Thinking about Order without Thought: The Lifetime Contributions of Gordon TullockAuthor(s): Michael MungerSource: Public Choice, Vol. 135, No. 1/2, A Symposium on Tullock's Contributions toSpontaneous Order Studies (Apr., 2008), pp. 79-88Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27698252 .

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Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

DOI 10 1007/sl 1127-008-9283-0

Thinking about order without thought: the lifetime

contributions of Gordon Tullock

Michael Munger

Received 11 September 2007 / Accepted 10 December 2007 / Published online 5 February 2008

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract Philosophers tend to think of them as "conventions "

Economists and some biolo

gists conceive of them as "spontaneous ordeis," a concept discussed at some length in othei

papers in this issue Peihaps the most general conception is "systems" theory, with loots m

many disciplines Many scholars in the sciences have tried to advance then reseaich agen

das by bringing systems theory to the study of human civilization Gordon Tullock, a scholar

who in the future will be recognized as someone well ahead of his own time, tiaveled the

reveise path, in many cases being the first to suggest that the path even exists

Keywords Tullock Spontaneous older Bioeconomics

Let me cleai about my claim a vanety of very significant scholars have contributed far more

than Tullock to the developing science of representing economies as spontaneous oideis

What Tullock has done is to show that the concept of spontaneous order, in its essentially economic meaning of directing esources, optimizing energy use, and minimizing costs, is

more general than has been previously recognized and has broad application in the law, in

bureaucracy, and in both macro- and micro-biological systems Tullock's work is the place to go for those of us who want to make the following argument It is not true that more

economists should read Holland What is true is that more scientists should read Hayek

1 Complex adaptive systems

Since the concept of spontaneous order is descnbed elsewhere in this issue, I will begin by

addressing a related concept, systems theory I should also note that the elations have not

been well developed, particularly from the science side I have very fiequently had the ex

perience of having a complex systems theorist lecture me about the "emergent" piopeities

M Munger (IS)

Department of Political Science and Department of Economics Duke University Durham

NC 27708-0097, USA e mail munger@ duke edu

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80 Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

of gioups, leaving me open-mouthed at their aggressive ignorance of even the most basic

concepts of Austrian economics and Public Choice theory I suppose academics are social

ized to hold aloft round spoked disks and shout, "Look1 The wheel' I have invented it1", but

I still find their parochialism unsettling Human societies are complex adaptive systems A complex system is made up of many

parts, and cannot usefully be analyzed piecemeal Thus, they are nonlinear in a particular

way changes in one area affect processes somewhere else in the system, so complex systems

cannot be studied one part at a time Instead, some understanding is required of the entire

system, and the "comparative statics" of the system may produce unexpected or disastious

results

Complex adaptive systems have an additional feature Such systems are made up of

many elements that interact, just like standard complex systems But in adaptive systems the features of the elements themselves are not fixed, but can evolve according to rules

that are part of the make-up of the system These rules could be experience, or learning, oi

evolutionary selection, or something else entirely Holland (1998, p 10) claims that complex

adaptive systems "exhibit coherence under change, via conditional action and anticipation, and they do so without central direction" (Holland 1998 38-39)

The problem is that "coherence" is not the same as efficiency, or equity, or any other de

sirable property Evolution in nature pioduces "coherence under change "

One of the most

coherent, and persistent, patterns of matter are the insects called "cockroaches "

No one

would claim they are good, or desirable, or admirable They just aie The same thing might well be said about the outcomes of public choice processes It is perfectly true that institu

tional structures of domination and control may be persistent features of political economies

But that tells us nothing about whether these features are desirable

The Ottoman Empire lasted for more than 600 years, and though stable and elatively

peaceful it anested growth in the economies, and repressed progress in the sciences, of a

dozen nations Stability and coherence may not be good On the other hand, Enron Coi

poration exhibited the consequences, potential in many complex systems, of amplifying feedback That's no better, and possibly worse

The point is that there are many kinds of persistent areangements of human societies

that have nothing to do with markets They may last a long time, but have bad normative

properties And there may be very violent short-run events that seem to be very much mar

ket processes, and these also have very bad normative pioperties We are led to pose two

questions that, while hardly new, will require our attention The first is under what circum

stances will market processes have good (i e , Pareto superior) normative features9 And the

second is are these processes, not just the outcomes but the results themselves, mimicked

by "societies" other than human ones7

It is emarkable that Tullock, as early as 1971 in his article "The Coal Tit as a Careful

