Edward Stringham, ed., Anarchy, State and Public Choice

Abstract

Is anarchy a viable, desirable form of organization of society? Anarchy intrigues economists as the limit of the process of privatization—can all government’s functions be turned over to market forces? In the early 1970s, Winston Bush led an exploration of anarchy at the Public Choice Center at Virginia Tech. The new book Anarchy, State and Public Choice, edited by Edward Stringham, brings together some of the old school public choice contributions with contemporary research. The book consists of seven papers reprinted from Gordon Tullock’s edited volumes, Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy and Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, along with six modern responses and four original retrospective/prospective papers. The reprinting of some of the earlier papers should provide new life into this research and the paired contemporary papers illustrate that significant progress has been made in the intervening decades. A paper by Winston Bush from Explorations on equilibrium in an anarchy model and a response by Jason Osborne lead off the volume. Bush’s paper is a now familiar description of the equilibrium in an anarchy economy, emphasizing the natural distribution of income resulting from comparative advantage in predation. Osborne offers an intriguing two part response. The first examines the impact of a contract enforcer on relative well-being in the Bush anarchy economy, while the second considers the implications of research on contingent cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma. Recent research emphasizes the benefits of contingent cooperation and how well-developed abilities to detect cheating allow the prisoner’s dilemma to be overcome without third party enforcement, increasing the potential for a workable anarchy. The next two papers from Explorations by Gordon Tullock and J. Patrick Gunning, and the contemporary responses by Christopher Coyne and Peter Leeson, deal with contract enforcement. Tullock and Gunning argue that government must enforce contracts, particularly deals over time or when one party has a lot at stake. The replies by Coyne and Leeson draw