On the extraordinary scholarly life and times of Gordon Tullock

See also the four remembrances of Gordon by, respectively, Clark and Lee (2015), Congleton (2015), Tideman (2015), and Yandle (2015), all published in March 2015 as volume 162, numbers 3–4, of Public Choice. In a private communication with the first-named author of this essay, David Theroux, founder and president of the Independent Institute, described Gordon as “kind and generous”. We share that assessment.

A PDF version of Gordon’s c.v., current as of October 2000 (containing Gordon’s own summary of his career beginning with his appointment to the US Foreign Service) can be downloaded from the website of George Mason University Law School here: publicchoice.​info/​TullockTales/​VitaGT.​pdf.

At the end of his postdoctoral fellowship at UVA, Gordon was appointed in fall 1959 to the tenure-track faculty of the University of South Carolina, where he remained until 1962. He returned to UVA as an associate professor that fall; the denial of Gordon’s promotion to full professor there apparently was partly spiteful—he apparently had alienated members of UVA’s political science department by berating them during luncheons at Charlottesville’s Colonnade Club.

The University of Virginia thereby earned the dubious distinction of forcing out two members of its economics faculty who later became Nobel laureates, James Buchanan and Ronald Coase. A second mass movement of the Center to George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, took place circa 1983.

To be precise, joint coeditors for the “rest of the world” (i.e., beyond Western Europe), which at the time and for all practical purposes comprised Canada and the United States. See Rowley (1991a) and Shughart (2014) for more details on the transition.

Such disappointment persists even in an age of online processing of manuscripts from initial submission to final editorial decision. The main bottleneck in the system befalls authors and editors when at least one external referee agrees to review a paper, but then misses the deadline for sending in his or her report.

He solicited the advice of other scholars only rarely, usually by walking down the hallway to ask the opinion as to a paper’s publishability of one of his colleagues in the Center for Study of Public Choice (Shughart 2014, p. 232).

It is in recognition of Gordon Tullock’s penchant for fostering the careers of “bright young assistant professors” that Springer, the current publisher of Public Choice, now funds the honorarium for a prize awarded annually to the author(s) of the best paper published in the journal every year by a younger scholar or scholars, the winner having been selected by the editors of Public Choice and announced at the annual meeting of the Public Choice Society, convened at various locations traditionally in March.

The editors of Public Choice thus choose their successors in the same way as the presidency of the Public Choice Society customarily changes hands. The sole exception to the Society’s norm transpired in 2006 when its rank-and-file members, at the suggestion of then-president Steven Brams, voted for the president who served the next two-year term. Voter turnout was abysmally low in that election (Brams et al. 2006). Given his familiarity with Anthony Downs’s (1957) model of instrumental voting, low voter turnout would not have been a surprise to Gordon Tullock, who was delighted to proclaim to students and colleagues that he never voted, perhaps with an eye on demonstrating his own economic rationality. (Graffiti in the men’s bathroom of the Center for Study of Public Choice on the George Mason University campus proclaims “Tullock votes!” The Society’s traditional practice was restored when its “democratically” elected president appointed his successor. Both institutions conceivably are reflected in Gordon’s longstanding scholarly interest in dictatorships and monarchies (see below).

The field fathered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock therefore sometimes is referred to as Virginia Political Economy (VPE), to distinguish it from important offshoots at the “Rochester [New York] School”, most closely associated with the work of political scientist William Riker and his students, and at the “Bloomington [Indiana] School” connected with the workshop established there by the late Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, the last also a Nobel laureate in her own right.

See on the latter theme, see Buchanan (1964) and Shughart and Thomas (2014).

Other examples include most of the salaries of college football coaches, superstar athletes and headline entertainers, who earn rents because their talents are scarce and their supplies cannot readily be increased or, given current biotechnologies, cloned.

Rents likewise can arise in a perfectly competitive industry, but under constant cost conditions, only in the short run. Because of easy entry into and exit from such industries, rents (above-normal economic profits) or losses cannot persist in the long run. The crucial distinctions between profit-seeking and rent-seeking behavior, including their very different social welfare implications, are discussed in Buchanan (1980).

Game-theoretic models of oligopolistic markets, models that have much in common with Tullock’s (1980a) analysis of rent seeking, also usually assume that the number of players (firms) is fixed ex ante. See Higgins et al. (1985) for an extension of the Tullock rent-seeking contest that allows players to enter until the available rent is fully dissipated (in potential entrants’ ex ante expectations) and for some further analysis of the exponent r in the equation below.

