Results for “gordon tullock” 53 found
Gordon Tullock has passed away at age 92
It is hard to know what to say — Gordon was a colleague of ours for many years and we all were very fond of him. He was one of the most creative thinkers of his time. His contributions include not just the seminal chapters of Calculus of Consent, but a wide range of ideas ranging from law and economics to monetary theory to the economics of insect societies. Many of Gordon’s best ideas remain somewhat unmined, such as his analyses of jury trials, or his question why there is so little money in politics, relative to what is at stake. Almost everything Gordon wrote was worth reading and he was also a wonderful critic of the work of others. He knew a remarkable amount about history, including Chinese history, and was one of the quickest people I ever have met. Just about everyone has his or her favorite Gordon Tullock story. Gordon, by the way, took only one class in economics in his life, from Henry Simons, he was otherwise entirely self-taught.
Gordon Tullock is 90 years old today
Here are previous MR entries concerning Gordon.
The life and times of Gordon Tullock
Here is a new paper by Daniel Houser and Charles K. Rowley (pdf):
Gordon Tullock is a founding father of public choice. In an academic career that has spanned 50 years, he forged much of the research agenda of the public choice program and he founded and edited Public Choice, the key journal of public choice scholarship. Tullock, however did much more than this. This Special Issue of Public Choice honors Gordon Tullock in precisely the manner that he most values: the creation of new ideas across the vast range of his own scholarly interests.
The paper gives a better sense of Tullock the individual than the abstract alone indicates. Hat tip goes to Andres Marroquin, who all development economists should be following on Twitter.
The wisdom of Gordon Tullock, part II
The U.S. Navy said pirates commandeered a Saudi-owned supertanker
bearing more than $100 million worth of crude a few hundred miles off
the Kenyan coast, an attack that sharply increases the stakes in an
effort by governments and militaries to protect the world’s
energy-supply lines.U.S. Navy officials said the hijacking was unprecedented for its
distance from shore and the size of its target — a ship about the
length of a U.S. aircraft carrier. The attack appears also to be the
first significant disruption of crude shipments in the region by
pirates.
Here is the story. Here is Peter Leeson’s paper on pirates. I don’t yet see it on Amazon, but stay tuned for Peter’s forthcoming book The Invisible Hook.
I thank Brad Williams for the pointer.
Addendum: From another article:
The pirates’ profits are set to reach a record $50 million in 2008,
Somali officials say. Shipping firms are usually prepared to pay,
because the sums are still low compared with the value of the ships.
Our colleague Gordon Tullock
The new Liberty Fund edition of Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry is out:
In this book, Tullock focuses attention on the organization of science, raising important questions about scientific inquiry and specifically about the problems of science as a social system. Tullock poses such questions as: how do scientists engage in apparently cooperative contributions in the absence of hierarchic organization and why are scientific contributions worthy, for the most part, of the public’s trust?
If you are fed up with publication lags, Gordon had the answer for that one too, circa 1980:
"Professor Gordon Tullock referees submissions to Public Choice himself and usually has a response in the mail within 48 hours."
See also Brad DeLong’s appreciation of Gordon. And here is a list of forthcoming volumes in the series.
Gordon Tullock triumphant
My colleague Gordon Tullock, along with Thomas Schelling, is one of the most deserving scholars never to have received a Nobel Prize [Ed Prescott and Eugene Fama are also obviously deserving, though they are much younger].
A new Liberty Fund series may help rectify this injustice. In ten cheap volumes ($12.00 for the first, 450 pp.) we will receive the greatest hits of Tullock. The first book, just published, presents Tullock’s best essays, including his classic article on rent-seeking behavior; read this summary as well.
Gordon’s degree is in law, many of his formative experiences were in post-WWII China (some say he was a spy), and he took only a single economics class, from Henry Simons at Chicago. Nonetheless Gordon is an economist to the core and full of intellectual surprises.
Gordon is best-known for his co-authorship of Calculus of Consent, which set the foundation for how economists think about voting rules and “politics as exchange.” But I think as much about his lesser-known contributions. He wrote early works on the economics of scientific organization, the economics of trials, and the economics of animal societies, including insects. These works have yet to be mined for their full insights. His Politics of Bureaucracy remains a classic.
Gordon is very much a systematic thinker, although he is oddly reluctant to admit this fact. I take his central insight to be the importance of law, but also that real laws are given by economic incentives, rather than by what is on the books. Here is Gordon’s 46-page vita, with a brief written introduction.
Kudos to Charles Rowley for having edited the volumes, and here is a more general link to the Liberty Fund publishing program.
This reminded me of Gordon Tullock
Security at diamond mines the world over makes antiterrorism security efforts at airports look like they’re conducted by the Boy Scouts. In Namibia, for instance, at the De Beers-owned Oranjemund claim, the only cars in the town in the 1970s were company cars that could never leave its borders. Private vehicles were banned when an enterprising engineer removed several bolts from the chassis of his car, bored out the middle for holding diamonds, and then screwed them back in tight. The fact that he was actually caught is testament in itself to how high the security was; from then on, De Beers outlawed new cars. All vehicles in the town had to stay there until they rusted away. One worker at the same site stole diamonds by tying a small bag to a homing pigeon, which would fly the diamonds back to his house. One day, he got too ambitious and overloaded his winged courier; the pigeon was so laden with stolen diamonds, it couldn’t fly over the fence and was discovered by security guards a short time later. They reclaimed the diamonds and let the bird go, following it to the man’s home, where he was arrested after work.
