Liberty Fund Books

Description

Editor Charles Rowley calls Gordon Tullock "an economist by nature rather than by training." Tullock attended a one-semester course in economics for law students at the University of Chicago but is otherwise self-taught. Tullock's background has enabled him to analyze economic problems with an open mind and to deploy his formidable intellect in a truly entrepreneurial manner.

Virginia Political Economy is the inaugural volume in a new series, Liberty Fund's The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock. The series will consist of ten volumes of selections from the major monographs and scholarly papers published by Tullock between 1954 and 2002.

The first volume contains a selection from Tullock's published academic papers and essays designed to introduce the series and to offer a representative picture of his work to allow scholars to evaluate in depth the relevance and intellectual impact of his contributions. The volume begins with the only two pieces in the Selected Works that were not written by Tullock himself. The first is the brief assessment of Tullock's contributions made by Mark Blaug in 1985 when explaining why he had included Tullock in his list of the one hundred great economists since John Maynard Keynes. The second is the short statement published in American Economic Review in September 1998, recognizing Tullock as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Charles K. Rowley is Duncan Black Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University. He is also General Director of the Locke Institute.

The entire series includes:

Volume 1: Virginia Political Economy
Volume 2: The Calculus of Consent
Volume 3: The Organization of Inquiry (November 2004)
Volume 4: The Economics of Politics (February 2005)
Volume 5: The Rent-Seeking Society (March 2005)
Volume 6: Bureaucracy (June 2005)
Volume 7: The Economics and Politics of Wealth Redistribution (July 2005)
Volume 8: The Social Dilemma: Of Autocracy, Revolution, Coup d'Etat, and War (December 2005)
Volume 9: Law and Economics (December 2005)
Volume 10: Economics without Frontiers (January 2006)

Reviews

Virginia Political Economy is a collection of selected works by Gordon Tullock which have been compiled, edited, and provided with an informative introduction by Charles K. Rowley (Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University) and is the first of a proposed ten volume series showcasing Tullocks’ published academic papers and essays as selected from twenty-three books and several hundred articles and papers produced by Tullock between 1954 and 2002. Chapters offer an in-depth exploration of such issues as the problems of majority voting, issues associated with redistributive policies, the problem of social cost, bioeconomics, and much more. A scholarly, rational, and well-presented voice of insight into difficult quandaries of state government and fiscal policy.

Wisconsin Bookwatch
September 2004



Virginia Political Economy is the first volume in a 10-volume series of the scholarly articles and monographs by Gordon Tullock from 1954 through 2002. The complete series has been edited by Charles K. Rowley, who has also written a separate introduction for each volume. This first volume, in effect, is an introduction to the whole series by including selected early articles in each subject area to which Tullock has made a major contribution. This first volume also includes a brief biographical note and a table of contents for the whole series. Each of the subsequent volumes includes one or more of the most important contributions by Tullock to a specific subject area.

The most impressive characteristic of the first volume is a reminder of the range of subjects to which Tullock has made an important contribution. The major sections of this first volume address the following issues: the imperialism of economics, especially with respect to political science; the problems of majority voting; the demand-revealing process; rent seeking; redistributive politics; the problem of social cost; law and economics; bioeconomics; and the limited relevance of the public interest theory.

Tullock has maintained a roughly constant utilitarian perspective on each of these issues over the past 50 years, even when it leads him, as in law and economics, to a position that is quite different from most other scholars working on these issues. But he does not insist that utilitarianism explains all human behavior, only that part which is explainable without knowing the distinctive personalities and biographies of those involved. In addition to his coauthorship of The Calculus of Consent (with James Buchanan), the major individual contributions for which Tullock still deserves the Nobel Prize are his proofs that democracy usually works rather better than suggested by the theories of Kenneth Arrow and Duncan Black and that the social costs of inefficient policies are substantially larger than suggested by Arnold Harberger. But there should also be some reward, wherever economists spend their afterlife, for making valuable contributions to so many subjects, for good writing, and for relatively little use of mathematics.

One of Tullock’s major early articles (1959) explains the effects of vote-trading (logrolling) in a legislature, pointing out that this process permits expression of the intensity of preferences and explains both the protection of intense minorities and special interest legislation. An important 1967 article demonstrates that the misallocation caused by political favors such as tariffs or legal monopolies includes the costs of both acquiring and defending the favors, a process that would later be described as rent seeking. (A similar article explains why it is so difficult to get rid of blue laws, limits on taxicab licenses, etc.) A 1969 article explains the conditions that determine the optimal degree of centralization in a federal system, pointing out that decentralization may increase the share of voters that favor the outcomes of the political process. A series of articles published in the 1970s explores such topics as anarchy, bribery, corruption, and revolution. Tullock brings his utilitarian perspective and training as a lawyer to articles on crime, juries, trials, and judicial errors. And starting in the 1970s, Tullock was one of the first economists since Malthus to recognize the similarity of biological and economic reasoning, leading him to write interesting articles on “The Coal Tit as a Careful Shopper” and on “The Economics of (Very) Primitive Societies” and to be a founder of the modern field of bioeconomics.

