This essay examines the administrative state as a ubiquitous phenomenon that results in part from the mismatch of incentives. Using two dramatic episodes in the history of economics, the essay considers two types of mismatch. It then examines how economists increasingly endorsed the “general good” as a unitary goal for society, even at the expense of private hopes and desires. More than this, their procedures and models gave them warrant to design mechanisms and advocate for legislation and regulations to “fix” the supposedly suboptimal choices of individuals in service to the overarching goal. The rise of New Welfare Economics dealt an additional blow to the sovereignty of individual motivations, notwithstanding that Hayek and Buchanan warned that this engineering approach allowed social goals to override individual preferences. Throughout, the argument is that it is important to recognize that people within or advising the administrative state are influenced by the same sorts of (private) motivations as actors throughout the economy.

中文翻译：

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私人激励、经济模式和行政国家的经济学家：幸福与所谓的公共利益之间的冲突

本文将行政国家视为一种普遍存在的现象，其部分原因是激励措施的不匹配。本文利用经济学史上的两个戏剧性事件，考虑了两种类型的不匹配。然后，它研究了经济学家如何越来越多地认可“普遍利益”作为社会的单一目标，即使以牺牲个人希望和愿望为代价。不仅如此，他们的程序和模型使他们有理由设计机制并倡导立法和法规，以“修复”个人在服务于总体目标方面的所谓次优选择。新福利经济学的兴起对个人动机的主权造成了额外的打击，尽管哈耶克和布坎南警告说，这种工程方法允许社会目标凌驾于个人偏好之上。始终，