The Life and Times of Gordon Tullock
Public Choice (2012) 152:3–27 DOI 10.1007/s11127-011-9899-3 The life and times of Gordon Tullock Charles K. Rowley · Daniel Houser Received: 24 October 2011 / Accepted: 25 October 2011 / Published online: 10 November 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Gordon Tullock is a founding father of public choice. In an academic career that has spanned 50 years, he forged much of the research agenda of the public choice program and he founded and edited Public Choice, the key journal of public choice scholarship. Tullock, however did much more than this. This Special Issue of Public Choice honors Gordon Tullock in precisely the manner that he most values: the creation of new ideas across the vast range of his own scholarly interests. Keywords Gordon Tullock · Tullock’s life · Tullock’s times Si monumentum requiris, circumspice 1 Innocence of youth Gordon Tullock was born in Rockford, Illinois on February 13, 1922. His father, George Tullock, was a hardy Midwesterner of Scottish ancestry. His mother, Helen, nee Crumb, was of equally hardy Pennsylvania-Dutch stock. His father’s elder brother, Tom, and his two children, also lived in Rockford, but some distance away. So Gordon had no close and continuing relationship with them. Both of Gordon’s grandfathers died before he was old enough to remember them. Both of his grandmothers ‘lived with us for some time, but fortunately not at the same time’ (Tullock 2009:1) Rockford, often referred to as the ‘Forest City’, was a mid-sized city with a 64,000 pop- ulation in 1922, when Gordon Tullock was born.
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