A review of past research picking out common errors and problems and suggesting a fresh approach dealing with all news media sources, not one at a time, and avoiding speculation, plausible or otherwise. It points out how lack of information has resulted in speculation to fill the gap, some of it implausible, contradictory and highly imaginative, and it argues for a close study of how media and audiences interact to produce media effects.

Even if populism is not simply an illiberal ideology, it is bad for democracy. Because populists are not constrained by power-seeking party elites, they are more likely, on average, to erode civil liberties and judicial and legislative constraints on their authority. At the extreme, populists so erode these constraints that they cross the threshold into authoritarianism. The best defense against this democratic rollback is not to be found in policy alone. Rather, institutional changes are needed that incentivize power-seeking politicians to create and sustain bureaucratic parties. The conditions that produced the mass membership parties of the twentieth century have essentially passed. But a new generation of programmatic political organizations could sustain democracy well into the future, taking advantage of new tools to map how we live and work, integrating people across space, and forging new civil and political spaces.

Chapter 2 considers and critiques a number of rationalist explanations for these developments, including geopolitics, financial necessity, administrative capacity, principal-agent problems, and potential collective action issues. It argues, first, that some combination of these factors is largely capable of explaining the Qing’s approach to nonagricultural taxation, which grew whenever the state faced significant fiscal pressure, but was subject to a number of political economy and administrative constraints that became increasingly apparent in the nineteenth century. The chapter then argues that these rationalist theories are unable to fully explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, which suggests that ideological factors should be brought in to complete the picture.

Microeconomics focuses on the mechanics of demand and supply and development of the argument that competitive markets achieve efficiency in the allocation of resources. The tools of microeconomics find application in macroeconomics for analyzing markets that pertain to the economy as a whole, specifically, the market for loanable funds in which the interest rate is determined and the market for foreign exchange in which the exchange rate is determined.

Markets are intersections of buyers and sellers brought together to exchange goods and services most efficiently, so the theory goes. In fact, markets are also connected to barter and exchange and to their underlying value: resourcefulness. We look at Nina Katchadourian and her artwork made on airplanes ("Seat Assignment") as an example of resourcefulness, Caroline Woolard’s Work Dress as an example of barter, and Elizabeth Cleland’s exhibition as an example of equivalencies created by markets. We introduce supply and demand, how the graphs are constructed, and how to think about shifts in supply and demand.

Chapter 2 examines Burke’s fundamental beliefs on market economies. I first provide an outline of the agricultural economy in late eighteenth-century England in order to draw a specific historical context for Burke’s economic thought during that period. Then I use Thoughts and Details to explain his commentary on market liberty. I discuss Burke’s support for a free domestic grain trade; government restraint; supply and demand laws; and the competitive price system. For Burke, the internal grain market should be largely protected from state intrusion. The silent efficiency of supply and demand laws channeled provisions to communities without requiring the hand of government. Prices of goods should be determined by the market, not by magistrates, who lacked the knowledge of local market conditions necessary to establish equitable prices and create fair labor contracts. I also investigate Burke’s firm defense of middlemen in Thoughts and Details, and describe his efforts in 1772 to repeal long-standing statutes that had banned the middlemen trading activities of forestalling, regrating, and engrossing. According to Burke, middlemen played a crucial role in the provisions trade by helping promote the smooth distribution of goods and lower prices.