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Public Choice, Past and Present: The Legacy of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock PDF

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Studies in Public Choice Series Editor Randall G. Holcombe Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA Founding Editor Gordon Tullock George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6550 Dwight R. Lee Editor Public Choice, Past and Present The Legacy of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock Editor Dwight R. Lee Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX , USA ISSN 0924-4700 ISBN 978-1-4614-5908-8 ISBN 978-1-4614-5909-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5909-5 Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953268 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, speci fi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on micro fi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied speci fi cally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a speci fi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Preface This volume was conceived when Larry Kenny asked me if I would be willing to participate in a plenary session honoring Jim and Gordon on the fi ftieth anniversary of the publication of The Calculus of Consent at the March 2012 International Public Choice Meeting in Miami. There was to be three separate discussions: the fi rst on the impact of T he Calculus of Consent , the second on the work of Buchanan, and the third on the work of Tullock. I asked for a few days to think about what I might say during which my wife insisted that I owed it to Jim and Gordon to say yes. But almost immediately upon deciding to accept Larry’s invitation, I received an invita- tion to attend a Liberty Fund conference in San Diego the same weekend as the Public Choice Meeting. I was very much tempted to turn Larry down and accept the Liberty Fund invitation, telling my wife how much I enjoyed Liberty Fund confer- ences. Her response was, “Yes I know, but if hadn’t been for Jim you would have never been invited to a Liberty Fund Conference.” I e-mailed Larry the next day letting him know I would be happy to participate and chose to make my comments on the impact of T he Calculus of Consent . The plenary session went well with interesting comments by Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Randy Holcombe on the work of Buchanan; Roger Congleton, Heinrich Ursprung, and Arye Hillman on the work of Tullock; with me leading off on the impact of The Calculus of Consent since I was the only one who chose that topic. After the session, Larry Kenny and Nicholas Philipson, Editorial Director for Business, Economics and Statistics for Springer Academic Publishers, asked me if I would be willing to edit a volume including papers from the session participants and others who would have interesting things to say on the intellectual legacy of Buchanan and Tullock. I said yes. Springer imposed a rather tight deadline on receipt of the chapters, and three of those who participated in the session were unable to commit to the project. There were, however, plenty of students (which in the broad sense includes us all) and former colleagues who were willing and able to meet the deadline. This volume begins with an overview discussion of the impact of The Calculus of Consent in particular, and of public choice more generally, by J. R. Clark and myself which expands rather signi fi cantly on my presentation in Miami. We argue v vi Preface that though Buchanan and Tullock, through both The Calculus of Consent and other contributions, have had a signi fi cant impact on scholarship in economics and politi- cal science, there are some notable disappointments in their impact on economic education, some areas of economic research and in political reform. We end, how- ever, with a cautiously optimistic assessment of the long-run in fl uence of public choice on political reform. The remaining chapters are ordered roughly in accordance with a continuum beginning with discussions focusing on the theoretical work of either Buchanan, Tullock, or both, moving to discussions of the impact of public choice in general on particular issues with some autobiographical emphasis, and fi nally to those discus- sions that approach the contributions of Buchanan and Tullock primarily from an autobiographical, or personal, perspective. This continuum is too loosely de fi ned to determine a precise ordering of the chapters, and it should not be assumed that the ordering re fl ects any judgment on the relative importance of the chapters. I want this volume to be both informative and interesting, and I believe every chapter contrib- utes to satisfying that goal. Let me now turn to providing brief summaries of Chaps. 