Gordon Tullock, R.I.P.

The great
economist Gordon Tullock, who contributed greatly to the
intellectual zeitgeist of libertarianism thanks to his role, along
with Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, in developing
the “public choice” school of economics, has died at age 92, his
colleagues are reporting on Twitter.

Peter Suderman blogged earlier today with a video in which
the
brilliant Tullock explains why it doesn’t much matter if you
vote.

Tullock was, among other accomplishments, the intellectual
father of the concept of rent-seeking, summed up
well by David Henderson. An excerpt:

It has been known for centuries that people lobby the government
for privileges. Tullock’s insight was that expenditures on lobbying
for privileges are costly and that these expenditures, therefore,
dissipate some of the gains to the beneficiaries and cause
inefficiency. If, for example, a steel firm spends one million
dollars lobbying and advertisingfor
restrictions on steel imports, whatever money it gains by
succeeding, presumably more than one million, is not a net gain.
From this gain must be subtracted the one-million-dollar cost
of seeking the restrictions. Although such an expenditure is
rational from the narrow viewpoint of the firm that spends it, it
represents a use of real resources to get a transfer from others
and is therefore a pure loss to the economy as a whole.

I wrote about the importance of Tullock and Buchanan’s
contributions in a libertarian context in my 2007 book
Radicals for Capitalism. Excerpts:

[Buchanan] and his old partner Gordon Tullock, with whom he did
the early foundational work in the school of economics that has
come to be known as Public Choice, have unquestionably given
libertarians a valuable intellectual and ideological tool. Buchanan
and Tullock helped build a professional consensus and a rigorous
scholarly apparatus around the notion that—despite what many
economic professionals used to assume—the behavior of government
agents can fruitfully be modeled the same way we model individual
behavior in markets; that is, as largely motivated by maximizing
the personal utility of the government worker or politician, not
some empyrean concept of the “public good” or an overall “social
welfare function” that a technical economist could calculate.

As Tullock explains it, “the different attitude toward
government that arises from public choice does have major effects
on our views on what policies government should undertake or can
carry out. In particular, it makes us much less ambitious about
relying on government to provide certain services. No student of
public choice would feel that the establishment of a national
health service in the United States would mean that the doctors
would work devotedly to improve the health of the
citizens.”….

The Buchanan/Tullock public choice approach also came to be
known as the “Virginia School” of political economy because of
Buchanan’s formative years teaching at the University of Virginia.
(Buchanan had been, unsurprisingly, an economics student at the
University of Chicago.) The Volker Fund was one of the early
supporters of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political
Economy and Social Philosophy that Buchanan ran there, and helped
them bring in other libertarian thinkers such as Hayek and Italian
legal scholar Bruno Leoni for half-year stints. Buchanan sums up
the libertarian implications of his research program: “The Virginia
emphasis was, from the outset, on the limits of political process
rather than on any schemes to use politics to correct for market
failures.”….

Tullock was a curious character in addition to his great
intellectual accomplishments; he once troubled himself to write a
letter to the editor to Reason wondering on that
age-old intellectual conundrum: in Lord of the Rings, why
didn’t they just give the ring to a flying eagle to deposit in Mt.
Doom?

His colleagues long believed he deserved his own Nobel Prize. He
will be missed, but his insights will be undying.