Shopper," was skipping ahead to the second question Remember, this was an era where the

answers to the first question (when are markets good7) was often "Never'" or "Under heavy

regulation "But Tullock was a man ahead of his time

I came across a summaiy of the work of J Gibb on the consumption of the eucosmid

moth Ernarmorma conicolana by coal tits which contains a figure which looks

surprisingly like a standard economic demand and supply diagram A little exami

nation indicated that it was not a true demand and supply curve, but nevertheless that

economic principles do apply quite readily Indeed, it can be said that the coal tits

are maximizing the return to their labor in searching out food supplies We need not,

of course, argue that the coal tits have thought the matter out in the same may that

human beings would Presumably, they have inherited an efficient pattern of behavior

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Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88 81

resulting from natural selection which would eliminate inefficient heritable behavior

patterns (Tullock 1971, p 77)

Tullock notes that the analogy he makes to comparison shopping based on price as a mech

anism for minimizing energy expenditure in finding and eating moths may appear to be

"bizarre," but he argues convincingly for the value of the theory as a means of making

predictions And, of course, he is quite right The advantage of the essentially economic

approach to investigating biological phenomena is clear One avoids the "'just so' story"

problem It is always possible to justify, ex post, why it must be efficient for a monkeye to

have a tail, or for flying squirrels to be able to fly, or for hedgehogs not to be able to fly

Tullock's approach to bioeconomics requires one of two things, either (1) the demon

stration that there exists no feasible alternative means of rearranging effort to reduce cost or

increasing fitness, or (2) the discovery that there is an unfilled environmental or behavioral

niche The second of these is particularly interesting, in that it provides something close to

a telos or predicted direction of movement on the fitness landscape

This conception of survival value is reflected in some of Tullock's later work on bioeco

nomics in a way that comes quite close to an argument about group selection In a relatively

recent article, Tullock (2002) uses an anecdote to illustrate that we are not always, every

where, egoistically self-mterested (He appears to believe that he is a limiting case if there

are instances where he, Gordon Tullock, was not entirely self-interested, there must be many

instances where less economystic people behave this way also )

I landed in Normandy on D plus 7 as a rifle company replacement That this was ex

tremely dangerous, I knew, although I cannot say I realized how dangerous it would

have been Fortunately, I ended up in a headquarters company and ran relatively little

risk At the time I landed, however, I had no idea that I would find the war primarily

boring and not particularly dangerous I cannot recall any strong feeling that all this

was unjust or that I should do anything about it except go forward and fire my rifle

My colleagues in the replacement package with which I landed seemed to have much

the same attitude In my own case, I wasn't even enthusiastic about the war I had read

Schumpeter and thought the war was three sided I suspected that the end would leave

Russia without any European country to hold them in check The fact that American

soldiers died to give Warsaw to the Russians did not in any way surprise me Never

theless I had no particular doubts about going forward and perhaps being killed

I was clearly not selfishly maximizing (Tullock 2002, p 99)

2 Market processes as group selection: which spontaneous order?

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously talked about the problem of coordination

It is easy to object, when one reads this excerpt, that the process of production and purchase

of goods is not really an example of spontaneous order, or what Holland calls "emergence," at all The reason is that thousands of individual humans each will some part of this chain of

causation, and act on it Emergence cannot involve volition '

But that's wrong First, even if someone wills each step, it does not follow that the ag

gregate result is coherent, or even that the intention of the specific individual is actually

1 As Adam Ferguson (1966) put it, "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design "

Hayek (1978) echoes this theme, in his "Of Human Action, But Not of Human Design" Thanks to Peter

