Mancur Lloyd Olson (Rhodes 1954)
North Dakota State University. Rhodes Scholar, University College, University of Oxford. Harvard.
The Logic of Collective Action was an instant hit. Before Olson, political scientists had assumed that the interplay of pressure groups was the essence of democracy. Some got their way, others didn’t. Well, that showed that the first had more members than the second, or members who cared more deeply, or both. So it was right and proper that they should get their way. This “pluralism” both described and celebrated lobbying in a democracy.[2]
Olson pointed out the fatal flaw in this complacent argument. Some lobbies (e.g. consumers) are dispersed. Others (e.g. producers) are concentrated. All consumers have a common interest in keeping down the price of cars (or food, or textiles). Domestic producers have a common interest in keeping it up. There are more consumers than producers. So governments never artificially raise car (etc) prices - right? Wrong. They do, all over the developed world.[2]
As an individual consumer, it is rational for me to contribute time or money to the Consumers’ Association if and only if my contribution makes the difference between the consumer lobby’s success and failure. It is infinitesimally unlikely that it does. Therefore, in the term popularised by Olson, I probably free-ride.[2]
As an individual car-maker, it makes a great deal of sense for me to join the trade association and lobby for protection and tax breaks. These privileges are worth hundreds of millions of dollars to me, many times more than the comparatively trivial cost of lobbying. So I do not free- ride.[2]
This might seem tritely obvious now. But that is only because Mancur Olson made it so. His analysis of lobbying subverts Left and Right. It subverts the Left by arguing that the crucial distinction is between consumers and producers, rather than between capitalists and proletarians. But it subverts the Right by showing that capitalists will have systematically more efficient lobbies than proletarians because there are fewer of them, and therefore that Marx was right about the balance of power between capital and labour.[2]
Olson’s second big book, The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982), argued that political stability was bad news for growth. Stable democracies suffered from “institutional sclerosis” as their lobbies enforced inefficient redistribution. The German and Japanese economic miracles occurred, not because they could build afresh on ruined cities, but because they could build afresh on ruined institutions and design more inclusive, and hence more efficient, lobbying systems.[2]….
Olson’s recent ideas have not been accepted as universally as those from The Logic of Collective Action, but they have been hugely influential on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the many and various Western bodies that have tried to set the post-Communist economies to rights. They emanated from this most humble, personally self-effacing, anglophile, delightful, modest economist.[2]
1970 to 1998? - Professor of Economics at University of Maryland.[2]
1969 - Professor of Economics to the sprawling and unfashionable College Park campus of University of Maryland.[2] He resisted all offers to move to more glamorous institutions and remained at College Park for the rest of his life.[2]
1967 to 1969 - Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to John W. Gardner and Wilbur J. Cohen by President Lyndon B. Johnson.[2]
Joined Economics Department at Princeton.[2]
1965 - Harvard University.[2]
1963 - PhD, Economics, Harvard University.[2]
1954 - Rhodes Scholar, University College, University of Oxford.[2]
Died 19 Feb 1998, from Not Known. Age 66.
[2] - www.independent.co.uk - Obituary - Mancur Lloyd Olson (Rhodes 1954)
[3] - Find a Grave.com - Mancur Lloyd Olson (Rhodes 1954)
Comments