Arguably the greatest economist of our era never to have received the Nobel Prize, Gordon Tullock, who passed away this week, greatly improved our understanding of the "rent seeking" process, bureaucracies, and voting procedures.
Tullock, who passed away in Des Moines, Iowa, at the age of 92, was a leading figure of the "public choice" school of economics, which seeks to explain a wide range of political phenomena using the insights and tools of economic science.
After a spell of US military service during World War II and later completing law school in Chicago, Tullock joined the Foreign Service from 1947 to 1956.
It was those years working in US public sector administration that led him to write his first major work, The Politics of Bureaucracy, exploring in great depth the nature and limitations of bureaucratic modes of public administration.
Tullock's profound, yet still underappreciated, key insight was that motives of self-interest motivated bureaucratic actions as much as anything else, and that this reflected growth in the complexity and scale of bureaucracies which are very difficult for reformist politicians to counter.
If Prime Minister Tony Abbott has ever faced his own "Tullock moment" during his relatively brief time in office, it would be the recent pushback from public sector unions over pay, amidst a severe budget deficit.
Pursuing a fully-fledged academic career by the early 1960s, Gordon Tullock collaborated with the famed economist James Buchanan to write the seminal work in public choice theory, The Calculus of Consent.
This defining work holistically modelled political process as the product of individual choices, of each and every one of us in our roles as either voters, bureaucrats or political representatives. Those choices were in turn heavily influenced by the framing of institutional rules.
GENUINE CONSENSUS OPTION
Bicameral parliaments were preferred over unicameral parliaments to ensure more genuine political consensus over contentious legislation that could erode individual liberties, while unanimity (or near unanimity) voting rules were preferred over majority voting for much the same reasons.
Politicians who prefer maximum discretion in decision-making, and the greatest ease in passing their programs, would flinch at such conclusions, but Tullock's suggestions represented greater accountability to the people.
And as much as the Abbott government might not like it, this major work by Tullock, along with his colleague Buchanan, represents an implicit big tick for even a hostile Senate filled with members charged with representing different constituencies in this country.
Most economists would tend to agree that Gordon Tullock's major contribution was his theories explaining the rent seeking process.
According to a classic economic article produced by Tullock in 1967, the spending and other efforts involved in lobbying politicians for certain policy outcomes inevitably involved a wastage of scarce resources, not to mention poor policy outcomes for consumers and taxpayers.
Tullock found that the more that lobbyists spent scarce resources to influence the political process, the more inefficiencies incurred.
A large part of the growing criticisms of "crony capitalism", both here and throughout much of the world, centres upon the massively wasted, and often damaging, lobbying efforts that Tullock originally cited all those years ago.
Indeed, perhaps Tullock gained much satisfaction during his twilight years in knowing that arguments against the influence of cronyism in our economic, financial and social policies are fast becoming a cause bringing all sides of politics together.
INTELLECTUAL WINGS FLY FAR
Coming originally from the non-economic background as he did, it was no surprise that Tullock had a tendency to spread his intellectual wings over a wide and varied field.
Tullock was a key player in applying the "rational choice" approach of economics to a wide range of non-economic activities, even to such issues as marriage and sexual behaviour, as aptly illustrated by his 1975 book The New World of Economics.
Although this book was published to the chagrin of Tullock's critics, there is no denying the empirical tractability, and even the popularity, of using economics to answer social questions, if modern efforts such as Freakonomics are any guide.
Some within the economics profession have wondered if the likes of Tullock, and others who have also recently passed, such as Armen Alchian, Gary Becker and James Buchanan, will be replaced by a new breed of economists who could reach out to a broader audience.
In the most obvious sense it is true that Tullock cannot be replaced, with even James Buchanan bestowing upon Tullock the rare and honourable description of being a "natural economist", and the jury is still out as to whether the current batch of economists can reach similar heights.
But there is one thing for certain.
Thanks to the works of Gordon Tullock, we can never think of government, and indeed life, in the same way again.
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