From The Calculus of Consent to extended logrolling, negative externalities, and the Coase theorem

Excerpt

My first exposure to some of the ideas analyzed in The Calculus of Consent took place in spring 1963. At that time, I participated in a seminar of Edward Banfield during the months I spent as a Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard University. Banfield, a well-known political scientist always open to new approaches, had invited three young scholars who worked at the forefront of what soon became known as public choice theory, namely Anthony Downs, Lieutenant Mancur Olson, and Gordon Tullock. We seminar participants where highly interested in their presentations, and on all three occasions a lively discussion arose. I had already used ideas of Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy in my habilitation thesis on Aussenpolitik und internationale Wirtschaftsbeziehungen (Foreign Policy and International Economic Relations), but the subjects presented by Mancur Olson and Gordon Tullock were new to me. …