The Failure of the Market for Presidential Candidates

New column:

The Failure of the Market for Presidential Candidates: Almost all economists believe in markets, and the tools economists use to analyze markets can be applied to a surprisingly large number of social interactions. Our attempts to use economics to examine questions that are traditionally the purview of sociology, psychology, and political science have not always been welcomed by those in other fields, and there’s no doubt that our methods are often applied naively without a full understanding of what researchers in other disciplines have learned. Nevertheless, I can’t help speculating on why the “market” for political candidates failed so spectacularly this year. ...