Seminar Title: “Protecting ideology: Belief in the benevolence of government and the challenge of politically assigned rents”.

Venue: LT2 W40.

Date: Thursday 19^th November at 12:00PM.

Professor Arye L. Hillman

Abstract

In this seminar, I will review the academic response to the proposal by Gordon Tullock, the founder of the public-choice school of political economy, that social losses are incurred because of unproductive use of resources to contest politically assigned rents. The contesting of rents described by Tullock undermined progressive principles of socially desirable behavior and compromised the possibility of a successful social-democratic welfare state. Tullock’s idea was blocked from mainstream U.S. economics literature. I will compare the academic exclusion of Tullock’s idea with the 19th century academic exclusion of Alexander del Mar, who also went against the mainstream academic thought of his time. Finally, I will show how ideology and self-interest can influence perspectives on permissible economic thought.

Speaker: Professor Arye L. Hillman, Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Arye L. Hillman is professor of economics and has the William Gittes Chair at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, with which has been affiliated since 1980. He has made original contributions to political economy. He pioneered the political-economy approach to international trade policy, which subsequently became the standard view with developments by Gene Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, and others; he placed public policy in a political-economy context with a focus on rent seeking and political discretion; and he formulated a view of the transition from socialism as a political economy phenomenon when the focus of debate in the academic and policy community was on defining “correct policies”. His more than 120 research papers have been published in various professional journals and volumes. His book “The Political Economy of Protection” (1989; reprinted 2001, reissued 2014) set out the role of political self-interest in international trade policy. His textbook “Public Finance and Public Policy: Responsibilities and Limitations of Government” (1st ed. 2003, 2nd ed. 2009, 3rd ed. 2017) combines political economy with public finance in a treatise on markets and government. The book has been published in Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian. His academic studies were in Australia at the University of Newcastle and Macquarie University and in the U.S. at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught at various universities including the Australian National University, UCLA, Princeton, and Paris I (Sorbonne-Panthéon). He has been a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. Between 1994 and 2015, he served as editor-in-chief and editor of the European Journal of Political Economy (Elsevier). Since 1989, he has co-organized the annual Silvaplana Workshop in Political Economy, which offers opportunities for young scholars to present their research. He is a former president of the European Public Choice Society and a joint recipient with Heinrich Ursprung of the Max-Planck Prize for Humanities Sciences.