The same 50 % chance of winning could also be “purchased” if each player bids $50, but such outlays are inefficient in the sense that it would be irrational to double one’s bid and still expect to win only half of the available rent.

The extent of rent dissipation, D, in Tullock’s model is determined by \(D = \frac{Nx}{V} = \frac{N - 1}{N},\) where N > 1 is the number of contestants; x is player i’s bid and V is the value of the contested rent. Setting \(r = \infty\) leads to an “all-pay auction” (Hillman and Samet 1987; Hillman and Riley 1989) in which rents are fully dissipated (i.e., D = 1) whenever \(N \ge 2\).

See, for example, Tollison (1982), Congleton et al. (2008), Hillman (2013), Shughart and Thomas (2015) and Congleton and Hillman (2015) for summaries of the relevant theoretical and empirical literatures.

Because medallions represent transferrable property rights with very long useful lives, they have much in common with perpetuities, a type of bond (a “consol”) having no term to maturity. Let A be the annual payment (coupon) received by the bondholder and i the market rate of interest; the bond’s present market value at any point in time is \(P = \frac{A}{i}\). If A is thought of as the taxicab operator’s annual rent, that stream of rents is fully capitalized in the medallion’s market price.

The academic database JSTOR lists 61,125 search results for “rent seeking”; EconLit counts 662 occurrences of “rent seeking” in the titles and texts of scholarly books and articles since 1969.

Buchanan’s Appendix 1 is titled “Marginal Notes on Political Philosophy” (Buchanan and Tullock 1962, pp. 307–322).

Journal editors nowadays can only dream about such short turnaround times! On logrolling, see also Tullock (1970).

The 2005 Liberty Fund volume combines selections from The Social Dilemma and Tullock’s equally insightful Autocracy (Tullock [1987] 2005), published originally by Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer Academic Publishers and summarized further below.

Republished in 2005 as vol. 6 of Rowley (2004–2010).

Niskanen had resigned from Ford as a result of a dispute with top company managers following his principled refusal to support governmental imposition of import restrictions on foreign automobile manufacturers.

Bureaucratic failures can—and often do—lead to pleas for bigger budgets. On the other hand, as Morris Fiorina (1977) observes, bureaucratic sluggishness, the “red tape” associated with formal, one-size-fits-all rules and procedures, and outright ineptitude supply the Members of Congress with a convenient scapegoat when their constituents complain.

It was for that reason that the post of customs collector for the Port of New York was for many years a much sought-after plum. Likely as a result of his earlier experiences in that position, including removal from the job by President Rutherford B. Hayes, President Chester A. Arthur became a staunch advocate of civil service reform, ultimately signing the Pendleton Act in 1883, which required appointments to federal jobs to be based on merit. Source: http://​www.​history.​com/​topics/​chester-a-arthur; last accessed May 9, 2015.

See Wilson (1989) for a political scientist’s modern analysis of bureaucracy, inspired in part by the contributions of Tullock and other public choice scholars who followed his lead.

For simplicity’s sake, we use the term “autocrat” to refer to any head of government not elected to that post by popular vote. Constitutional monarchies exercising mainly ceremonial functions, such as England’s Queen Elizabeth II and the future successors to her throne, obviously represent exceptions to our terminology. It is worth noting in that regard that some members of the Scottish National Party want to call England’s current queen “Elizabeth I”, since the original Queen Elizabeth ruled prior to the union of England, Wales and Scotland in 1707.

Such ideas call to mind Hayek (1944, pp. 134–152), in a chapter of The Road to Serfdom titled “Why the Worst Get on Top”. See Coats et al. (2015) for application of the same framework to explain why corrupt politicians tend rise to the top in democratic polities.

Selections from both volumes are reproduced in Tullock (2005). Also see Tullock (1997).

The term “peers” refers to lords and other nobles of the British realm, whose guilt or innocence was thought to be beyond the ken of mere commoners. See Allen (2012).

Tullock (1994) summarizes most of that line of research, but also see Tullock (1971c). Tullock’s many writings in the area of bioeconomics are reprinted in vol. 9 of Rowley (2004–2010), under the title Economics without Borders.