Boettke for pointing out the parallel

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82 Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

achieved by the action Second, even if the intended proximate consequences are achieved,

at each level, there need not be any intentionality causing the ultimate outcome Somehow,

the actions have to add up, to make sense in an impossibly complex setting where informa

tion is scattered and expensive Here's Smith's quote

Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civi

lized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose

industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this ac

commodation, exceeds all computation The woollen coat, for example, which covers

the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint

labour of a great multitude of workmen The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the

wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the

dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even

this homely pioduction How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been

employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who

often live in a very distant pait of the country' how much commerce and navigation

in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have

been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer,

which often come from the remotest corners of the world' What a variety of labour

too is necessary in order to pioduce the tools of the meanest of those workmen' To say

nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller,

or even the loom of the weavei, let us consider only what a variety of labour is req

uisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd

clips the wool The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller

of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the

brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wnght, the

forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in ordei to produce them

Hundreds of people, thousands actually, play a role in providing some part of nearly

every article of clothing, or office supplies, or household items, you own Yet none of them

have met you They might be nice people, or not nice people, personally But they likely

don't caie about you and your welfare, except in the most abstract sense Nonetheless, they

have worked to piovide you with food, goods, and shelter, and have done it at a lower price

than any other system imaginable

Let's be a little more careful, and give a definition A market is a collection of institutions

that reduces transactions costs and expands the volume of uncoerced impeisonal exchange

In impel sonal exchange, trades require only the information contained in product and price

Sellers or buyers, as individuals, are irrelevant and essentially invisible There is no easy

way of exercising preferences that we might think of as socially positive (i e , buying from

producers we like) or negative (discriminating against some group based on prejudice) No

one notices what we buy, or what we do, in the impersonal exchange space

But then if all the feedback mechanisms are atomistic, and impersonal, aie there mech

anisms for group selection within market processes7 This is, after all, the most important,

and most controversial, conclusion in the later work of Hayek How do markets select for

groups, or policies, or moral systems7

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Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88 83

3 The exchange origins of markets

Adam Smith famously recognized that the motoi of capitalist systems is division of labor,

and the fuel that drives this motor is self-interest Furthermore, the motor itself is not the

product of design or direction

This division of labour, norn which so many advantages aie derived, is not ongmally

the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence

to which it gives occasion It is the necessary, though veiy slow and giadual, conse

quence of a certain piopensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive

utility, the piopensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing foi anothei Smith Bk I,

Chapter 2, http //www econhb oig/hbrary/Smith/smWN html

Early exchange was always personal, in the sense that the tiadeis knew each othei Ex

change of this sort has two origins differences in tastes, and diffeienees in endowments 7

If I have one apple and one banana, and you have one apple and one banana, and we

each like fruit salad well, I could offer you my banana for y oui banana, but you would

think I was crazy, or ti ymg to hide the bruised spot But if I have two apples, and you have

two bananas, and we both like fruit salad, then we have good easons to "tiuck, barter, and

exchange "

If I ti ade you one apple for one banana, the total amount of resouices available

is the same (still two apples, two bananas) Yet our exchange improves both our lots, as

resources go to higher valued uses Likewise, if each of us has one apple and one banana,

but I really prefer bananas and you really prefer apples, then again we exchange Same total

resources, but universal improvement in welfare, just from allowing exchange

Buchanan and Tullock note this feature of collective choice in markets quite clearly

Any theory of collective choice must attempt to explain oi to descube the means

through which conflicting interests aie reconciled In a genuine sense, economic the

ory is also a theory of collective choice, and, as such, provides us with an explanation of how sepaiate individual interests are econciled through the mechanism of trade

or exchange Indeed, when individual interests are assumed to be identical, the main

body of economic theory vanishes If all men weie equal in inteiest and in endow

ment, natural oi artificial, there would be no organized economic activity to explain Each man would be a Ciusoe Economic theory thus explains why men co-opeiate

through trade They do so because they aie different (Buchanan and Tullock 1962,

P 2)

A famous example of this "equal endowments, different preferences" ongin of a market

is Radford's (1945) description of a German PO W camp Allied piisoners got Red Cross

parcels, once per month (during good times), and the parcels contained identical quantities

of cigarettes, tinned beef, molasses, carrots, and othei delights And as soon as the packets

arrived, ti ade and exchange began, redirecting each commodity toward a higher value use

