Downs has served as a consultant to many of the nation's largest corporations and public institutions, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the National Commission on Urban Problems in 1967, and HUD SecretaryJack Kemp appointed him to the Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing in 1989. He is officer or trustee of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He is the author or co-author of 24 books and over 500 articles. His most influential books are An Economic Theory of Democracy and Inside Bureaucracy ; widely translated, both are credited as major influences on the public choice school of political economy. Later, Downs concerned himself with housing policy, writing about rent control and affordable housing. The Revolution in Real Estate Finance predicted a long-term housing slowdown and decrease in housing prices. Downs has involved himself with transportation economics. In 1962, Downs published his Down's Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion. This Law states that on urban commuter expressways, peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity. Therefore, expanding the expressway network does not help against traffic jams. A complex set of forces lie behind this Law, which were analyzed by presentation of a model of commuter decision-making and its underlying set of assumptions. By the same token, e.g. the 1965 Highway Capacity Manual stated that the capacity of a highway or motorway increases with decreasing traffic speed, till its maximum capacity is reached at about 50 km/h. His book Stuck in Traffic, which detailed the economic disadvantages of traffic congestion and proposed road pricing as the only effective means of alleviating it, was denounced by traffic engineers for its insistence on the futility of congestion relief measures. However, enough of his gloomy predictions about congestion were proven right that he successfully published a second edition, Still Stuck in Traffic. Downs' recommendations are starting to see implementation, largely in the form of high-occupancy toll lanes in the medians of crowded American freeways, and through congestion pricing, already implemented in several cities around the world: Singapore ; London ; Stockholm ; Valletta, Malta; and Milan, Italy. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco, from June 2004 until March 2005.
Thought
The left–right continuum
In his work An Economic Theory of Democracy, Downs introduced a left–right axis to economic theory. On the "left" he placed communist parties that want entirely state-planned economies, and on the "right" he placed conservative parties that demand an entirely deregulated economy. He claimed that most voters have incomplete information when voting for political candidates in a democracy, and therefore will resort to economic issues of "how much government intervention in the economy there should be" and how parties will control this. Downs borrowed the curve from Harold Hotelling, who developed it to explain how grocery stores targeted customers. Downs' book has since become one of the most cited books in political science. His left–right axis model has been integrated into the median voter theory first articulated by Duncan Black.
