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"Solving Social Dilemmas demonstrates that social, political, and economic progress occur when ethical dispositions evolve in a manner that solves or ameliorate social dilemmas. That same process can account for the emergence of prosperous societies in the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was substantially a consequence of increased moral support for commerce and careers in commerce that had emerged during the previous two centuries. To support these claims, two analytical histories are developed. The first uses elementary game theory to illustrate how critical social dilemmas can be solved by internalized ethical ideas about "proper" or "moral" conduct. That analytical history implies that in the absence of solutions to critical social dilemmas-of which there are many thousands-social, political, and economic development tends to be curtailed. The second analytical history surveys three centuries of ethical assessments concerning the proper role of commerce in a good life and good society. The authors reviewed all used economic illustrations to illustrate moral principles or how they may be applied. Because the illustrating examples are ones that their readers would have found "obvious," they shed light on the ethical dispositions in the communities to whom those works were addressed. Together, they reveal that concerns about the effects of market son ethical dispositions were diminishing during the centuries before the great acceleration of commerce in the nineteenth century. In fact, many of the authors reviewed argued that there was a complete harmony between ethical dispositions and commerce. Together the two narratives imply that shifts in norms directly and indirectly account for the relative prosperity of the West compared to other parts of the World during the twentieth century. It turns out that flourishing commercial societies have moral foundations."

This paper uses a political principal-agent model to analyze the process by which international environmental treaties are negotiated and ratified. To the extent that political principals hire negotiators on the basis of their negotiation skills rather than their policy preferences, negotiators will generally favor more stringent environmental regulations than their principals. Consequently, there will tend to be a greater consensus among negotiators for stringent environmental treaties than among principals. And, treaties will be greener than politically optimal. Historical and statistical evidence from the treaties negotiated at the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro is consistent with the analysis developed.

AbstractThis paper analyzes optimal tax policy from the perspective of voters who want public policies to systematically advance their interests. Self‐acknowledged ignorance implies that voters have a practical interest in transparent and stable tax systems that allow personal tax burdens to be calculated accurately and easily. Such properties reduce voter mistakes. However, a voter's normative interests may conflict with these practical interests, because ideas about a good life or good society often support tax system complexity. Tradeoffs between these two aims of democratic tax systems imply that the optimal tax system for a democracy neither minimizes voter errors nor maximizes a social welfare function.