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The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.

Public health programs facilitate access to resources that not only provide individuals’ options but also often foreclose individual preference through prescriptive requirements. This chapter takes two disparate cases from public health – vaccines and family planning –that reveal patterns of inequality in who has access to individual choice and who requires state support to exercise choice. Looking specifically at dynamics of funding and compulsion, this chapter elucidates how reliance on the rhetoric of individual choice as an expression of freedom rewards those with the greatest access to resources and fails to make sure that all members of the community have the resources to shape their own outcomes or to make sure collective health is protected.

Hayek’s “Use of knowledge in society” is often misunderstood. Hayek’s point is not just that prices aggregate dispersed knowledge, but also that the knowledge embedded in prices would not exist absent the market process. Later, in The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that this same idea can also be applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Democracy is not just about aggregating preferences. Absent the democratic process, the knowledge necessary to solve collective problems is not generated. We compare this perspective on democracy to Bryan Caplan’s and Helen Landemore’s theories, and we argue that Hayek’s account focused on “opinion falsification” is richer. Unlike Caplan or Landemore, who adopt a static perspective, Hayek is more interested in the long-term tendencies and feed-back mechanisms. For example, why do Western democracies seem to have gradually moved away from the most deleterious types of economic policies (such as price controls)? Hayek’s conjecture is that the democratic process itself is responsible for this. We connect Hayek’s conjecture about democracy to the broader argument made by Vincent Ostrom, who has claimed that public choice should study not just incentive structures, but also collective learning processes. We believe that this line of research, that is, comparative institutional analysis based on the collective learning capacities embedded in alternative institutional arrangements, merits a lot more attention than it has received so far. The question “Which collective choice arrangements have the best epistemic properties?” is one of the most important neglected questions in political economy.

Traditional public choice analysis implicitly views political outcomes as the intention of a single-minded person. This view is seriously misguided. Rather than viewing politics as being done by one person or a group of persons acting in concert, this chapter presents an Austrian economist’s thoughts on what an Austrian theory of public choice would look like. Particular attention is paid to the emergent, rather than additive, quality that political outcomes exhibit.

America began the process of funding public education beyond the military colleges and American Indian School in 1965 with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA has evolved over the past 40 years to be called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB has had three major evaluations in which I participated in the last two evaluations by the U.S. Department of Education and each evaluation found that NCLB did not make a difference in the education lives of the students who received services from the program; but it did not harm. This chapter explored all the school choice options available to k-12 students in public and private schools; and reviewed the evaluation of these school choice options. Research reveals that for disadvantaged students, traditional public schools outperform private schools and charter schools. Voucher programs are also reviewed. This chapter concludes that educational equity is not adequately addressed by NCLB, school choice programs, charter schools or the traditional public schools.

Purpose — The chapter seeks to examine the impact of neoliberal language on the library profession in the United Kingdom. Since New Labour's election in 1997 public service restructuring in the United Kingdom took on a more oblique managerialist and consumerist approach. The impact of managerialism in the public library service has focused mainly on modernising and improving services to the individual user, and is based on scenarios where public libraries have to model themselves on the private sector, and where managers have been empowered over professionals.

Design/methodology/approach — The chapter uses a mixed methods approach by combining content and discourse analysis to examine how neoliberal discourses have impacted on public librarianship through examination of government policy documents, and other works on public libraries in the era under study.

Findings — The study highlights neoliberal narratives within public library policy documents in the period, with emphasis on deprofessionalisation and consumerist attitudes related to public choice evident. The discussion reveals how narratives of elitism and decline are used to describe the public library service, which reinforces negative stereotypes of a service in distress.

Research limitations/implications — The study only relates to the period 1997–2010 with an emphasis on the United Kingdom, thus cannot be seen to be representative of all public library services.

Originality/value — The study utilises a mixed method approach to examine narratives within public library policy, and reflects on an important period in public library development, and offers a unique insight into the period.

X = multiple interpretations

Mises (1949[1963], p. 692) explains that market-failure justifications for state actions, such as economic regulation “ascribe to the state not only the best intentions but also omniscience.” He then points out that neither assumption is valid: government is not benevolent since both, those who are employed by the state and those who demand state actions, have subjective self-interests, and it is not all knowing since knowledge is widely dispersed and the cost of coordination is infinitely high, particularly without market profits and prices as coordinating mechanisms. Furthermore, Mises suggests that dropping either assumption undermines the conclusions that state intervention is necessarily desirable even if some sort of market failure is actually identified. Austrian economists in the Mises tradition have tended to focus on the knowledge problem in their challenges to regulation, however. Many Austrians obviously recognize the interest problem, of course, but they often assume it away in order to illustrate that government interference with markets is not desirable even if it is well intended. In contrast, public-choice analysis tends to focus on the interest problem as source of government failure, although some public-choice analysts also obviously recognize the knowledge problem. Indeed, this difference in perspective is so pronounced that Ikeda (1997, p. 240) explicitly distinguishes between Public Choice and Austrian political economy by suggesting that the Austrian approach assumes benevolence on the part of government officials, while the public-choice approach assume narrow interests.¹ Ikeda (1997, p. 150) also suggests that the separation of these two approaches is justified because “Austrian political economy and public choice are each capable of standing on their own [so] public-theorists…find it optimal simply to continue to pursue their research along the line of either the former or the latter approaches.” The following presentation questions this assertion. Instead, both assumptions should be dropped, and the resulting integrated Austrian-public-choice model should be expanded to include assumptions about the relationships between regulations, property rights security, and both market and political behavior.²

Federal involvement with closing the achievement gap was inspired by the failed local efforts in the 1960s. To aid in closing the achievement gap the federal government has promoted the busing of African American students in sometimes hostile white schools and financially supported educational/social programs such as Head Start. Currently, we are faced with yet another federal effort to close the achievement gap due to the failed attempts by local and state districts. Many school districts across the nation are participating in public school choice programs in response to the choice mandate in No Child Left Behind. The use of school choice, along with testing and accountability measures, is a major mechanism employed by the Bush administration to close the gap. As desegregation has shown, the transfer of students from one facility to a seemingly better facility is not enough. When looking at the majority population served in America's urban schools, we need to continue to raise the question, how do we best serve the needs of those who are most in need and have been historically and systematically placed in need?

Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.