Mancur Olson | |
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| Born | Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr. (1932-01-22)January 22, 1932 Grand Forks,North Dakota, U.S. |
| Died | February 19, 1998(1998-02-19) (aged 66) College Park,Maryland, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Economics Political science |
| School or tradition | New institutional economics[1] |
| Institutions | |
Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr. (/ˈmænsər/;[2] January 22, 1932 – February 19, 1998) was an Americaneconomist andpolitical scientist who taught at theUniversity of Maryland, College Park. His most influential contributions were tonew institutional economics, and focused on the role played byprivate property,taxation,public goods,collective action, andcontract rights ineconomic development.
Olson was born on January 22, 1932, inGrand Forks, North Dakota, to a family ofNorwegian immigrants.[2][3][4] He grew up on a farm nearBuxton, North Dakota, next to the state border withClimax, Minnesota.[5] Olson claimed that his given name, Mancur, was common throughout Scandinavian-immigrant communities in North America and was a variation of the Arabic nameMansoor.[2][4]
Olson graduated fromNorth Dakota State University in 1954, and was aRhodes Scholar atUniversity College,Oxford from 1954 to 1956, before earning aPhD ineconomics fromHarvard in 1963.[2] He also served in theU.S. Air Force for two years from 1961 to 1963.[5]
While serving in the U.S. Air Force, Olson became a lecturer in the Economics Department of theUnited States Air Force Academy from 1961 to 1963.[2] He then became an assistant professor atPrinceton University in 1963.[5][6] Afterwards, he served as Deputy AssistantSecretary of Health, Education and Welfare for two years inWashington, D.C. In 1969, he joined the economics department of theUniversity of Maryland, College Park, where he remained until his death.[6]
Olson married his wife, Alison, in 1959, and the couple had three children.[3] At the time of his death, he was a resident of College Park, Maryland.[5]
On February 19, 1998, Olson, then 66 years of age, suddenly collapsed outside his office after returning from lunch. He never regained consciousness and died on the same day. He and his infant son are buried in the cemetery of his childhood church, Grue Norwegian Lutheran, near his family's farm and hometown of Buxton, Traill County, North Dakota. The cause of death was later determined to be aheart attack.[5]
In his first book,The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965), he theorized that what stimulates people to act in groups is incentive; members of large groups do not act in accordance with a common interest unless motivated by personal gain (economic, social, etc.). While small groups can act on shared objectives, large groups will not work towards shared objectives unless their individual members are sufficiently motivated.[7]
In 1982, he expanded the scope of his earlier work in an attempt to explainThe Rise and Decline of Nations (1982). He argues that groups such as cotton farmers, steel producers, andlabor unions have an incentive to formlobby groups and influence policies in their favor. These policies will tend to beprotectionist, which will hurteconomic growth; but because the benefits of such policies are concentrated, and their costs are diffused throughout the whole population, there will be little public resistance to them. As distributional coalitions accumulate, nations burdened by them will fall into economic decline. His work influenced the formulation of theCalmfors–Driffill hypothesis ofcollective bargaining.[8]
In his final book,Power and Prosperity (2000), Olson distinguished between the economic effects of different types of government, in particular,tyranny,anarchy, anddemocracy. Olson argued that under anarchy, a "roving bandit" only has the incentive to steal and destroy, whilst a "stationary bandit"—a tyrant—has an incentive to encourage some degree of economic success as he expects to remain in power long enough to benefit from that success. A stationary bandit thereby begins to take on the governmental function of protecting citizens and their property against roving bandits. In the move from roving to stationary bandits, Olson sees the seeds ofcivilization, paving the way, eventually for democracy, which by giving power to those who align with the wishes of the population, improves incentives for good government.[9] Olson's work on the roving vs. stationary bandits is influential in analysis of the political and economic order structured inwarlord states and societies.[citation needed]
To help bring his ideas to the attention of policymakers, Olson founded the Center for Institutional Reform in the Informal Sector ("IRIS Center"), funded byUSAID (United States Agency for International Development). Based at the University of Maryland, the Center sought to supply an intellectual foundation for legal and economic reform projects carried out by USAID in formerly communist states that were attempting to make the transition to market-driven democratic governments governed by therule of law. It was particularly active in East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.[citation needed]
The center also became actively involved in projects in South America, Africa, and Asia, where it became a proponent ofjudicial independence. It sponsored the first conference oncorruption in francophone Africa in the 1990s, when it was a very sensitive subject.[citation needed] The IRIS Center continued to operate after Olson's death, but was eventually folded into other programs at the University of Maryland.
To honor Olson's many contributions, theAmerican Political Science Association established the Olson Award for the best PhD dissertation in Political Economy.[10] In 2013 the University of Maryland announced the creation of a newendowed professorship—the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics.[11] Maryland Professor of Economics Peter Murrell was the first Mancur Olson Professor.
