Is an economy like a machine or a tropical rainforest? Is it more like a mechanical device that can be maintained by an exogenous force (government), or is it more like a diverse ecology, one that includes government actors?

Richard Wagner joins us this week to discuss his new book, Politics As a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (2016).

Wagner concludes that modern governments function much the way a business enterprise does, albeit a strange one. He also theorizes about what happens when government becomes entangled in the same incentive structures it claims regulatory power over.

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