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Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, by Gordon Tullock, Arthur Seldon, and Gordon L. Brady. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002, 193 pp., $9.95.
Government's Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Security, by Paul C. Light. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002, 189 pp., $19.95.
Policy scholars of whatever ideological stripe should ponder their luck to work in a time and place so hospitable to intellectual heterodoxy. Consider: Two respectable Washington think tanks, based mere blocks apart on Massachusetts Avenue, almost simultaneously issued books entitled, respectively, Government Failure, and Government's Greatest Achievements. The two books are even more different than one might infer from their titles and provenance. Government Failure is relentlessly conceptual, with the odd empirical reference thrown in here and there. Government's Greatest Achievements is cheerfully atheoretical, layering thumbnail case studies with roughand-ready empiricism beneath only the thinnest veneer of abstraction. Each has its virtues and defects. Reading them together, despite some risk of mental whiplash, provides grist for reflection on the vitality, dynamics, and purpose of the public realm.
Gordon Tullock is a grand old man of the "Public Choice" school, and his is the guiding intelligence of Government Failure. Seldon is a like-minded British contemporary of Tullock's, while Brady is a younger American acolyte. (A forthcoming Brady paper extols the particular merits of those Tullock articles that publishers rejected.) Tullock is a thinker who matters. In the mid-1960s, against the cresting tide of enthusiasm for government solutions, he founded the influential journal Public Choice, which he continues to edit. With his Nobel-laureate comrade James M. Buchanan he wrote The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962), a book that sells briskly and shapes minds after more than 40 years.
It would be an overstatement, perhaps, to characterize this new book as "Public Choice for Dummies," but this gives a good sense of its purpose and style. The best part of the book-Tullock's 75-page overview-offers an accessible summary of Public Choice logic and its application to selected broad domains such as "Bureaucracy" and "Federalism." Scrubbed of the methodological embellishment of which most Public Choice scholars are so enamored, the conceptual architecture is rendered admirably straightforward. This is a useful service for both enthusiasts and skeptics, revealing that Public Choice is less a...