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Tulloch

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Following periods of employment as an attorney at law and in the U.S. Department of State, Professor Tullock taught at the University of South Carolina, University of Virginia, Rice University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, George Mason University and University of Arizona. In 1966, Professor Tullock became the Founding Editor of the Journal of Non-Market Decision Making (later renamed Public Choice). He remained Senior Editor of Public Choice until May 1990. In 1968 (together with Charles Goetz) he established the Center for Studies in Public Choice (renamed the Center for Study of Public Choice in 1969).

Professor Tullock is author of twenty-three books and several hundred articles in economics, public choice, law and economics, bio-economics and foreign affairs. He is best known for such works as The Calculus of Consent (with James M. Buchanan), The Logic of the Law, The Politics of Bureaucracy, The Social Dilemma, Autocracy, The Economics of Non-Human Societies, Rent Seeking and On Voting. Professor Tullock's 1967 article entitled:

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1. Tullock: The Subjectivist Homo Economicus

1This paper examines several of Tullock’s unconventional contributions to economics which provided an interdisciplinary bridge to political science, law, and biology. During his professional career spanning 65 years, Tullock served at six universities, published over 400 papers, 26 books, and made presentations around the world. He received many honors, and was nominated for a number of prestigious awards, most of which he won. The prize which escaped him was the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. However, he was appointed as a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and held many honorary degrees including one bestowed by his alma mater the University of Chicago. Although he is best known for his joint work with Buchanan which formally began in 1960 with joint authorship of The Calculus of Consent (1962), he also issued many challenges to the profession, and formulated theorems by applying economic analysis to areas considered “unconventional” or “nontraditional” by the economics profession.

2Tullock’s insights so

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Gordon Tullock, along with his colleague James M. Buchanan, was a founder of the School of Public Choice. Among his contributions to public choice were his study of bureaucracy, his early insights on rent seeking, his study of political revolutions, his analysis of dictatorships, and his analysis of incentives and outcomes in foreign policy. Tullock also contributed to the study of optimal organization of research, was a strong critic of common law, and did work on evolutionary biology. He was arguably one of the ten or so most influential economists of the last half of the twentieth century. Many economists believe that Tullock deserved to share Buchanan’s 1986 Nobel Prize or even deserved a Nobel Prize on his own.

One of Tullock’s early contributions to public choice was The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, co-authored with Buchanan in 1962. In that path-breaking book, the authors assume that people seek their own interests in the political system and then consider the results of various rules and political structures. One can thin

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