Anthony Downs spent most of his career as an economist studying real-estate markets but made a bigger mark in two areas not usually associated with economics: examining the behavior of American voters and explaining why traffic jams couldn’t be eliminated in major cities.
Mr. Downs—who shunned the honorific Dr. even though he had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University—was best known for his doctoral thesis, published in 1957 as a book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy.” Applying economic
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