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

256 Pages·2013·1.58 MB·English

by  J. R. Clark

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
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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