Exit, Voice, and Loyalty [antikvár]

Preface1. I -. This is an unpremeditated book. It has its origin in an observation on rail transport in Nigeria which occupied a paragraph in my previous book, reproduced here at the start of Chapter 4. One critic objected to that paragraph because, as he charitably expressed himself, "there must be a lot of assumptions hidden there somewhere." After a while I decided to pursue these assumptions into their hiding places and was soon off on an absorbing expedition which lasted the full year that I had planned to spend in leisurely meditation at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.The principal reason for which I persevered will be obvious to the reader: I had come upon a manner of analyzing certain economic processes which promised to illuminate a wide range of social, political, and indeed moral phenomena. But this book does not use the tools of one discipline for the purpose of annexing another. As is shown particularly in the appendixes, the concepts I develop can be translated into the language of traditional economic analysis, and may possibly enrich it; but by no means do they uniquely belong there. I rather became concerned that the concepts of "exit" and "voice" might be too broad as my writing expanded with surprising ease into ever new territories. The principal concession I made to these worries was to keep this book short. Otherwise, having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of "unhappy" top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.The Center provided a particularly favorable environ-