Gordon Tullock Quotes (1922-2014)

“Today we have great laboratories and individual research projects employing thousands of [[scientists], but the interrelation between these giant laboratories, and between them and the myriad of individual investigators, is still one of voluntary, and almost unconscious, co-operation. It is not based on central planning or hierarchic organization. But as any economist knows, the fact that there is no one who can give commands does not mean that there is no social organization.”

“It does tend to make Hayek a much more systematic thinker in this area than he was. I am not saying that Hayek thought of himself as a good economist but only a moderately good political scientist or philosopher, but that is the fact. […] To repeat what I said above, Hayek was only a moderately good political scientist or philosopher. (I should say that Hayek's view of my work was much the same: He thought I was a good economist but didn't like my political science.)”

“Buchanan and Tullock went on to apply the customary neoclassical hypothesis of individual rational utility maximization to the whole area of collective choice. One of their novel assumptions, and one that was truly revolutionary in those days, was the idea that politicians and bureaucrats do not necessarily behave as “benevolent dictators” on behalf of the public interest, but rather display the common kind of purposive behavior. They pursue their own interests and they react to incentives just like anybody else. In this landmark study, Buchanan and Tullock also draw a crucial distinction between two different levels of collective decision making, namely the constitutional level and the level of ordinary, day-to-day politics. All of this defines the paradigm they would later apply to almost every field of public economics.”

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods (Tideman and Tullock 1976).”

“Call me a masochist but one of the great pleasures of being at George Mason is that I am regularly insulted by Gordon Tullock. You have to understand, however, that in my profession not to have been insulted by Gordon is to be a nobody. In anycase, here is one from yesterday. "Gordon," I asked, "do you think we should ban child labor?" "No, keep working." The other day Gordon asked me to read one of his papers and I pointed out a few typos. "Excellent," he said, "this will surely be your greatest contribution to economics." Gordon is prone to pressing people with difficult questions. One of my colleagues responded, "Gordon, I’m not that good at thinking on my feet." Without missing a beat Gordon pulled up a chair and said "well sit down and we’ll see how you do then."”