| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
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 text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
About the Author
James M Buchanan is an eminent economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Some reviewers comment that this book has "a conservative bias." Nothing could be further from the truth. This book is written in the great classical-liberal tradition that motivated the American revolution and the drafting of America's 1787 Constitution. Buchanan and Tullock saw themselves as putting into modern economic language the insights and wisdom of James Madison and Co. The book does indeed counsel skepticism of big government, and it is no great fan of unlimited democracy. But the authors come to this position because they understand that even democratic governments can be tyrannical and that a depoliticized society -- governed largely by private property rights -- promises peace, prosperity, and cultural flourishing. Few books on economics are as original and insightful as is The Calculus of Consent -- and it remains as fresh in 1999 as it was when first published in 1962.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Calculus of consent attempts to answer two questions through the locus of an economic decision model; what should be a public decision, and how are these decisions made. The authors answer these questions with a simple but surprisingly powerful model. They discuss all possible actions in terms of costs. Only actions whose costs are minimized through collective provision should be considered to be handled in the public sector. Once a service is determined to be 'cost-minimized' through collective provision, decision rules must be established to determine what proportion of individuals need to agree in order to take public action. These decision rules are based on two types of costs, external costs - or the costs others could impose on an individual's liberty and property if group action is taken, and decision costs - the costs of putting together a decision making coalition. The closer to unanimous approval the lower the risks of high external costs, but the less number of people needed to make a decision, the lower the decision costs. Buchanan and Tullock argue that the proportion of the population's approval needed to make a public decision is at the number of people where the combined decision and external costs are minimized.
This model in itself is robust, however in application, it is clear that Buchanan and Tullock would prefer to error on the side of minimizing what they call threats to 'liberty and property'. Therefore, they forward a strongly conservative agenda in which a small propertied minority can, in this axiom legitimately, block the collectivization of activities which a majority of the population supports.
4 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The authors claim to be 'scientific', 'rational', 'empirical', 'economic' in their assessment of the public decision making process and the role of public choice, but there are clearly several normative value judgements embedded in their framework. In discussing their choice of optimal rules, the authors state that an assumption of their model is that all votes are considered equal, and that if this assumption is not valid then there model will fail to function properly. They continue in stating that this is not a very large constraint as one vote is only one vote whether or not the individual uses it or cares about it or not. However, a hundred pages later, the author's apply their model to representational democracy, an area where a very compelling argument can be made that all votes are not equal, yet they fail to address this fairly basic flaw in their thinking, or how it effects the functioning of their model. The authors also repeatedly give the same importance to the protection of property that they do to the protection of liberty, another normative assumption that influences their model, as they seem to egg the reader on in thinking that greater decision costs can be tolerated if the stake is Liberty and property. This piggy-backing of the property rights of the wealthy on the civil rights of the working class seems pretty disingenuous as the end result of this piggy-backing is that the workers get screwed while the rich are free to get richer. However the weakest aspect of the text from an 'empirical' perspective, is that the authors leave their definition of costs largely undefined. In other words they can, and indeed do, shift the 'contract locus' at will to ensure that a conservative ideology will prevail no matter the given situation. That the authors oppose the enlargement of government is clear, as is the fact they justify this position by advocating what they call personal liberty, which is in reality the protection of the private property of the few. Those may or may not be convincing arguments depending on the readers own perspective (and pocketbook). However, the authors do not claim to be offering a perspective. They are offering a 'calculus of consent', a scientific method by which to divine our political choices free of the nasty constraints of opinion and values. Put it this way, as passionate intellectual forefathers of slippery right wing rationalizations for greed and inequality, these authors score major points, as dispassionate scientists merely describing the way 'things are' they are merely majorly hilarious.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Economics
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management > Management Skills > Decision Making
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Professional Finance
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Reference & Education > Encyclopaedias
- Books > Home & Garden > Antiques & Collectables > Reference & Price Guides > Encyclopaedias
- Books > Reference
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Government & Politics > Political Science & Ideology > Democracy
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
