Tribes struggle with many socioeconomic problems, including poverty and crime. Though the United States claims to support tribal self-determination, tribes remain subject to unique, federally imposed constraints on their sovereignty. This book argues removing the federal limitations on tribal sovereignty is the key to improving life in Indian country.

Section 1.1 calls attention to the prevalent research practice that studies planning with incredible certitude. Section 1.2 contrasts the conceptions of uncertainty in consequentialist and axiomatic decision theory. Section 1.3 presents the formal structure of consequentialist theory, which is used throughout the book. Section 1.4 explains the prevalent econometric characterization of uncertainty, which distinguishes identification problems and statistical imprecision. Section 1.5 discusses the distinct perspectives on social welfare expressed in various strands of research on planning.

Importantly, parties to transactions sometimes work deliberately to create a world of high social capital around their transaction. They do this because, with high levels of social capital, they can obtain information about their contracting partners from multiple sources. With these webs of networks, they can enforce their agreements without the help of the courts. And with these webs, they can make credible their promises not to defect. They embed a transaction within a world of high levels of social capital, in other words, to mitigate the effect of the other three factors.

This chapter provides an introduction to behavioural health economics. Far from attempting to replace what we know about health economics as a discipline, behavioural health economics aims at complementing its foundations by relaxing some of its core assumptions. This implies taking a more ‘realistic depiction’ of individual motivation even though it makes it more complex work beyond simple mathematical formulation. By incorporating what are otherwise anomalies of rational decision-making (defined as purposeful decision-making), health economics can go the extra mile with this extended toolkit which we define as behavioural health economics. Our agent is constrained by the social norms of its place and suffers from status quo bias and endowment effects that introduce bias into making decision and evaluations. ‘Real individuals’ care about others and have social preferences with regard to other people’s well-being, and often suffer from self-control problems, where impulsivity and emotion translate into suffering from a specific form of short sightedness otherwise known as ‘present bias’). These problems are arguably more prominent in the health domain. Market price is not the only relevant variable guiding behaviour in health and health care, where insurance is the most common form of payment, and tangible monetary incentives are often not made salient to influence behaviour.

For most of human history, societies were divided into the rulers and the ruled. Citizens were subjects of their governments and were obligated to obey the orders of their rulers. Enlightenment ideas changed the way that citizens viewed their relationship to government. The view that citizens were subjects of their governments and obligated to serve their governments was reversed, so people increasingly thought that government should serve its citizens rather than the other way around. Democratic political institutions that increasingly were adopted as a result can act as a constraint on those who hold government power, but they also convey legitimacy to the exercise of that power. Democratic political institutions create the illusion that the political elite are accountable to the masses. Meanwhile, the masses, who have an incentive to be rationally ignorant about public policy measures, adopt their public policy views from those offered them by the elite.

This book is the third of a trilogy of books that I wrote on the past, present and my preferred conception of the future of the field of behavioural public policy. The first book was titled ’The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy’, and the second ’Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy’. This Introduction summarises the content of those two books to remind the reader where I have got to in the trilogy, and then briefly details some of the main arguments in the current book, to signpost to the reader where I am about to go.

In Economics 101, we learn that competition and competitive markets provide the biggest bang for the buck. Market imperfections, however, impair the competitive process and introduce inefficiencies that, in time, reduce the well-being of society. In this chapter, we discuss how the antitrust laws can be used to promote competition in the US health care sector, which could save consumers, health insurers, and the government billions of dollars. We provide a road map of the issues that we will discuss in later chapters.

This overview first discusses some traditional thoughts on public finance, particularly the thought of implicit taxation, which have had a profound influence on the behavior of the Chinese government historically and currently. It then describes public finance under the centrally planned economic system, followed by an examination of market-oriented public finance reforms before exploring the challenges to China’s public finance. Finally it explains the contributions of this book. By the end of 1956, China completed the “socialist economic reforms,” turning all large- and medium-sized private enterprises into SOEs and small private enterprises into collectively-owned-enterprises. In 1958, the government took back the land previously allocated to farmers and established the people’s communes.Another economic reform started in 1978, allowing private enterprises to develop and allowing farmers to grow whatever they like on the land allocated to them. A modern tax system and a social insurance system were established and local governments have been given some fiscal freedom. However, there are still problems with public finance.