Remembering Mancur Olson.

• Position: Obituary

Mancur Olson, professor of Economics at the University of Maryland--College Park, died February 19, 1998. He served the Southern Economic Association as a member of the Executive Committee in 1978-80, as President-Elect in 1980-81, and as President in 1981-82. Three of his colleagues, Wallace Oates, Joe Oppenheimer, and Thomas Schelling, contributed personal essays to a memorial symposium in Public Choice Studies (No. 31, 1998), a journal published in Japanese. The Editor thanks the Japan Public Choice Society for permission to publish these contributions in English for the benefit of our readers.

I recall a few years ago an inconclusive discussion with Mancur concerning, I believe, the relationship of fiscal decentralization to some dimension of economic performance. Mancur's closing observation was that "We just haven't thought hard enough about this." On later reflection, I realized that this statement captured Mancur Olson's approach to economics: If we simply work hard enough, employing logical thinking and careful observation, we can understand how the world works. And moreover, we can come to see how we need to restructure economic and social institutions and policies to bring widespread prosperity.

Over the course of his work, Mancur had come to believe that it is not a matter of natural resource endowments or access to capital that accounts for economic success. It is "the quality of a country's institutions [that] principally determines its economic performance." This is a complicated matter. To establish a "thriving market economy" requires a government that provides secure property rights and establishes a basic confidence that rights and contracts will be honored. But at the same time, governments may threaten this very basis of economic order through expropriation or other measures that suppress advantageous trade. The development of a set of institutions that sustains and encourages economic performance rather than undermining it thus becomes a challenging and critical enterprise. It was to this formidable task that Mancur Olson devoted his intellectual life.

Mancur came to this task with a basic optimism. The workings of the economic system are intelligible: We can understand them, and we have the capacity to design institutions and policies that will direct individual activities along socially constructive paths. This involves big questions. And Mancur brought to this enterprise a real boldness of mind: "Just as the great fighter is looking for the jugular, so the great scientist is looking for the areas where there can be a breakthrough--for areas where strong claims are in order. Thus I think it is a good research strategy to search for stark and simplifying propositions. In my career I like to think that I have always done that. That is certainly the only thing that I want to do" (from a letter to Avinash Dixit, July 18, 1997).

I like to think of Mancur as a product of the Enlightenment with his basic faith in, and commitment to, the rational capacities of humanity to understand and realign the world. He stood unperturbed (as, fortunately, is most of economics) by the postmodern malaise. He believed that we can understand the world and that we can use this understanding to change things for the better.

Mancur brought to his work a remarkable tenacity of mind. He simply wouldn't give up on a matter that remained unclear. This was true in discussion with colleagues, where he would sometimes hold the conversation on a particular point, looking at the matter first from one side and then another until he was satisfied that it had been dealt with adequately. But more generally, one can see in Mancur's own work the continuing and unyielding pursuit of some basic ideas that he gradually clarified over the course of his professional life. Mancur calls to mind John Maynard Keynes' striking description of Isaac Newton: "His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted." (from "Newton the Man" in Keynes' Essays in Biography). It is in this spirit that I think of Mancur's focus and concentration on the se minal ideas and insights that he has given to us.

Fully equal to his deep commitment to understanding economic and social principles was Mancur's concern with and loyalty to his colleagues, students, and friends. Should anyone be in trouble or need, Mancur was the first to drop everything and come to his assistance. I can still recall arriving at Princeton in 1965 as a new, unsure assistant professor, fresh out of graduate school. Mancur kindly took me under his wing and provided much needed and appreciated guidance and support. Mancur and I thus go back a long way together. We were colleagues in the economics department at Princeton from 1965-67, and then were reunited at the University of Maryland in College Park in 1979, where we worked together until his death. In addition to his brilliance, Mancur's kindness and good cheer (a much underrated commodity) pervaded all our lives here.

Mancur gave of himself without reserve not only to individuals but to the University of Maryland as well. Among other things at College Park, Mancur essentially founded and provided the inspiration for a vast undertaking, the project on Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS), whose purposes are "enlarging knowledge about the role of institutions through research, and promoting institutional reform in the third world and in countries undergoing transition from communism by providing technical and organizational assistance." Through the IRIS project, Mancur and his colleagues have been able to marshal resources both to further understanding of those institutions that Mancur knew were critical for economic development and to put this understanding to work in Third World countries through extensive programs of education and technical assistance. IRIS has lost Mancur's physical...