We can't know if things end up at their highest-valued use, because transactions cost (finding

trading partners, negotiating) may prevent some exchanges, but we know that every trade

that does take place makes at least those two people better off

-The evolution of this kind of exchange, and the expansion into personal or family production, is summa

nzed in a very interesting way by Ben-Porath (1980) The puzzle of the move from personal to impersonal

exchange, and the institutional path to accomplishing it, have most recently occupied North (2005) and Greil

(2006), who have made remarkable progress on this question Once again, Tullock was a man ahead of his

time

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84 Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

In the prison camp, several things worked toward making this set of exchanges a real

market First, commodities were uniform an unopened can of carrots, or beef, or molasses,

is of known quantity and quality Second, these exchanges were routine and continuous, so

it came to be understood that although I might value carrots very highly, most people didn't,

and so the "price" of carrots (in terms of trade goods required in exchange) was quite low

No one could say, "Go sell your carrots to Lance Corporal Rutten, he'll pay more'"

Finally, institutions for facilitating exchange sprang up, not because of any central order

but rather because it reduced the cost of trades A bulletin board first used for other purposes was converted to a forum for bids and offers of exchanges A cigarette "currency" came to

be used, to get around the problem of bilateral barter If I want to sell beef, but you have

only carrots, which I don't like, we can't trade But if I can take cigarettes, even if I don't

smoke, knowing that cigarettes represent abstract command over all other commodities,

then we can trade quickly and cheaply At one point, an actual scrip, or paper currency was

created, backed by tins of beef, in an effort to reduce problems with fluctuations of cigarette

currency Cigarettes had the obvious problem that they were also a sought-after commodity, and periods where packets were delayed caused terrible deflation in the camp economy

So, at some points in Radford's account, we have a fully developed market I could

purchase, regardless of where I was in camp, indistinguishable cans of products, at the same

price, without reference to the personality or character of the seller I didn't even need to

know the person to be confident that the transaction would make me better off

Markets of larger geographic size, with fully elaborated production characterized by divi

sion of labor, have certain effects on social relations Division of labor forces most economic

activity to be impersonal, because of the physical size and enormous quantity of resources at

work in the market As productivity increases place firms under additional competitive pres

sures, and as exchange becomes more impersonal, discrimination in hiring and employment become too expensive to practice Firms lack the market power to practice discrimination,

and lack the information to target discrimination at individuals because they lack specific information about workers or consumers

On the other hand, firms are unable to pay high wages, or offer extended benefits like

pregnancy leaves, or holidays Without direction and regulation of the market, division of

labor drives health, wage, benefit, and safety policies toward convergence American firms

cannot afford to give women pregnancy leave in sock factories, because then the socks could

be made even more cheaply abroad, where these policies do not exist More starkly, a mem

ber of Congress who votes for required maternity leaves in Washington, DC is putting people out of business in Alabama, because someone in China figured out a way to divide the pro

duction process for socks into more steps than ever before None of them will ever meet, but

they affect each other profoundly The point is that there are many, very many, possible different states of the world econ

omy And we face two fundamental problems, problems that have not been solved, regarding them First, we as citizens of different countries have preferences over those states, and those

preferences may be strikingly different Given the diversity of goals and beliefs about the

good, what possible means of reconciliation can be used7 What institution can be relied to

produce coordinate, but undirected, efforts by hundreds of millions of people7

Second, even if we could somehow agree on a goal, how could we gain an understanding of the mapping from policies into outcomes7 Why would we think that action by government

makes things better, rather than worse7 And why would we expect elected officials to want

to make things better7

The first problem, differences m preferences and in fundamental moral norms, is one of

the most difficult theoretical nuts to crack in all the social sciences

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Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88 85

To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted

not from human design or intention but spontaneously, it arose from unintention

ally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which

men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity

they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an

evolutionary selection-the comparative increase of population and wealth-of those

groups that happened to follow them (FA Hayek, 1988, p 6, emphasis original)

So, one could argue that the survival of a cultural or moral system is subject to a process

of natural selection, no less than is true in natural systems of evolution such as those that

made the coal tit a "careful shopper" The problem with Tullock's analogy of "coal tit as

careful shopper" understood in Hayekian terms, is not intuitive In fact, it's astonishing

