Public Choice and Deviance

Abstract

Professor McKenzie, in his interesting and insightful paper, puts forth hypothesis that plays a central role in development of new fields and paradigms of inquiry, and that success of deviants is a function of existence of certain underlying conditions--including strong, standard-setting personalities; physical and intellectual remoteness of deviant scholarly activity; early development of a critical mass of like-minded scholars; having a base in a program that is not wedded to dominant intellectual paradigm; adoption of a bunker mentality; cultivation of graduate students and visiting scholars who will spread gospel upon their departure; and establishment of professional organizations and publication outlets. There are few things to quibble with in Professor McKenzie's analysis, but let me see if I can expand scope of discussion a bit. One immediate issue raised by Professor McKenzie's analysis is that of what constitutes deviance. Professor McKenzie defines term as the search for carefully crafted ideas that initially seem absurd. Let us step back a bit and note that, first of all, deviance requires orthodoxy--a ruling paradigm. As such, sort of deviance embodied in public choice could not have existed in pre-World War II era, when economics was an incredibly pluralistic discipline and there was no dominant paradigm (or, in Professor McKenzie's mountain-climbing terminology, no accepted peak). Public choice would have flourished during this era, but deviance characteristics about which Professor McKenzie spoke would not have been necessary for its success. Indeed, one will find more than a bit of public-choice-type analysis (albeit of a rather different nature) in work of early institutionalists. Public choice certainly would have established itself in this earlier period--but it would also have been more diverse. A second issue, really a question, is whether public choice actually constituted or constitutes deviance at all, and, if so, to what extent. To get at this, we need to think about what public choice really was and is. Two aspects are rather clear: 1. Filling void in existing economics literature by examining how government that carries out economic policy actually operates (what I would argue was motivating force behind Jim Buchanan's interest in public choice); 2. An early branch of economic imperialism, wherein lens of homo economicus is trained on political process (which I would argue was motivating force behind Gordon Tullock's interest in public choice). In first of these senses, one could certainly argue that public choice was deviant, in that it rejected accepted Pigovian line of taking government as given and assuming that it could smoothly and efficiently correct all manner of supposed market failures. What public choice analysis showed, in a nutshell, was that market failure had its complement in government failure, and that cure for market failure could well be worse than disease. But one could argue that, in second of these senses, public choice (within economics at least) was not really deviant at all, in that it, following Lionel Robbins's (1932) dictum, applied standard tools of economic analysis to situations of choice in presence of scarcity--a standard extension of neoclassical paradigm. Added to this was fact that Jim Buchanan was already an established scholar within orthodox public finance--although Gordon Tullock was, and still continues to be, a maverick. It could be argued that Buchanan's orthodoxy, so to speak, provided an entree and a degree of legitimacy that might not otherwise have been present--evidenced in access of public choice scholarship to AEA sessions, National Science Foundation funding, and so on during early days of movement. …