Gordon Tullock

Today I was reached by the incredibly sad news that Gordon Tullock passed away on Monday, 3rd November, at age 92. These past few years have seen the demise of many of my great heroes, among whom Alchian, Becker, Coase, and now Tullock, stand out. What a dismal endeavour to go through the list in any detail. I never got to meet him, but the stories I hear all tell of an amazing character. Case in point: visited by what may have been the Governor of Virginia (if I recall the story correctly), then GMU Professor Tullock, always forthright, said to him: "So you're from the government? Very good. Then maybe you can do something about the leak in my ceiling". Actually these were also among the last words spoken between them.

Gordon Tullock is of course best known for his work on Public Choice and he was the founding editor of the eponymous journal, but his interests and articles showcase an astonishing breadth and depth of thought. He even had a publication in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. He wrote extensively on history and it is a great understatement to say that he was very well read. One article of his is 'An Economic Theory of Military Tactics', joint work with Geoffrey Brennan, in which they analyse the general's problem of getting the soldiers not to run away from battle. I have blogged about that article before, and several times about the late legend.

Tullock had a few paradoxes to his name. One, a wee note called 'The Purchase of Politicians' in the Western Economic Journal (now Economic Inquiry), says that political favours are bought for much less money than they reward, a phenomenon known as the Tullock Paradox which as far as I can tell lacks a satisfactory explanation. A better-known paradox of his is, of course, that of revolution: The individual faces great risk from participating in a protest against a tyrant, who might order the firing squads on the protestors, and the benefit he receives from doing so are hardly greater than what he would have got if he hadn't taken part in the protests.

With Tullock's passing, the world also loses a refreshing observation on the lack of necessity of formal training to be educated. Tullock never obtained a PhD in Economics even though he was surely among the two or three greatest economists to have been alive for over 40 years of Nobel Prize announcements and never received one - and a far greater recipient than many a Laureate. Tullock held a JD from the University of Chicago and only took one economics course for that degree. His works are rigorous without the formulae, which he would refer to as "ornamental mathematics". It is a tremendous loss to economic science that his example is no longer among us.

Of the tributes which I have seen, I particularly like the one by Professor David Friedman. Mine cannot compete, but I humbly add it to the pile, along with a piece of evidence as to how much Gordon Tullock has influenced my own thinking: I still do not know how yesterday's American election turned out. That will change soon enough with the number of interactions I have with others, but if it were not for them, I probably would not find out until I accidentally saw the headline on the news or maybe encountered it as part of some data crunching for a project.

We have lost a great economist and a remarkable character.

Teacher

It is with very great sadness that I write that the greatest teacher I have ever had by far, Professor Gary Becker, passed away on 3rd May. He would have turned 84 in December. One common reaction when hearing of the death of an octogenarian is to suggest that the person in question was rather old and that he or she had lived a full life, but if every day of a long life was truly filled to the brim with valuable content, my reaction is to deplore such departures with no reduction in intensity, for an even longer life would likely have added still more blessings for those around the deceased person.

 

Gary Stanley Becker was precisely the kind of person who lived each day till it was full and contributed to economic science in proportion thereto. I was fortunate to interact with him on a few occasions at Chicago. Many people will truthfully mention the fear he instilled in the students of whom he was about to ask a question (he would call on people in class), but no-one should take this to mean he was anything less than a thoroughly warm and gentle person. Indeed, his focus when interacting with other economists, students or faculty members, on the question and on making sure its answer is grasped is really a declaration of love for the other fellow, because this approach takes care to find and expose errors and to correct them. No seeker of truth should expect greater favours.

Professor Becker remained active until the end. So very active that it is hard for me to fathom that he is gone. Last year at Chicago, when I was still there, Professor Becker looked very good. Although he may have been walking rather slowly and the text would appear with a bit of a slant when he wrote on the blackboard, everyone was still in awe of his intellect and in very few words he could poke irreparable holes in models he encountered in the many workshops in which he was an active participant. I hasten to add that when he liked something he certainly would not refrain from saying it. Such is the nature of the constructive criticism which he was always certain to offer. He understood that the truth is more valuable than anything else and should be told irrespective of whether it helps or shatters a model.

I say that he lived each day till it was full and I truly believe that; his quest for new insights and understanding in social science was pursued with incredible vigour. The clearest evidence is that he kept as great a teaching load as most of his junior colleagues until the end. In addition, there are many stories of his diligently going to his office during weekends. For instance, one weekend in November of 2006, shortly after his friend and teacher Milton Friedman had passed away, a panel discussion was held at the University of Chicago and Professor Becker, sure enough, was easy to find in his office. It was to be expected that this sort of person would be professionally active until his passing, the tragic thing is that he could not have had a few million more years.
 

The brilliance of this scholar has to my knowledge never been overstated. I am not sure it can be. To take economics as the natural starting point for essentially any problem in social science must have been well beyond the unexpected when he wrote his doctoral dissertation, The Economics of Discrimination, almost sixty years ago. He repeated the feat countless times, seeing market situations and purposeful individuals where others saw intractable ethical quandaries (the economics of crime), irrational behaviour (addiction) or such numinous matters as love and lust (the economics of the family). He used economics to illuminate really important big-picture features of society in a way which the rest of us may well fail to equal forever; even though there is no shortage of good and interesting topics, really good ideas are scarce - but not nearly as scarce as they would have been without Professor Becker.

 

There will be a lot of praise for this towering scholar in the coming days. Of the ones I have seen so far, I have particularly enjoyed the ones by Professors Justin Wolfers and Steve Levitt. Professor James Heckman, true to his wont, has a very long piece, although it was written in 2011 for a conference in Professor Becker's honour. It is also very nice and mixes terrific insight with interesting titbits, humour and pictures.

The world can become a lot poorer in just the short time it takes for the right person to pass away. The fields in which such people make their marks, having prospered immensely during their lifetimes, may take a lot of time to recover the same greatness after these people have gone. Gary Becker was one of the right persons. Almost anyone else would require hundreds of years to accomplish half of what he did, yet he had much too little time.