Art Carden, the Margaret Gage Bush distinguished professor of economics at Samford University's Brock School of Business, has had a new paper, “Gordon Tullock and the Economics of Slavery”, published by Public Choice.

 

Carden is a co-author on the paper with Phillip Magness from the American Institute for Economic Research and Ilia Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

 

The American economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) published widely, but he published very little on the economics of slavery. This does not mean he didn’t think hard about it. In the paper, Carden and his co-authors use Tullock’s unpublished personal correspondence to identify and develop his theory of American slavery.

 

This study is similar to the co-authors’ 2022 paper “’The Danger of Deplorable Reactions’: W.H. Hutt on Liberalism, Populism, and the Constitutional Political Economic Racism”, which was published by the Independent Review.

 

Carden said, “Tullock was a unique mind who applied the economic way of thinking widely. While he clearly thought about it, he published very little on slavery. He was also a colorful character: it was long said that your career as an economist was not complete unless Tullock insulted you at some point, which was a sign he took you seriously. I checked that off my bucket list when he insulted me at the 2007 Public Choice Society conference in Amsterdam.”