Mancur Olson Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Mancur Olson (1932–1998) was an American economist. After receiving degrees from North Dakota State University, Oxford University, and Harvard University, he started his academic career teaching at the United States Air Force Academy and then took a post at Princeton University. In 1969, Olson joined the economics faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, and remained there as a distinguished professor, making frequent forays to think tanks, lecture platforms, and downtown Washington. He also established the Center on Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector at Maryland.

Olson used three social sciences—economics, political science, and history—to answer questions about how major institutions of society develop. From economics, he took certain concepts, such as the incentives for individual action, and a rigorous respect for the logic of cause and effect models. History provided him with evidence of big events that required explanation. From political science, he took a concern with institutions and power. Olson believed that the best way to advance intellectually was to break out of narrow disciplinary boundaries and make use of whatever intellectual tools were relevant to the problem at hand. He demonstrated this in his first book, The Economics of Wartime Shortages (1963), a study of why Britain won wars against opponents with more sophisticated military machines: His answer was that Britain had a better fiscal and administrative system for mobilizing the range of resources necessary to win a long war.

In his 1963 journal article “Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force,” Olson contrasted sociologist Talcott Parsons’s priority for social stability with the economists’ preference for economic growth. In The Logic of Collective Action (1965), Olson demonstrated the importance of individual self-interest opposed to political values as a motive for people to join pressure groups; for example, membership can provide discounts on car insurance or travel. This logic was applied to trade unions and farm cooperatives. The approach was greatly expanded in a path breaking study, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (1982).

In 1967, Olson was named deputy assistant secretary in the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare, with responsibility for developing social indicators as a complement to economic indicators used in policy making. Olson’s work in this capacity, Toward a Social Report (1969), drew on existing social indicators and stimulated worldwide action by governments to take into account social as well as economic indicators when evaluating the quality of life. Over the years, Olson sought to produce a unified system of indicators that went beyond the measuring rod of money, but this was never fully realized.

Just before his death, Olson finished writing Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, which cut across conventional thinking to address the question of why some governments provide public goods that strengthen markets while others do not. The book mixed politics, economics, and history in striking ways.

Olson was a founder and past president of the Public Choice Society, which has influenced the development of the rational choice school of political science. Describing himself as an economics educator, his personal manner was well suited to this role; he was always willing to listen to and reflect on criticisms of his works as well as provide a clear and logical restatement of his ideas.

Bibliography:

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.
Swerdberg, Richard. Economics and Sociology: Redefining the Borders. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

This example Mancur Olson Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.