Public choice as an academic enterprise: Charlottesville, Blacksburg, and Fairfax retrospectively viewed

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2004  by Richard E. Wagner

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The purpose of this paper is to explore the success of public choice as an academic enterprise, and to do so by paying particular attention to whatever insights might have resulted from my having been present at all three locations: Charlottesville, Blacksburg, and Fairfax. I am one of only two people (Robert D. Tollison being the other) who went through the graduate program at the University of Virginia (1963-1966), and who was a faculty member at both VPI (1973-1979) and George Mason University (since 1988). Organizationally speaking, public choice was founded at the University of Virginia, but it was at VPI where public choice experienced its prime years of maturity and achieved a major presence on the intellectual radar screen. While the Nobel Prize was awarded to James M. Buchanan after he had moved to George Mason, it would surely have come all the same had he remained in Blacksburg.

I think it is reasonable to summarize the relative contributions of Charlottesville, Blacksburg, and Fairfax to the value of the public choice enterprise by a simple though conjectural statistic, the rate of return on intellectual capital. Such a statistic, if properly constructed, would surely show abnormally high rates of return during the Charlottesville and Blacksburg years, while showing, perhaps, but normal rates of return in Fairfax. In any case, I take this conjectured pattern of intellectual returns as comprising the basic stylized facts with which I work. At the one extreme, this pattern could be judged as wholly idiosyncratic, due exclusively to the particular qualities of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, both individually and through their interaction. In this case, the intellectual success of public choice would have been a singular event and it would offer no institutional or organizational lessons. At the other extreme, the particularly high rate of return in Charlottesville and Blacksburg, as well as subsequent stasis in Fairfax, would reside in particular organizational features that differ across the three settings. It is only to the extent that this alternative option has explanatory power that the success of public choice offers lessons for future conduct. (1)

I do not think anyone can doubt that idiosyncrasy is by far the major part of the explanation for the success of the public choice enterprise. I would put it at somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of the story. It is not, though, the full story. Institutional arrangements and organizational forms have been important to that success, though even those arrangements and forms have also borne the imprint of Buchanan and Tullock. This is surely as it should and must be. The ability to achieve intellectual influence must start with some ideas that have the capacity to intrigue other scholars. Without the presence of that capacity, all the organizational and institutional tinkering in the world will accomplish nothing but facades and illusions of scholarship. My attention here is centered on the institutional and organizational features and not on the bodies of work of Buchanan and Tullock, nor on their personal characteristics. Many items have been written about these men and their work, and I have done so myself. (2) In this paper I try to keep their ideas and characteristics in the background, to focus on the institutional and organizational environments within which public choice originated and matured.

I start with some general remarks about the promotion of research programs and follow this with individual discussions regarding Charlottesville, Blacksburg, and Fairfax. It is in those individual discussions that I seek to explore and distinguish the idiosyncratic sources of success from the institutional and organizational. Before starting, it might be good to offer some brief, though perhaps obvious, remarks of disclosure or disclaimer. While these remarks are based on my good deal of interest in both the economics of organizations and institutions and in the history of economics, they nonetheless revolve around more than 30 years of personal experiences and reflections. During this period the observer has gone from being a young man to a middle-aged grandfather. This transition brings well-noted changes of vision and orientation that can sometimes create difficulty in distinguishing between the universal and the particular when it comes to reflecting upon the events and circumstances that form part of one's own history.

I

Prefatory Notes on the Historiography of Economics

THERE IS SURELY MUCH ROOM FOR an economics of producing economics. (3) Histories of economic thought are typically written as a succession of great men and their works. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The history of economics does present us with a number of giants, two of whom we honor with this conference. Giants provide their inspired articulations, but a good deal of the subsequent theoretical development is a spontaneously generated order, where the order itself takes the form of a network of findings, propositions, and citations generated through interactions among scholars. The production of economic knowledge is a cooperative endeavor among economists, secured through open competition. (4)