Tullock Challenges: Happiness, Revolutions and Democracy

Democracy and Happiness: What Causes What?

During the years before the surge of democratization in 1987-1993, reported happiness levels showed strong nation-level correlations with measures of democracy such as the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties scores: the correlations were in the .7 to .8 range. This could be interpreted as meaning that: (1) living under democratic institutions makes people happy; or (2) high level...

Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy

Screen and song celebrate social justice movements that protested in the streets when they were convinced that existing institutions and their normal procedures only reinforced the status quo. Many rights have been won in democratic societies by means of courageous activism — the eight hour day, votes for women, the right to sit at any lunch counter. Yet contemporary democratic theory rarely re...

Rejoinder to Gordon Tullock

Outcomes and Strategy Choices in Tullock Contests

We explore the relationship between the choice of the strategy space and outcomes in Tullock contests. In particular, in a framework where one of the contest’s participants moves …rst, we show that there is an equilibrium where this individual wins the contest with probability one. We also show that not only the nature of the outcome changes (e.g., who wins the contest) with the choice of the s...

Technological Revolutions

In skill-biased (de-skilling) technological revolutions learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (de-skilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow(fast-) to fast(slow-) learning workers, thereby reducing the relative and absolute wages of the former. The model of skill-biased (de-skilling) re...