These are a set of very short notes which will someday, with luck, assemble
themselves into a review. For the moment, however, they're quite
useless to anyone but myself, and I really don't know how they got indexed
by a search-engine, though the thing was evidently dumb enough to give
them a fairly high score for some keywords. Try back in a year or so, or better yet
use Google (no, they don't pay me
to say that.)
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
[How groups work, and why volunteerism is almost never sufficient to secure
public goods. (Short version: if it's a public good, i.e. one from which
everyone benefits without exclusion, why should you put yourself out
to secure it? Surely somebody else will... Olson provides a detailed
economic analysis to flesh this out.) How interest groups work, why people
won't show up to union meetings but will overwhelmingly vote to make union
membership compulsory, taxes and government, the weakness of large classes,
etc., etc. Brilliant.]