In this important new book, Gordon Tullock, a founding father of the public choice school, provides a formal analysis of the foundations of decision making. Voting procedures are crucial to Western democratic governments but are also employed in dictatorial governments, private clubs, corporations and religious organizations. This comprehensive book examines the many techniques of voting and the different outcomes in different situations. Gordon Tullock's analysis begins by using a simple model in which individuals vote in terms of their own preferences. It is assumed that the voters are well informed, their preferences are reasonably firm and there are no trades or bargains made among voters. These assumptions are then relaxed in order to make the analysis more realistic. Special attention is given to Arrow's work and the idea that people do not always vote according to simple preferences. The author discusses the phenomenon of 'throwing a vote away' or the possibility of an individual voting against their preference if offered something in return. After considering strategic voting, situations where voters engage in trades between one another and the lack of perfect information, Gordon Tullock examines a voter's options and the idea that individuals may rank options in degrees of their preferred outcomes. He also explores the possibility of preferences changing over time, why some issues are put up to vote and others are not, and situations where individuals voting with the same preferences, but in different voting systems, result in different outcomes. On Voting expands present thinking in the Public Choice school and provides a forum for creating new paradigms in the school as well as changing the focus and scope of current studies. It encourages new research by suggesting areas where more work should be done. The book will be of special interest to political scientists as well as those interested in public policy and political economy.

Gordon Tullock, eminent political economist and one of the founders of public choice, offers this new and fascinating look at how governments and externalities are linked. Economists frequently justify government as dealing with externalities, defined as benefits or costs that are generated as the result of an economic activity, but that do not accrue directly to those involved in the activity. In this original work, Gordon Tullock posits that government can also create externalities. In doing so, he looks at governmental activity that internalizes such externalities. Monarchical governments originally introduced, for the benefit of the monarch rather than to eliminate externalities, many standard government activities such as road building, war, and internal policing. Most modern governments spend more money on redistribution than on more traditional government activities. This can be thought of as another effort to reduce externalities, since suffering in the community imposes externalities on the rest of us. Rent seeking, a relatively new field in economics and political science, is closely related to externalities and to the structure of government. An analysis of rent seeking, as well as some suggestions for improving government structure, cap off this fascinating treatise. Economists and political scientists will find this lively and readable book both stimulating and provocative.

This is the second volume of Liberty Fund's "The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock", it is a reprint edition of the ground-breaking economic classic written by two of the world's preeminent economists -- Gordon Tullock and Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan. This book is a unique blend of economics and political science that helped create significant new subfields in each discipline respectively, namely, the public choice school and constitutional political economy. Charles K. Rowley, Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University, points out in his introduction, "The Calculus of Consent" is, by a wide margin, the most widely cited publication of each coauthor and, by general agreement, their most important scientific contribution." The book is divided into four parts, each consisting of several chapters. The introduction by Professor Rowley provides a short overview of the book and identifies key insights that permeated the bounds of economics and political science and created an enduring nexus between the two sciences. Part I establishes the conceptual framework of the book's subject; part II defines the realm of social choice; part III applies the logic developed in part II to describe a range of decision-making rules, most notably, the rule of simple majority; while part IV explores the economics and ethics of democracy.

This is a succinct but comprehensive account of the research programme in rent-seeking launched in 1967 by Gordon Tullock's argument that the availability of monopoly rents through government encourages self-seeking individuals to waste economic resources in competitive bidding for those rents. Rent Seeking reviews each of the contributions for which Professor Tullock is famous, including the basic insight, the cost of transfers, competition for aid, the political market in rent-seeking, efficient rent-seeking, the transitional gains trap, and the cost of rent-seeking, and shows how each of these insights has triggered a burgeoning research literature. He skilfully draws out the dangerous implications of rent-seeking behaviour for private property rights. In characteristic fashion, he returns to his path-breaking work on the economic theory of constitutions in search of novel ways to secure the right to life, liberty and property through a reinforced constitutional republic. Both for the specialist scholar and for the new initiate, this is a great and instructive essay.

Gordon Tullock, eminent political economist and one of the founders of public choice, offers this new and fascinating look at how governments and externalities are linked. Economists frequently justify government as dealing with externalities, defined as benefits or costs that are generated as the result of an economic activity, but that do not accrue directly to those involved in the activity. In this original work, Gordon Tullock posits that government can also create externalities. In doing so, he looks at governmental activity that internalizes such externalities. Monarchical governments originally introduced, for the benefit of the monarch rather than to eliminate externalities, many standard government activities such as road building, war, and internal policing. Most modern governments spend more money on redistribution than on more traditional government activities. This can be thought of as another effort to reduce externalities, since suffering in the community imposes externalities on the rest of us. Rent seeking, a relatively new field in economics and political science, is closely related to externalities and to the structure of government. An analysis of rent seeking, as well as some suggestions for improving government structure, cap off this fascinating treatise. Economists and political scientists will find this lively and readable book both stimulating and provocative.

This book provides a compact history of the gradual development of the US into a great power. Most histories of US foreign policy and development concentrate either on economic growth or on relations with the major powers outside the continental United States. This book, however, emphasizes the longstanding conflict between the US and the American Indians and Mexico, and how the development of the United States as a great power depended primarily on its seizure of large areas of land from their previous inhabitants. Covering Christopher Columbus's famous voyage and US colonial policy up to World War II, the book explains (at times controversially) how the US became a large land area, which proved to be an indispensable tool in its becoming a great power.

The New World of Economics, 6th edition, by Richard McKenzie and Gordon Tullock, represents a revival of a classic text that, when it was first published, changed substantially the way economics would be taught at the introductory and advanced levels of economics for all time. In a very real sense, many contemporary general-audience economics books that seek to apply the "economic way of thinking" to an unbounded array of social issues have grown out of the disciplinary tradition established by earlier editions of The New World of Economics.

This new edition of The New World will expose new generations of economics students to how McKenzie and Tullock have applied in a lucid manner a relatively small number of economic concepts and principles to a cluster of topics that have been in the book from its first release and to a larger number of topics that are new to this edition, with the focus of the new topics on showing students how economic thinking can be applied to business decision making. This edition continues the book's tradition of taking contrarian stances on important economic issues. Economics professors have long reported that The New World is a rare book in that students will read it without being required to do so.

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This book provides an introduction to the positive theory of the budgetary process based on the theory of public choice. Although budgetary institutions are very diverse, both between and within countries, it is possible to identify key elements which are common to all forms of representative government. The author identifies these key elements as the supply of services by public agencies; demand for services by political bodies (cabinet, houses of parliament, etc); negotiations between administrators of agencies and political bodies in an 'internal market'; and decision-making in the form of budgetary and substantive legislation. The book develops a step-by-step model which incorporates all these elements, a model which can be used to explain and predict budgetary decisions in existing institutions, as well as to analyze institutional change, including cost budgeting and various forms of privatization.

This book provides an introduction to the positive theory of the budgetary process based on the theory of public choice. Although budgetary institutions are very diverse, both between and within countries, it is possible to identify key elements which are common to all forms of representative government. The author identifies these key elements as the supply of services by public agencies; demand for services by political bodies (cabinet, houses of parliament, etc); negotiations between administrators of agencies and political bodies in an 'internal market'; and decision-making in the form of budgetary and substantive legislation. The book develops a step-by-step model which incorporates all these elements, a model which can be used to explain and predict budgetary decisions in existing institutions, as well as to analyze institutional change, including cost budgeting and various forms of privatization.