The problem in analyzing macro-level systems is not our assumption that birds think The

problem is our assumption that humans thinW Of course, we do think, all the time, but

we think about our selves and our own actions That has relatively little to do with the

effects of choosing one moral code or social system over another Hayek's "comparative

increase of population and wealth" may have nothing to do with any action that anticipates

this outcome Nonetheless, a wide variety of phenomena in human societies are socially

selected, by a process every bit as cutthroat as nature, red in tooth and claw

Let's pursue this analogy for a moment Suppose we observe a canine mammal, per

haps a wolf, or a coyote What inference about origin and survival would we draw7 This

morphology (adapted for the environment) and behavior (selected by the censoring of other

behaviors through starvation or failure to mate) is sufficiently high on a scale of fitness to

survive

But suppose that now we see a dachshund, does anything like this reasoning apply7

What caused this outrage, this offense to dog-shape7 Only if God had a truly perverse sense

of humor could dachshunds be explained by supernatural design And dachshunds could not

possibly survive, on their own, if they had to compete as predators with wolves and coy

otes It is easy to dismiss the example, of course obviously human direction and control of

breeding brought us wiener dogs But the reason we like wiener dogs (or, enough humans

like them to make them a distinct and recognizable breed) has to do with a much softer

selection mechanism socially constructed taste, or culture Which is better, a wiener dog or

a Chihuahua7 They don't compete for food, but their relative proportions in the dog popula tion very much reflect a competition for discretionary income some people buy dachshund

puppies, and others buy Chihuahuas

So, wolves and coyotes survive because they exhibit one kind of fitness they can out

compete other predators for resources, in part because of their instinctual pack behaviors

Dachshunds and Chihuahuas survive because they exhibit another kind of fitness humans

from some societies differentially intentionally select dachshunds and Chihuahuas as pets

One kind of selection (the natural kind) is Darwinian, the other kind of selection (the cul

tural kind) is Lamarckian 3 Dog owners prefer, as a matter of conscious intention, dogs with

outlandishly short legs And so, in Lamarckian terms, the dachshund "wants" to have short

legs, and so dachshund legs get shorter

3 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique (1809) contrasted with Charles Darwin's Origin of Species

(1859) I had believed that this distinction in discussing culture was original to me, but in fact it appears verbatim in Caldwell's discussion of Hayek's thought in "The Emergence of Hayek's Ideas on Cultural Evo

lution," p 6 I am indebted to Caldwell for the Hayek citation on genetic evolution, as well as most of the

other Hayek references in the remainder of the chapter

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86 Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

There is an even larger stage on which survival is important the survival of the entire

society, or culture My claim is that an emergent process, or spontaneous order of a rather

different kind, is likewise observable in the previous step the formation of preferences The key difference is the absence of any feedback mechanism by which the merits of the

emergent order might be judged, or subjected to modification Douglass North makes this

point quite forcefully

Efficient markets are created in the real world when competition is strong enough via

arbitrage and efficient information feedback to approximate the Coase zero transac

tion cost conditions and the parties can realize the gains from trade inherent in the

neo-classical argument

But the informational and institutional requirements necessary to achieve such effi

cient markets are stringent Players must not only have objectives but know the cor

rect way to achieve them But how do the players know the correct way to achieve

their objectives7 The instrumental rationality answer is that even though the actors

may initially have diverse and erroneous models, the informational feedback process and aibitragmg actors will correct initially incorrect models, punish deviant behavior

and lead surviving players to correct models (North 1990)

Elsewhere, North (1994) also makes it clear why the absence of coherent feedback is

important, and why societies might have difficulty changing their level of economic perfor mance He distinguishes two levels of analysis institutions and organizations Institutions

are the humanly devised rules of the game, formal (constitutions and laws) or informal

(norms, moral systems, manners), but they tend to be long-lived and not easily evaluated,

because there is no specific feedback metric for comparison Organizations are the optimiz

ing responses to the set of incentives and constraints created by institutions

The reason the distinction is important for North is that organizations are always optimal, in the sense that they maximize the advantage of those who own or control the organization

