Mises, bastiat, public opinion, and public choice

The political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Frederic Bastiat has been largely ignored even by their admirers. We argue that Mises' and Bastiat's views in this area were both original and insightful. While traditional public choice generally maintains that democracy fails because voters' views are rational but ignored, the Mises-Bastiat view is that democracy fails because voters' views are irrational but heeded. Mises and Bastiat anticipate many of the most effective criticisms of traditional public choice to emerge during the last decade and point to many avenues for future research.

Achieving Inclusion with Contextualized User-Sensitive Design

Users and contexts in human-computer interaction systems often have great diversity, which limits the inclusion provided by a single design. Existing user-sensitive design and contextual design methodologies have made useful attempts to pay attention to diversities, but they still cannot provide sufficient design basis for adapting to dynamically changing user capabilities, needs and usage contexts. Based on the analysis of the interaction between the behavior model and various elements in the human-computer system, this paper constructs a contextualized user-sensitive design framework, and studies the diversity and changing factors in the human-computer system from the two basic dimensions of the user and the context. In order to reflect the multi-dimensional dynamic characteristics of users, the authors propose a new user research and analysis tool, the generalized user balance sheet, for user-sensitive design, and takes a questionnaire case to reveal the huge differences of users’ needs in different contexts. Based on the contextualized user-sensitive design framework, this paper shows the basic methods and essential system elements of user-sensitive design and contextualized design, as well as the possibility of combining the two for inclusive design