The book features Professor Tullock s normal array of insights and gems of wisdom throughout. The thesis of the book, to view government through the prism of externalities, is intriguing and makes the book well worth reading. Daniel Sutter, Public Choice The book can be commended for introducing a broad range of thought-provoking ideas in an accessible form. It is an easy read, but does not achieve (nor does it aspire to) the usual standards of academic rigour. It is in places retrospective and in others polemical. But all of it is entertaining. Gareth Myles, Economica The book offers a nice introduction into public choice but still has enough in it to keep more advanced scholars interested. Well worth reading for anyone with even a modicum of interest in economics and/or politics in the most non-partisan sense. Phong Ngo, Economic Record Tullock provides a readable account of public choice economics and the problems with collective decision making. . . Highly recommended. M. Steckbeck, Choice 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.

It is now twenty years since the concept of rent-seeking was first devised by Gordon Tullock, though he was not responsible for coining the phrase itself. His initial insight has burgeoned over two decades into a major research program which has had an impact not only on public choice, but also on the related disciplines of economics, political science, and law and economics. The reach of the insight has proved to be universal, with relevance not just for the democracies, but also, and arguably more important, for all forms of autocracy, irrespective of ideological com plexion. It is not surprising, therefore, that this volume is the third edited publication dedicated specifically to scholarship into rent-seeking behavior. The theory of rent-seeking bridges normative and positive analyses of state action. In its normative dimension, rent-seeking scholarship has expanded, enlivened, in some respects turned on its head, the traditional welfare analyses of such features of modern economics as monopoly, externalities, public goods, and trade protection devices. In its positive dimension, rent-seeking contributions have provided an important analy tical perspective from which to understand and to predict the behavior of politicians, interest groups and bureaucrats, the media and the academy within the political market place. This bridge between normative and positive elements of analysis is invaluable in facilitating an understanding of and evaluating the costs of state activity within a consistent paradigm.

The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.

This state-of-the art collection of papers analyses various aspects of the theory of externalities and public goods. The contributions employ new analytical techniques like the aggregative game approach, and discuss the philosophical underpinnings of the theory. Furthermore, they highlight a range of topical empirical applications including climate policy and counterterrorism. This contributed volume was written in memory of Richard C. Cornes, a pioneer in the theory of externalities and public goods.

As the reader of this book probably already knows, I have devoted a great deal of time to the topic which is, rather unfortunately, named rent seeking. Rent seeking, the use of resources in actually lowering total product although benefiting some minority, is, unfortunately, a major activity of most governments. As a result of this, I have stumbled on a puzzle. The rent-seeking activity found in major societies is immense, but the industry devoted to producing it is nowhere near as immense. In Washington the rent-seeking industry is a very conspicuous part of the landscape. On the other hand, if you consider how much money is being moved by that industry, then it is comparatively small. The first question that this book seeks to answer is: How do we account for the disparity? A second problem is that almost all rent seeking is done in what superficially appears to be an extremely inefficient way. I recently got estimates of the net cost to the public of the farm program and its net benefit to the farmers. The first is many times the second. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that in the long run, today's farmers are better off than they would be if the program had never been implemented. Of course, in any given year, cancelling the program would be quite painful. The first section of this book, then, is devoted to this problem.

Rent Seeking and Human Capital: How the Hunt for Rents Is Changing Our Economic and Political Landscape explores the debates around rent seeking and contextualizes it within the capitalist economy. It is vital that the field of economics does a better job of analyzing and making policy recommendations that reduce the opportunities and rewards for rent seeking, generating returns from the redistribution of wealth rather than wealth creation. This short and provocative book addresses the key questions: Who are the rent seekers? What do they do? Where do they come from? What are the consequences of rent seeking for the broader economy? And, finally: What should policymakers do about them? The chapters examine the existing literature on rent seeking, including looking at the differences between rent seeking and economic rent. The work provides an in-depth look at the case of the impact of rent seeking degrees in the United States, particularly in business and law, and explores potential policy remedies, such as a wealth tax, changes to the rules on financial transactions, and patent law reform. This text provides an important intervention on rent seeking for students and scholars of heterodox economics, political economy, inequality, and anyone interested in the shape of the modern capitalist economy.

We study how between-group wealth and size asymmetries affect aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous analyses on between-group asymmetries, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of the loss in private consumption an individual faces when contributing to this activity. Our main result is that fewer between-group asymmetries do not necessarily imply greater aggregate rent-seeking efforts. The result is at odds with the commonly held notion that the more homogeneous the contestants in a static rent-seeking model, the greater the aggregate rent-seeking efforts.