But transactions cost, both of writing complete contracts and of making changes in institu

tions, even Pareto-supenor changes, may lock organizations into institutional settings that

are in some larger some sense Pareto inferior More simply, there may exist alternative rule

arrangements that have the potential, through feasible compensation arrangements, to make

literally all the citizens in the society better off Yet these rules are not selected and the

existing, inferior rule set is maintained

Our point, of course, is that these sorts of "evolutionary" changes could not be more

different from the changes that result from mutation coupled with natural selection Hayek

developed this insight in some very profound ways His claims are, paradoxically, both

undei-recognized and controversial, because he was working on adaptive complex systems,

though he didn't recognize it Consider

The stiuctuies formed by traditional human practices are neither natuial in the sense

of being genetically determined, nor artificial in the sense of being the pioduct of in

telligent design, but the result of a process of winnowing and sifting, directed by the

differential advantages gamed by groups from practices adopted for some unknown

and perhaps purely accidental reasons Acquired cultural ti aits may affect phys

iological evolution-as is obvious in the case of language its rudimentary appear ance undoubtedly made the physical capacity of clear aiticulation a great advantage,

favouring genetic selection of a suitable speech apparatus

Nearly all writings on this topic stress that what we call cultuial evolution took place

during the last 1 per cent of the time during which Homo sapiens existed With re

spect to what we mean by cultural evolution in a nanower sense, that is, the fast and

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Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88 87

accelerating development of civilization, this is true enough Since it differs from ge

netic evolution by relying on the transmission of acquired properties, it is very fast,

and once it dominates, it swamps genetic evolution But this does not justify the mis

conception that it was the developed mind which in turn directed cultural evolution

mind and culture developed concurrently and not successively It is this cul

tural evolution which man alone has undergone that now distinguishes him from the

other animals To understand this development we must completely discard the

conception that man was able to develop culture because he was endowed with reason

(Hayek 1979, pp 155-156)

Interestingly, Hayek also anticipates the North objection about lack of feedback, and this

becomes one of the most interesting areas of Hayek's thought (as Caldwell, 2002a, 2002b

also argues) On the one hand, Hayek argues for something very close to group selection,

with "better" moral systems and social conventions outcompeting inferior ones On the other

hand, he recognizes that there is no telos, no intentionality or infallible human agency in ef

fecting cultural change In fact, in The Constitution of Liberty he clearly makes both points,

but there is a tension between them that only a close reading can resolve Society's perfor mance is a consequence of its ethical and moral practices

It is in the pursuit of man's aims of the moment that all the devices of civilization have

to prove themselves, the ineffective will be discarded and the effective retained But

there is more to it than the fact that new ends constantly arise with the satisfaction of

old needs and with the appearance of new opportunities Which individuals and which

groups succeed and continue to exist depends as much on the goals that they pursue,

the values that govern their action, as on the tools and capacities at their command

Whether a group will prosper or be extinguished depends as much on the ethical code

it obeys, or the ideals of beauty or well-being that guide it, as on the degree to which

it has learned or not learned to satisfy its material needs

And again, from Hayek (1988) "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men

how little they really know about what they imagine they can design "

4 Conclusion

I want to emphasize the nature of the contributions that I have claimed that Tullock has

made On its face, much of his work has led scientists and scholars in other disciplines to

recognize connections to economic reasoning that had until now escaped them This is an

important contilbution, and on its own would merit Tullock's strong candidacy for the Atlas

FSSO Award But there is rather more to be said, and I have tried in a simple way to say it in this essay

The real insight in use of survival as the metaphor foi selection in evolutional y processes is

not that we don't need to assume that animals think It is that we don't need to assume that

human beings think In fact, Hayek's real contribution is the notion that humans could not

have thought of market processes in all then complexity and precision (though he admits

that humans would be very proud of the achievement if they had thought of it') Tullock

has questioned whether the contributions of human thought and direction, in economics, in

bureaucracy, in the law, and in the direction of the scientific enterprise, really have anything at all to do with our success and prosperity

Those of us who know and love Gordon have to smile, when we think of his delight in

such a perverse conclusion The irony that will characterize Tullock's contribution can be

4y Springer

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88 Public Choice (2008) 135 79-88

simply stated It took a human mind of surpassing sharpness and breadth to realize that, by

and large, the individual contributions of the human mind have little to do with the pace or

direction of human progress

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4 Springer

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