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , and 16 . Randall Holcombe focuses on the work of Buchanan in Chap. 2 . Holcombe argues that Buchanan’s work on institutions as a means of facilitating exchange in the development of public choice is broader than its application to political processes because his interests and writings extend to differences in political and market exchange resulting from the institutional differences in the two arenas. On the other hand, because of his concern in the importance of institutions, Buchanan’s work in public choice has been narrower than the broad body of work within the public choice literature. Chapter 3 by Roger Congleton makes what initially seems like an implausible argument – that much of Tullock’s work is more profound than commonly thought because he did not appreciate fully how important his work was. The plausibility of the argument is based on the claim that Tullock has been very good at pursuing his comparative social advantage. He was doing exactly what we would want a tire- lessly creative economist to do – throw out as many interesting ideas with the poten- tial to push out the frontier of knowledge as rapidly as possible and let others “plumb its depths.” Geoffrey Brennan and Michael Brooks consider in Chap. 4 Buchanan’s concep- tion of liberty and its connections to and tensions with a broad body of his work. For example, Buchanan’s conception of a libertarian af fi nity with anarchy and his con- stitutional contractarianism raise some interesting philosophical concerns. In Chap. 5 , Richard Wagner considers two different ways of assessing the legacy of Buchanan and Tullock as it relates to establishing public choice as a fi eld of scholarly inquiry. Wagner argues that examining the effect of an analytical approach aimed at understanding the political process is similar to making a choice between the Laspeyres and Paasche approaches when constructing index numbers. This fol- lows from Wagner’s view that the political process is more like a piazza than a parade, with the order observed in a piazza based not on everyone accepting and rehearsing a predetermined plan, but on people with different plans following rules Preface vii of courtesy and collision avoidance in achieving them. This important difference makes an approach more in line with the construction of Paasche index numbers the preferred way of evaluating the scholarly contribution of Buchanan and Tullock. Donald Boudreaux considers Buchanan’s work on constitutional design in Chap. 6 . Boudreaux emphasizes what he sees as a tension between Buchanan’s more con- structivist approach to constitutional reform and Hayek’s view that constitutional improvements emerge through a more evolutionary and spontaneous process. While Boudreaux agrees with Buchanan’s concern that “Evolution may produce social dilemma as readily as social paradise,” he gives the nod to Hayek once he considers the problems inherent in voting (in particular, the problems of expressive voting) that would be required in direct constitutional reform. In Chap. 7 , Janet Landa reexamines her earlier work that applied public choice theory to an interesting feature in the swarming behavior of honeybees. In her ear- lier work, she explained an empirical fi nding that scout bees use unanimous voting to make collective choices on the location of a new nest site with Buchanan and Tullock’s discussion of the advantage of unanimous voting. In response to recent empirical fi ndings that scout bees in fact choose new nests with a less than unani- mous vote, Landa makes use of the analysis leading to Fig. 5 in Chap. 6 of The Calculus of Consent to make her analysis consistent with the new fi nding. Landa also puts forth an interesting explanation for the ability of scout bees to sense when a decision has been reached despite their inability to count. In Chap. 8 , William Shughart discusses the important contributions Buchanan and Tullock have made independently in such scholarly areas as public fi nance, law and economics, and bio-economics, and, of course, their most noted joint work, T he Calculus of Consent . Shughart also summarizes, in an idiosyncratic way, three areas of Buchanan and Tullock’s work that have in fl uenced his thinking and writing – the cost of collective decision-making, rent seeking, and the analysis of public budget de fi cits and debt. In Chap. 9 , John Goodman credits the work of Buchanan and Tullock for insights that are essential to his understanding of the politics of medicine. He makes use of basic public choice analysis to explain the incentives to politicize medical care and then to explain why the promises made to justify that politicization (lower cost, more equal distribution, etc.) have not been kept. The examples are primarily from the British National Health Service, but the American healthcare policy, though different in many details, is following a path that can also be explained by public choice. Nicolous Tideman pays tribute in Chap. 1 0 to an important contribution Tullock made to public choice with a bold decision to publish a paper containing a compli- cated argument by an unknown (at least to Tullock) graduate student which made a startling claim before he (Tullock) fully understood it. The paper claimed to prove that it was possible to motivate people to report their