"Who is that crazy old man?" I asked. Nodding at a short fellow slowly leaving the seminar room.
"He just gave you a huge compliment."
I was still a PhD student, and I had just given a paper on Adam Smith and Rousseau at the Summer Institute.* I had been nervous because my last few talks to economist-only crowds had been confrontational affairs. But this event seem to have gone fine – the interruptions were respectful, even fruitful, and surprisingly philosophical – that is, until the old guy had started to lecture me.
"Really?" I was pretty sure that I was being made fun of.
"No, really. He stayed for your Q&A, and he was convinced."
"But that rant about Rousseau's children, that was totally off the wall."
"Oh, no, you convinced him that Rousseau on property rights and rents anticipates the Virginia School."
"What do I care…" I paused, "Wait, who was that?"
"That was Gordon Tullock."
'"Tullock?" I almost ran after him.
Gordon Tullock died yesterday. I met him a few more times upon my (almost) annual returns to George Mason, but we never had a real conversation. Tullock had a knack of measuring you up, and he could be very biting (and funny). You got a sense that he did not suffer fools lightly. Tullock's name is attached to theories of rent-seeking and public choice economics more generally. I don't think I insult his memory if I say that his ideas were all fairly simple. (He was a trained lawyer.) His papers were not dressed up with complex mathematics; they would get to the point often with sparse, lean prose. At bottom, it was all about incentives and logical entailment. (I always love that his most famous work, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), has such a philosophical title.) But he pursued his ideas with relentless focus and utter contempt for fashion and prestige. His work caused economists to stop focusing exclusively on market-failure and to start taking government failure, and institutional design more generally, equally seriously. I thought he deserved some share of the Nobel that Buchanan did win, in part, for their joint work. Buchanan understood his own work as part of a great, long conversation. Tullock also took ideas seriously – he did attend my talk on the history of political economy, after all --, but he did not feel the need to package them.
Some other time I may write a bit about his editorial stewardship of the journal Public Choice. But because I am on the eve of the PSA (Philosophy of Science association) in Chicago, I close with this: Tullock's work matters to the philosophy of science. In the 1950s and 60s – the age of Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, etc. --, he paid attention to the philosophers of science. In return in The Organization of Inquiry he created what I, only half-jokingly, call 'public choice philosophy of science;' the core idea is that in reflecting on science, you can't simply assume that scientists are pure truth-seekers. In particular, it is quite possible that economic interests will buy directly or, more subtly, indirectly some scientists to lobby or speak on their behalf. That is to say, the institutional context and social organization of science plays a role in the outcomes that science reports.
How to theorize about science and/or society while taking one's responses to incentives into account is, in fact, the central theme for analytical egalitarianism. Tullock's work has been pioneering in this respect. During the last few years, I discovered that Mandeville anticipated some of Tullock's best insights. I regret not having shared it with him; I think he would have been quite pleased to ditch Rousseau for the sharp, unsparing, but ultimately humane wit of Mandeville.
* I love that my name is flanked by Tullock and Warren Samuels in this announcement.
That is very nice. The Mandeville link would have indeed pleased him.
Posted by: David Levy | 11/05/2014 at 11:51 PM