#tullock

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Born February 13, 1922, Tullock received his JD from the University of Chicago in 1947 and then became an officer in the Foreign Service. There, he read Ludwig von Mises’s treatise Human Action. It helped inspire him to pursue a broad research agenda with the individual as the unit of analysis (methodological individualism) and the individual’s understanding of her social context as the analyst’s data (methodological subjectivism).  

In 1956, Tullock left for the Hoover Institution. In 1958, with the help of now-Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Tullock secured a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Center, which Buchanan had co-founded to promote a rebirth of classical political economy. 

Tullock went on to found the Journal of Non-Market Decision Making (later to become Public Choice) and to cofound the Center for Studies in Public Choice. Along with Buchanan, he was the epicenter of the Virginia school of political economy, so-called for its prominence at UVA, first, followed by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and George Mason University.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE

Tullock’s contributions have been so influential that many have put forward his name as a Nobel contender — and yet he took just one economics course in his life. 

Constitutional Choice

His first revolutionary contribution was the 1962 foundational work in constitutional political economy, co-authored with Buchanan, titled The Calculus of Consent. The two authors explored the rules within which the game of politics takes place. 

What rules allow all parties to improve their welfare? Whereas in markets, voluntary transactions make all parties better off, in politics, the same is true only when the rules require unanimity. Under such an institution, individuals exchange consent for one another’s favored projects and all benefit. 

In thus treating politics as a form of exchange, Buchanan and Tullock developed the concept of logrolling. They showed that despite its unsavory connotations, logrolling is only a symptom of pork-barrel politics. It is only harmful when a simple-majority rule allows the interests of some to override the interests of others.

But the absence of unanimity in ordinary politics doesn’t in itself suggest majoritarian democracy. Individuals acting in their self-interest recognize that the harms that come from majority rule should be considered side by side with the difficulty of reaching consensus under a unanimity rule. A qualified-majority rule and a bicameral legislature are two ways polities can strike a balance.

Bureaucracy

A second penetrating work is Tullock’s Bureaucracy (1965). Here he explored how higher-ups and subordinates face insuperable problems in coordinating their disparate bits of knowledge. In markets, profit-and-loss signals allow independent individuals to adjust their actions to the needs of others, even though each knows only a small piece of the whole. But individuals don’t have signals like that in politics. 

Rent-Seeking

A third revolutionary work came in 1967. Arnold Harberger had inspired Tullock indirectly by finding the harm from monopoly to be less than one-tenth of 1 percent of GNP in the ‘20s. How could it be so low? 

Tullock believed Harberger had overlooked a critical cost. Whereas Harberger only saw that monopolies allocate resources inefficiently, Tullock saw that individuals also waste resources to get the privilege to allocate resources inefficiently. More generally, people use up goods and services in competing to win prizes of all sorts. Privilege is one such prize, as are plunder and tariffs. Anne Kreuger later termed Tullock’s insight rent-seeking.

CONCLUSION