Summary and Final Tasks

In this lesson, we began to take a look at the way government functions in the real world - that is, we looked at government from a "positive" perspective, as opposed to a "normative" perspective. We looked at the public choice theory of government, which describes the flaws in the methods we use to elect politicians, and we looked at the theory of the bureaucracy, which explains why using government agencies to perform actions that are not supplied in the marketplace can be expensive, and why the bureaucracy has incentives and abilities to maximize its own utility, even in the face of opposition from politicians seeking to get elected.

In the next lesson, we will look at a couple more facets of government failure, and we will look at some of the actions that governments can take to intervene in a marketplace and what some of the concrete results are.

Have you completed everything?

You have reached the end of Lesson 8! Double check the list of requirements on the first page of this lesson to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there.