preferences for public goods truthfully, and Tullock quickly published it in Public Choice because he knew it would be important if true. Tideman reports on the events by which the paper came to be understood and expanded upon by himself, Tullock, and others. Chapter 11 by David Henderson begins by expressing his appreciation for the encouragement and help Buchanan and Tullock gave him as a 20-year-old thinking viii Preface about an academic career in economics. He then argues that foreign policy is one area in which public choice analysis could be productively extended more than it has been and supports his position with the results of such an analysis. John Baden is a key scholar in the development of the New Resource Economics (NRE), which promotes free-market approaches for addressing many environmen- tal and natural resource problems. An important component of NRE research involves realistically comparing the effectiveness of market and political approaches at aligning private incentives with socially productive activities, comparisons to which public choice contributes. In Chap. 1 2, John discusses the development of NRE and points out how both Buchanan and Tullock (as well as the Ostroms and others) and public choice insights were helpful at key junctures during that develop- ment. He also draws interesting parallels between the problems Jim and Gordon encountered because of destructive incentives within the University of Virginia dur- ing the mid-1960s and the same problems during the development of NRE at Montana State University a little over a decade and half later. As Baden points out, the parallel is not an aberration. In Chap. 1 3 , James Gwartney discusses how Buchanan, Tullock, and the public choice literature had a major impact on his career and approach to economics. Over Gwartney’s career he has written many scholarly articles, but he focuses his chapter on his economic principles text, Economics: Private and Public Choice , (which was fi rst published in 1976 and is now in its 14th edition with coauthors added) and eco- nomic education. The motto of his textbook writing could be that without a knowl- edge of both the market and political processes, one cannot understand how alternative institutions and policies will affect outcomes. His big disappointment is that public choice has not had more impact on economics principles courses , which still assume government is an effective means of correcting market failures, but devote little time, if any, to acknowledging, much less discussing, government failure. Instead of focusing on the contributions Buchanan and Tullock have made directly to economic thought, in Chap. 14 Richard McKenzie discusses their indi- rect contributions with a personal tribute to their largely unheralded dedication to assisting the academic efforts of their students and colleagues. By giving examples of how both Buchanan and Tullock, in their different ways, provided much needed guidance to him during his career, McKenzie suggests that neither of them could be mistaken for the “economic man” in economists’ models. And as McKenzie found out when expressing his amazement to Betty Tillman at Buchanan’s promptness in providing detailed comments on papers sent to him, he (McKenzie) was not being favored a bit by Buchanan over many others. Bruce Yandle’s tribute to Buchanan and Tullock in Chap. 1 5 reinforces that of McKenzie’s. His story includes personal encounters with Buchanan and Tullock as a graduate student, faculty member, and government economist, and tells how they con- tributed to his professional growth. He also discusses the power of Buchanan’s and Tullock’s insights in terms of how disruptive they were to the intellectual status quo. Randy Simmon’s concluding chapter tells how the work of Buchanan and Tullock affected both his academic and public life and how it provides a useful framework for understanding his experiences during 6 years on the city council and 4 years as Preface ix the mayor of a small Utah town. Given his academic background in public choice, he was not surprised to experience people acting badly when competing for political favor while showing compassion and concern for each other when acting in small voluntary groups. Let me conclude by thanking all the contributors for meeting the deadlines with informative chapters that convey the enormous respect and gratitude we all have for Jim and Gordon. I would also like to thank Larry Kenny for his academic entrepre- neurship in organizing the Miami session to honor Jim and Gordon on the fi ftieth anniversary of the publication of T he Calculus of Consent , and which initiated the work that culminated in this volume. I would be remiss not to thank Nicholas Philipson of Springer for his enthusiasm for the project and encouragement along the way. But my biggest thanks go to my wife, Cindy Crain-Lee, whose organiza- tional skills, attention to details, and meticulous editing of the manuscripts as they came in kept the project on schedule. Dallas, TX, USA Dwight R. Lee

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.