The Political Economist

The taxi market is undoubtedly one of the best examples of something economists like to call rent-seeking . What does this phenomenon stand for and why do economists (particularly political economists) devote a lot of attention to it?  The classical definition was given by Gordon Tullock back in his  1967  seminal paper "The welfare cost of tariffs, monopolies and theft" , even though the phrase itself was coined by Anne Krueger in 1974 .  Rent-seeking is a process of gaining private benefits through the political process (by lobbying or logrolling for example). It implies gaining protection for a certain privileged group, which in return promises political support, large campaign contributions, or even bribes. This protection varies from giving a monopoly status to a certain company, regulating market entry than hampers competition (such as introducing licences to specific occupations), imposing tariffs to import goods to protect the domestic indus...

More than a decade after Mancur Olson , and almost two years after James Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom , another champion of public choice theory has passed away , at the modest age of 92. Gordon Tullock , together with James Buchanan (both pictured below), founded the public choice school of economics, or as they saw it "the theory of politics without romance". Their legacy still remains the single most influential theory that explains how politics interacts with economics, and how one cannot fully grasp all the economic phenomena and outcomes without understanding the logic of politics. This is Tullock's (and Buchanan's) by far the biggest contribution to economics and even more so to political science. They taught us that politicians should be modeled and observed the same way market agents are modeled and observed; driven by self-interest and self-preservation. Before public choice theory governments were always modeled exogenously as a 'social planner'...