Tullock's collaboration with Buchanan produced The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, which quickly became a seminal work in the new field of public choice. He later joined Buchanan as a faculty colleague at Virginia. For four years Buchanan and Tullock continued their research program, even founding a new journal for their field, first called Papers in Non-Market Economics and eventually titled Public Choice, where they invited articles applying economic theory to all sorts of non-market phenomena, especially in the realm of government and politics. Despite the success of the book and the journal, disagreements with the UVA administration eventually led Tullock to leave. In 1967, Tullock identified many of the concepts of what came to be known as rent-seeking in a seminal paper. Tullock moved to Virginia Polytechnical Institute in 1968 and was joined by Buchanan a year later. There they continued the Public Choice Society and the journal, of which Tullock remained editor until 1990. At VPI, Tullock wrote a number of influential articles and books, including Private Wants, Public Means, The Logic of the Law, The Social Dilemma, and The Vote Motive. In 1983, Tullock and the Center for Study of Public Choice moved to George Mason University, at the time a relatively unknown school in Fairfax, Virginia. Tullock taught at GMU from 1983–1987 and at the University of Arizona from 1987–1999. He continued to publish widely, including "The Economics of Wealth and Poverty", Autocracy, Rent Seeking, The Economics of Non-Human Societies and On Voting: A Public Choice Approach. In 1999 he returned to George Mason as a professor of law and economics, where he retired in 2008.
Rent seeking
Tullock developed a theory referred to as rent-seeking. Rent seeking, according to public choice theory, is securing profits through the political process rather than the market process of exchange. An example of rent seeking is when a firm, union, or special-interest group lobbies political actors to influence legislation in a beneficial manner. This can lead to moral hazard when politicians make policy decisions based on the lobby instead of the efficiency of the policy. Tullock also formulated and considered the Tullock paradox, namely, the paradox of why rent-seeking is so cheap.
Tullock's spike
The name "Tullock's spike" refers to a thought experiment in which Tullock suggested that if governments were serious about reducing road casualties, they should mandate that a sharp spike be installed in the center of each car's steering wheel, to increase the probability that an accident would be fatal to the driver. Tullock's idea was that the normal process of risk compensation would then lead to safer driving by the affected drivers, thereby actually reducing driving fatalities.
His book, The Politics of Bureaucracy, has been criticized for overlooking a substantial body of literature. A number of authors have criticized Tullock and the public choice tradition as being too simplistic in its explanation of political behavior.