All of us have been Tullock’s students, even those, as in my case, who have never taken one of his courses. In the summer of 1967, he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses where I was the director of the economics division. In lunchtime conversations, he recognized that I had been thinking about bureaucratic behavior for some years but that I had not yet formulated a general theory about such behavior; these conversations and his encouragement led me to write my 1968 article (“The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy”) and my 1971 book (Bureaucracy and Representative Government) on this issue. Subsequent discussions about most any subject have made it clear that Tullock reads a great deal more history than I do; I don’t know how he finds the time. One way or another, we are all in his debt.

The quality of any series of edited volumes, of course, also depends on both the editor and publisher. Judging by the first volume, Charles Rowley has done a first-rate job of editing these volumes, with special care in selecting those Tullock articles and monographs that are most likely to make a lasting contribution; the first volume reflects special care in choosing articles that are an effective introduction to the whole range of subjects to which Tullock contributed. The Liberty Fund also merits special thanks for investing in these volumes. The paperbacks are handsome and are priced at only $12! All in all, one of the most impressive academic collections in some time.

William A. Niskanen
Cato Institute
Cato Journal
Fall 2004

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Charles K. Rowley xi
Gordon Tullock, by Mark Blaug xxv
Gordon Tullock: Distinguished Fellow, 1998 xxvii

1. GENESIS
Economic Imperialism 3
Public Choice 16
Public Choice—What I Hope for the Next Twenty-Five Years 27
Casual Recollections of an Editor 36

2. PROBLEMS OF MAJORITY VOTING
Problems of Majority Voting 51
The Irrationality of Intransitivity 62
Entry Barriers in Politics 69
Federalism: Problems of Scale 78
The General Irrelevance of the General Impossibility Theorem 90
Why So Much Stability 105
Is There a Paradox of Voting? 124

3. THE DEMAND-REVEALING PROCESS
A New and Superior Process for Making Social Choices
(T. Nicolaus Tideman and Gordon Tullock) 133
The Demand-Revealing Process as a Welfare Indicator 149
Demand-Revealing Process, Coalitions, and Public Goods 164

4. RENT SEEKING
The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft 169
The Cost of Transfers 180
More on the Welfare Costs of Transfers 194
Competing for Aid 199
The Transitional Gains Trap 212
Efficient Rent Seeking 222
Rent Seeking 237

5. REDISTRIBUTIVE POLITICS
Inheritance Justified 247
Inheritance Rejustified 258
The Charity of the Uncharitable 262
The Rhetoric and Reality of Redistribution 276

6. BUREAUCRACY
Dynamic Hypothesis on Bureaucracy 297
The Expanding Public Sector: Wagner Squared
(James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock) 302

7. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA
The Edge of the Jungle 309
Corruption and Anarchy 323
The Paradox of Revolution 329
Rationality and Revolution 341

8. THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL COST
Public and Private Interaction under Reciprocal Externality
(James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock) 349
Social Cost and Government Action 378
Public Decisions as Public Goods 388
Information without Profit 394
Polluters’ Profits and Political Response: Direct Controls versus Taxes
(James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock) 412
Polluters’ Profits and Political Response: Direct Controls versus Taxes:
Reply (James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock) 425
Hawks, Doves, and Free Riders 427

9. LAW AND ECONOMICS
An Economic Approach to Crime 441
The Costs of a Legal System (Warren F. Schwartz and Gordon Tullock) 456
On the Efficient Organization of Trials 465
On the Efficient Organization of Trials: Reply to McChesney,
and Ordover and Weitzman 480
Judicial Errors and a Proposal for Reform
(I. J. Good and Gordon Tullock) 484
Court Errors 495
Legal Heresy: Presidential Address to the Western Economic Association
Annual Meeting—1995 509
Juries 521

10. BIOECONOMICS
The Coal Tit as a Careful Shopper 537
Biological Externalities 541
Biological Applications of Economics 553
The Economics of (Very) Primitive Societies 558

11. IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST
A (Partial) Rehabilitation of the Public Interest Theory 577
How to Do Well While Doing Good! 589

APPENDIXES
Gordon Tullock: Biographical Note 605
Contents of the Selected Works of Gordon Tullock 611

Index 623