Charles Rowley is Duncan Black Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the James M Buchanan Centre for Political Economy at George Mason University. He is also General Director of the Locke Institute.
Virginia Political Economy is a collection of selected works by
Gordon Tullock which have been compiled, edited, and provided with
an informative introduction by Charles K. Rowley (Duncan Black
Professor of Economics at George Mason University) and is the first
of a proposed ten volume series showcasing Tullocks' published
academic papers and essays as selected from twenty-three books and
several hundred articles and papers produced by Tullock between
1954 and 2002. Chapters offer an in-depth exploration of such
issues as the problems of majority voting, issues associated with
redistributive policies, the problem of social cost, bioeconomics,
and much more. A scholarly, rational, and well-presented voice of
insight into difficult quandaries of state government and fiscal
policy. Wisconsin Bookwatch
September 2004
Virginia Political Economy is the first volume in a 10-volume
series of the scholarly articles and monographs by Gordon Tullock
from 1954 through 2002. The complete series has been edited by
Charles K. Rowley, who has also written a separate introduction for
each volume. This first volume, in effect, is an introduction to
the whole series by including selected early articles in each
subject area to which Tullock has made a major contribution. This
first volume also includes a brief biographical note and a table of
contents for the whole series. Each of the subsequent volumes
includes one or more of the most important contributions by Tullock
to a specific subject area. The most impressive characteristic of
the first volume is a reminder of the range of subjects to which
Tullock has made an important contribution. The major sections of
this first volume address the following issues: the imperialism of
economics, especially with respect to political science; the
problems of majority voting; the demand-revealing process; rent
seeking; redistributive politics; the problem of social cost; law
and economics; bioeconomics; and the limited relevance of the
public interest theory. Tullock has maintained a roughly constant
utilitarian perspective on each of these issues over the past 50
years, even when it leads him, as in law and economics, to a
position that is quite different from most other scholars working
on these issues. But he does not insist that utilitarianism
explains all human behavior, only that part which is explainable
without knowing the distinctive personalities and biographies of
those involved. In addition to his coauthorship of The Calculus of
Consent (with James Buchanan), the major individual contributions
for which Tullock still deserves the Nobel Prize are his proofs
that democracy usually works rather better than suggested by the
theories of Kenneth Arrow and Duncan Black and that the social
costs of inefficient policies are substantially larger than
suggested by Arnold Harberger. But there should also be some
reward, wherever economists spend their afterlife, for making
valuable contributions to so many subjects, for good writing, and
for relatively little use of mathematics. One of Tullock's major
early articles (1959) explains the effects of vote-trading
(logrolling) in a legislature, pointing out that this process
permits expression of the intensity of preferences and explains
both the protection of intense minorities and special interest
legislation. An important 1967 article demonstrates that the
misallocation caused by political favors such as tariffs or legal
monopolies includes the costs of both acquiring and defending the
favors, a process that would later be described as rent seeking. (A
similar article explains why it is so difficult to get rid of blue
laws, limits on taxicab licenses, etc.) A 1969 article explains the
conditions that determine the optimal degree of centralization in a
federal system, pointing out that decentralization may increase the
share of voters that favor the outcomes of the political process. A
series of articles published in the 1970s explores such topics as
anarchy, bribery, corruption, and revolution. Tullock brings his
utilitarian perspective and training as a lawyer to articles on
crime, juries, trials, and judicial errors. And starting in the
1970s, Tullock was one of the first economists since Malthus to
recognize the similarity of biological and economic reasoning,
leading him to write interesting articles on "The Coal Tit as a
Careful Shopper" and on "The Economics of (Very) Primitive
Societies" and to be a founder of the modern field of bioeconomics.
All of us have been Tullock's students, even those, as in my case,
who have never taken one of his courses. In the summer of 1967, he
worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses where I was the
director of the economics division. In lunchtime conversations, he
recognized that I had been thinking about bureaucratic behavior for
some years but that I had not yet formulated a general theory about
such behavior; these conversations and his encouragement led me to
write my 1968 article ("The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy") and
my 1971 book (Bureaucracy and Representative Government) on this
issue. Subsequent discussions about most any subject have made it
clear that Tullock reads a great deal more history than I do; I
don't know how he finds the time. One way or another, we are all in
his debt. The quality of any series of edited volumes, of course,
also depends on both the editor and publisher. Judging by the first
volume, Charles Rowley has done a first-rate job of editing these
volumes, with special care in selecting those Tullock articles and
monographs that are most likely to make a lasting contribution; the
first volume reflects special care in choosing articles that are an
effective introduction to the whole range of subjects to which
Tullock contributed. The Liberty Fund also merits special thanks
for investing in these volumes. The paperbacks are handsome and are
priced at only $12! All in all, one of the most impressive academic
collections in some time. William A. Niskanen
Cato Institute
Cato Journal
Fall 2004
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