[NickMPK]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If what Bush champions is "free market orthodoxy" then I agree, I am opposed to "free market orthodoxy."



[/ QUOTE ]

Its hard to tell from this article but it doesnt seem like he actually brought anything new to the debate. What did he get the nobel for again?

[ QUOTE ]
"How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences?" he said.

A clean environment, for example, is not a private good in that "my enjoyment of it doesn't preclude yours," he said.

"So the theory of mechanism design asks what sort of procedures or mechanisms or institutions could be put in place which allow us to choose the right level," he said.

Those mechanisms could include taxes to allow the more efficient provision of public goods, he said.



[/ QUOTE ]

Just pick any random economist from the past 50 years and they are likely to say this. *Yawn*

[/ QUOTE ]

He didn't win the Nobel for saying that free markets are imperfect. He won for mechanism design, which is a branch of game theory related to what procedures to put in place to help fix market imperfections. The fact that markets are imperfect is an assumption implicit in the whole enterprise, not a result.