Discussion of changes taking place in American agriculture followed by a review of the traditional model of extension suggests there is dissonance between what is needed to inform contemporary agriculture and what extension actually does. The paper further suggests that difficulty in packaging the newly needed information in ways that achieve the institutional maintenance objectives of extension explain a part of the system's decadence and reluctance to change. Since the intellectual problems of market failure, even political market failure, are within the domain of economists, diffidence by agricultural economists to those issues within the Land-Grant system can make a difference.

Private and public investment programs are often implemented without adequate knowledge of their employment or income distribution impacts. For example, although numerous studies have been done on the environmental and economic efficiency aspects of electricity generation alternatives, relatively little is known of who will benefit and by how much.

Conventional economic theory suggests that economists’ contribution to local government is primarily with respect to the production function type of knowledge. A characterization of local government decision making exposes some limitations on applicability of economic analysis of that kind. Public choice perspectives to local government help to redefine and elaborate the role of economic analysis in instructing local government decision making.