Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

4 LelandA personal appreciationGordon TullockI first met Leland when I received a postdoctoral fellowship at the University ofVirginia. Seeing as I really didn’t have a doctorate, since a DJ doesn’t count, thiswas very unusual. However, I can claim other unusual points in my appointment.The center had received a large sum of money to establish a distinguished visitingscholar and a visiting post doc. I was the first recipient of the visiting post doc funds.One of my colleagues said that they had a distinguished fellowship and an undistinguishedfellowship. He, unkindly, maintained that although they continued havingdistinguished and undistinguished fellows, I was the most truly undistinguished ofthem all.This was not Leland, of course, and I believe that he had much to do with myreceiving the fellowship. I had written my Politics of Bureaucracy and was havingtrouble getting it published. I arranged to have some preprints made and distributedthem to friends, one of which was my former debate partner at the Universityof Chicago, Warren Nutter. He distributed it around the department and Lelandread it and was much pleased. I believe he then began a campaign to get otherpeople to read it. He never claimed credit for this, so I can’t be sure, but I remaingrateful to him for, in a way, getting me started in economics. Without thisfellowship and the people I met in Virginia I would probably have continued ininternational studies with main emphasis on purely political problems. Since Ibelieve that my approach to the economics of politics was earlier than Buchanan’s,Leland had a major role in getting public choice started even if he himself seldomwrote on it.The period at Virginia was immensely important for my own intellectual developmentand my contact with Leland was an important part of that development.He was not himself deeply interested in public choice but in more conventionaleconomics. In a way it’s incorrect to refer to him as being a conventional economistbecause he was an extremely original thinker. He not only greatly improved myknowledge of economics, but he did the same for many, many other scholars. Hisimpact on his students was greater than most other teachers I have known. Hislectures were so admired that his students actually printed up their very carefulnotes on those lectures. Leland, with characteristic modesty, objected to this, but itsurely meant that the economic influence of Virginia and, in particular, Leland wasmagnified.