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

46 Gordon TullockIn any event, I gained a great deal from my association with Leland. It should bekept in mind that at the time I met him I had had one course in economics lasting10 weeks. Admittedly it was taught by Henry Simons and it made an immenseimpression on me. From then on I followed the economic journals as a sort ofhobby. I was engaged, firstly as a completely unimportant member of the militaryin Europe, followed by completing my law school training, and then after a veryshort period of legal practice in a downtown office, I joined the diplomatic serviceand went off to China.In China I followed the practice of a junior Foreign Service Officer, whichmeant that I engaged in minor clerical activities and worked on reporting thepolitical side of the local government and society. All this meant that I had very littlein the way of economic training other than my reading of economic journals in theUSS library. At the time I had no idea of leaving the diplomatic service or, inparticular, of becoming an academic of any sort, certainly not as an economist.I wrote my Politics of Bureaucracy as an effort to regularize and improve politicaltheory. I think I did not at that time regard it as an economic work. In a wayLeland’s reading it and recommending it to other people, indirectly, led me tobecome more interested in economics and less in foreign policy. The year that Ispent as a post doc in Virginia finished off a shift in which I continued to beinterested in political science and in foreign policy, but realized that economics wasdeeply relevant to all of that area.Thus Leland, by first attracting attention to my work in Virginia and henceleading to my receiving a post doc, which led to a firm indoctrination in a year atVirginia in economic methods – particularly, of course, Chicagoan economicmethods – in essence revolutionized my own intellectual development. I was, andremain, deeply grateful for his influence.I should say in passing that I also enjoyed my social relations with him when Iwas in Virginia and since I left Virginia when, as occasionally happens, we meet asships that pass in the night. His particular fields of study are different from mine.Further, he has an apparent great ability to learn foreign languages where I have anequally apparent great inability to do so. This means that in whole areas he is ableto do things that I can only admire from a distance. I can, however, recognize hisgreat contributions in these areas.Altogether his influence on me was great, but I suspect that his influence on hisstudents and other colleagues was even greater. We badly need more members ofthe profession that, if they’re not able to meet the high standards that Leland set,can at least provide an approximation, perhaps a poor approximation. Thus hisinfluence is not by any means entirely through his publications, excellent thoughthey are, or directly through his students, but to a large extent through the studentsof his students. We all should be grateful to the improvement in economics thatcomes out of his work.I cannot trace direct influence between his work and the sharp improvement inmonetary economics since his original work. Still, having a first-class mind devotedto these problems cannot have avoided being one of the causes of the greatimprovement in rationality in that area.