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Eminent political economists Ian Budge and Paul Whiteley make a forceful case for bringing the state back into economic planning for better economic and political outcomes. They do so primarily by calling attention to the shortcomings of axiomatic, neoclassical economic theorizing, which makes normative assumptions about how economic actors ought to behave without considering how they actually behave thanks largely to the influence of advertisers and politicians. Revisiting Adam Smith with this in mind, Budge and Whiteley offer original, alternative understandings of individual and collective decision-making; the difference between national economies and "the economy"; the state's role in the provision of public goods; the state's role in dealing with risks, uncertainties, and externalities such as climate change; and the very notion of "supply and demand," which they reconceive as supply-then-demand.

The end result is a more robust explanatory model of economics coupled with a normative case for the governance of public goods and markets. All this adds up to a major intervention into the question of how societies organize the extraction and allocation of resources to meet the needs of their constituents.