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38 Regulation 16 (2015-2016)
The Future Legacy of Public Choice

handle is hein.journals/rcatorbg38 and id is 79 raw text is: 16 / Regulation / SUMMER 2015 The Future Legacy of Public Choice GORDON TUL LOCK 1922-2014 BY ZACHARY GOCHENOUR ordon Tullock worked at many schools and on several continents over his long and illustrious career, but nowhere is his impact felt and pres- ence missed more than at George Mason Uni- versity, where I did my graduate work. In faculty offices there, nearly everyone has their favorite Tullock story. There he is remembered for his wit, often in the form of memo- rable insults; as colleague Alex Tabarrok mused in a memorial, In my profession, not to have been insulted by Gordon is to be a nobody. He is also remembered for the generosity he showed his colleagues with his time and insight. His work is assigned in more graduate courses than not, often carrying names of fields he was a seminal author in: Law and Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, and of course Public Choice. Unfortunately, I never met Tullock. He retired from Mason in 2008, two years before I started my doctoral work there. I never had a chance to take one of his famous seminar courses, where although he often said the optimal class size was zero, he inspired a large (and positive) number of economists. Still, I feel that I know him from his prolific work, of which he once said more was published than was ever assigned to him during all his formal economics training. For those of you who don't get his joke, Tullock was a lawyer by training, and supposedly only took one economics course for credit, taught by Henry Calvert Simons at the University of Chicago. Following his death last November at age 92, others com- mented extensively on his most recognized contributions to economics: his joint work with James Buchanan on The Calculus of Consent, the rent-seeking model, and the transitional gains trap. His work reveals an enormous intellect and command of econom- ics, but also an abiding curiosity and desire to understand the social world defined as broadly as possible. In this regard he joins ZACHARY GO CHENOUR is visiting assistant professor of economics at Western Carolina University. other giants of economic thought who pushed the boundaries of the economic way of thinking into other fields: Tullock was the prototypical economic imperialist. His work has inspired articles, dissertations, books, and entire careers. I hope and suspect it will continue to do so for many generations. And so, in this tribute to Professor Tullock, I want to discuss areas of his research that are, to date, relatively unmined. THE TULLOCK PARADOX While his work on the economics of politics and rent-seeking in particular never got the broad public recognition it deserved, it was enormously influential inside the economics profession. His seminal paper on the subject, The Welfare Costs of Tar- iffs, Monopolies, and Theft, is his most-cited work and one of the most cited articles in the field of political economy. It has inspired an extensive literature on the causes and consequences of corruption. Rent-seeking is sure to be the most durable part ofTullock's legacy, for which many economists believe he should have been awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize (presumably shared with Anne Krueger, who independently wrote about the idea and coined the term). People who accept the public interest theory of government-that government officials are selfless advocates of the public good-often ask (or lament) why there is so much money in politics. Tullock answered convincingly: firms curry favor with politicians, who need money for their re-election campaigns, through lobbying. While the idea of rent-seeking-the lobbying of policymakers for laws and regulations that give some firms market advantages over others-is a cornerstone of public choice theory, it has left economists with an empirical conundrum: why is there so little money in politics? If so much regulation and subsidy is driven by rent-seeking, why don't more firms pursue this strategy to strengthen their market position? In Tullock's original model, rent-seeking is an all-pay auction where the probability of winning the prize is an increasing func-

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