From Greg Campbell’s recent Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones.
The Tullock Memorial Conference
A conference on Gordon Tullock’s economic, political, and legal research is being held in Founders Hall of George Mason’s Arlington Campus on Friday October 2 and Saturday October 3, 2015.
Gordon Tullock was one of the founders of the field of research that came to be called Public Choice. He was coauthor of one of the most important books in the field, the Calculus of Consent (with Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan) and the first to point out the losses associated with rent seeking. He was also among the first researchers to use economic tools to analyze the law, trial procedures, and judicial systems. His research includes theories of the origin of the state and constitutional governance, the impossibility of revolution, legal systems, government failure, and the economics of science itself. Beyond his own research he was an institution builder. He was the founding editor of the journal Public Choice, a premiere outlet for research on public choice. He helped to launch the Public Choice Society and the European Public Choice Society. He is among the most influential economists never to win the Nobel Prize.
Looks like an excellent conference and event. More information and RSVP here.
Tullock’s Questions?
Gordon Tullock was famous for asking a lot of questions. Some odd, some uncomfortable, some on the spot and some in his work. For example, Gordon would often ask, Why don’t we invade Brazil? Meaning why did countries stop invading other countries and setting up colonies? It’s a good question. I am interested in collecting more of Tullock’s questions. Please respond with any questions Gordon asked you or questions that you find him asking in his work. Thanks!
Tullock Insults
Call me a masochist but one of the great pleasures of being at George Mason is that I am regularly insulted by Gordon Tullock. You have to understand, however, that in my profession not to have been insulted by Gordon is to be a nobody.
In anycase, here is one from yesterday.
"Gordon," I asked, "do you think we should ban child labor?" "No, keep working."
The other day Gordon asked me to read one of his papers and I pointed out a few typos. "Excellent," he said, "this will surely be your greatest contribution to economics."
Gordon is prone to pressing people with difficult questions. One of my colleagues responded, "Gordon, I’m not that good at thinking on my feet." Without missing a beat Gordon pulled up a chair and said "well sit down and we’ll see how you do then."
Comments are open if you would like to memorialize your own Gordon insults.
My Conversation with Yasheng Huang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, Yasheng is a China scholar and a professor at MIT. Here is part of the episode summary:
Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have less well becoming top CEOs of American companies than Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, in your book, you write of what you call Tullock’s curse— Gordon Tullock having been my former colleague — namely, embedded succession conflict in an autocracy. Why has Chinese succession been so stable up to now? And will we see Tullock’s curse whenever Xi steps down, passes on, whatever happens there?
HUANG: I do want to modify the word that you use, stable. There are two ways to use that term. One is to describe the succession process itself. If that’s the situation we’re trying to describe, it is not stable at all. If you look at the entire history of the PRC, there have been so many succession plans that failed, and at a catastrophic level. One potential successor was persecuted to death. Another fled and died in a plane crash. Others were unceremoniously dismissed, and one was put under house arrest for almost 15 years, and he died —
COWEN: But no civil war, right?
HUANG: Yes, that’s right.
COWEN: No civil war.
HUANG: That’s right. There’s another way to talk about stability, which is stability at the system level, and that, you are absolutely right. Despite all these problems with these successions, the system as a whole has remained stable. The CCP is in power. There’s no coup, and there were not even demonstrations on the street associated with the succession failures. So, we do need to distinguish between these two kinds of stability. By one criterion, it was not stable. By the other criterion, it is quite stable.
The reason for that is, I think — although it’s a little bit difficult to generalize because we don’t really have many data points — one reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping. These were founding fathers of the PRC, of the CCP, and they had the prestige and — using Max Weber’s term — charisma, that they could do whatever they wanted while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes. The big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure.
This is a remarkable statistic: Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Deng Xiaoping. Essentially, the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had oversized charisma, oversized prestige, and unshakeable political capital.
Now we have one leader who doesn’t really have that. He relies mostly on formal power, and that’s why he has accumulated so many titles, whereas he’s making similar succession errors as the previous two leaders.
Obviously, we don’t know — because he hasn’t chosen a successor — we don’t really know what will happen if he chooses a successor. But my bet is that the ability to contain the spillover effect is going to be less, rather than more, down the road, because Xi Jinping does not match, even in a remote sense, the charisma and the prestige of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. There’s no match there.
Recommended. And I am happy to recommend Yasheng Huang’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of the East.
Pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300266367?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_CXCHDSQB8JBKEXM4J5BE
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard Hanania, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Could this be the best public choice treatment of U.S. foreign policy? Gordon Tullock always was wishing for a book like this, and now it exists. I see Hanania’s views as more skeptical than my own (in East Asia in particular I think the American approach has brought huge benefits, Europe too), but nonetheless I am impressed by his careful analysis. This is a book that should revolutionize a field, though I doubt if it will.
2. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is one of the best written pieces of literary fiction this year. Very Irish, and it helps to have a one paragraph knowledge of Ireland’s earlier “Magdalen laundries” problem. It is not exciting for the action-oriented reader, but a perfect work within the terms of the world it creates.
3. Justin Gest, Majority Minority. The book considers racial transitions and how majorities may lose their ethnic or racial majority status. To see where America might be headed, the author considers histories from Bahrain, Hawaii, Mauritius, Singapore, trinidad and Tobago, and New York City.
4. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of Great Kings. The Persian empire had the best infrastructure of any of the great ancient civilizations. The Royal Road for instance stretched 2,400 kilometers. Read more about the whole thing here.
Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding is a good and economically literate treatment of the importance of maritime insurance during the time of America’s founding.
Gregory Zuckerman, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of The Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine is a good account of what it promises.
In the Douglass North tradition is Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan.
Do higher minimum wages induce more job search?
In some models job search is just about the posted wage, but I suspect that is the easiest kind of search to do. In reality, search covers multiple dimensions, for instance wage but also working conditions, such as the comfort of your job post, how much of a jerk the boss is, and so on.
If the minimum wage is hiked, the higher nominal wage will indeed induce more search, because the pecuniary gain from a good match is higher.
That said, a higher minimum wage will to some extent induce employers to lower the non-pecuniary quality of the job. At the very least, there will be more uncertainty about the non-pecuniary aspects of the job. Imagine a new job seeker: “I’ve read Gordon Tullock — now I’m wondering if they are going to turn down the air conditioner in the back room where I will be working.”
That uncertainty in fact raises the costs of job search and makes the results of that search less certain. In this regard, you can think of a higher minimum wage as a tax on job search.
If you think job search is mainly about the posted wage, you won’t be very worried about this affect. Alternatively, if you think job search is mainly about finding a good match along the non-pecuniary dimensions, you might be very worried about it indeed. And it will make it harder for minimum wage hikes to boost employment by inducing more labor search.
For this post, I am indebted to a conversation with the excellent Matthew Lilley.
Are queens more warlike than kings?
Yes, in a nutshell, as Gordon Tullock used to claim:
Are states led by women less prone to conflict than states led by men? We answer this question by examining the effect of female rule on war among European polities over the 15th-20th centuries. We utilize gender of the first born and presence of a female sibling among previous monarchs as instruments for queenly rule. We find that polities led by queens were more likely to engage in war than polities led by kings. Moreover, the tendency of queens to engage as aggressors varied by marital status. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely to be attacked than kings. Among married monarchs, queens were more likely to participate as attackers than kings, and, more likely to fight alongside allies. These results are consistent with an account in which marriages strengthened queenly reigns because married queens were more likely to secure alliances and enlist their spouses to help them rule. Married kings, in contrast, were less inclined to utilize a similar division of labor. These asymmetries, which reflected prevailing gender norms, ultimately enabled queens to pursue more aggressive war policies.
That is by Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish, here is the working paper version, here is the forthcoming in the JPE version.
Reading and rabbit holes
Let’s say you want to read some books on Venice, maybe because you are traveling there, or you are just curious about the Renaissance, or about the history of the visual arts.
Maybe you will write me and ask: “Tyler, which books should I read on Venice?” Now, there are many fine books on Venice, but I actually would not approach the problem in that manner. In fact, I don’t know a single particular “must read” book on Venice that stands out above all others, nor do I know a book that necessarily will draw you in to the study of Venice if you are not already interested.
I instead suggest a “rabbit holes” strategy, a term coined in this context by Devon Zuegel. Come up with a bunch of questions about Venice you want answered, and then simply do whatever you must to pursue them. Here are a few such possible questions, drawn up by me:
How did Venetian architecture draw upon Byzantine styles?
How did the Venetian salt trade evolve? Glasswork? Publishing?
What were the origins of accounting in Venice?
Why did Gordon Tullock think the Venetians had the finest and wisest constitution of history? How much power did the Doge really have?
How did the different Bellinis reflect different eras of Venetian history, both artistic and otherwise?
How did oil painting come to Venice and why did it become so prominent there?
Why are late Titian paintings better than almost everything else in the visual arts?
What factors led to the decline of Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? How did Napoleon treat Venice?
Now, those are just sample questions, obviously you could come up with your own and add to or alter that list. But here is the thing: simply pursue the list of questions. It may well induce you to buy books, such as this work on Venetian architecture and the East. Or it may lead you down Googled rabbit holes. Or it may lead you to…
Follow the questions, not the books per se. Don’t focus on which books to read, focus on which questions to ask. Then the books, and other sources, will follow almost automatically.
Read in clusters! Don’t obsess over titles. Obsess over questions. That is how to learn best about many historical areas, especially when there is not a dominant book or two which beat out all the others.
My question: Is it ever possible for an individual book to present and realize this very process for you? If not, why not?