Gordon Tullock was an American economist and one of the founders of public choice, the field that applies economic reasoning to political decisions. He studied at the University of Chicago from 1940 to 1943 and took a law degree there in 1947, and while there took a one-semester economics course taught by Henry Simons. After a brief stint at a law firm he spent nine years in the U.S. Foreign Service before turning to academic work. He taught at the University of South Carolina, the University of Virginia, Rice, Virginia Tech, George Mason and the University of Arizona, and returned to George Mason from 1999 to 2008.
The Calculus of Consent (1962), written with James Buchanan, treated the choice of voting rules as a decision rational individuals make in advance. Each person weighs two costs: the harm others may impose through collective decisions and the expense of reaching decisions at all. On that reckoning simple majority rule loses its special standing. The authors wrote that 51 percent of the voters "would not seem to be much preferable to 49 percent," and argued that the best rule varies with the issue and the person. When Buchanan received the 1986 Nobel Prize for his work in public choice, the economist Randall Holcombe later wrote, many people thought the prize should have been shared with Tullock.
His 1967 article "The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft" is credited as the first article on rent-seeking. Standard estimates of the cost of monopoly, Tullock argued, left out the resources that firms, and their would-be rivals, spend trying to become monopolists. He applied the point above all to firms seeking privileges from government rather than competing in the market.
Tullock carried the same method into other institutions. The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) analyzed officials as people who respond to the rewards and punishments they face, and Buchanan credited the book with changing how bureaucracy was studied. In Autocracy (1987) and related work he examined how dictators hold power under the constant threat of a coup and why revolutionaries tend to come from inside the existing government, extending public choice beyond democracy to arrangements ranging from autocracy to anarchy. He founded the journal Papers in Non-Market Decision Making in 1966, renamed Public Choice in 1969, and was its chief editor until 1992; he also co-founded the Public Choice Society. The American Economic Association named him a Distinguished Fellow in 1998. He died on November 3, 2014, at the age of 92.
Gordon Tullock is associated with Classical Liberal. See the archetype