Robert D. Tollison: In memoriam.

AuthorShughart, William F., II
PositionIn memoriam

My longtime friend, coauthor, and former colleague Robert D. Tollison passed away unexpectedly on October 24, 2016--just a month away from his seventy-fourth birthday. Bob was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and his academic career ended at Clemson University, a school he loved and had been employed by once before (in the mid-1980s), just down the road from his birthplace.

Bob graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wofford College, went to the University of Alabama for a master's degree on the advice of a Wofford faculty mentor, and then moved on to the Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he wrote his dissertation under James M. Buchanan, Nobel laureate in economics in 1986. While at UVA, Bob forged a lifelong friendship with Buchanan, but although he was Jim's student, he took his approach to scholarship over a prolific academic career more from Gordon Tullock. Like Tullock, Bob was an economic imperialist, applying the model of rational human action to such fields as sports (including horse racing, track and field, the Olympic Games, college basketball, and professional baseball), economic history, the history of economic thought, and religion, with special attention to the medieval Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation.

If you peruse Bob's curriculum vitae, which lists several hundred published peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, thirteen books, numerous edited volumes, and other writings--including an influential "pamphlet" on the military draft written while he was still a graduate student and a principles of economics text that went through seven editions--you will see the breadth and depth of his contributions to the literature of economics. You will not see, though, that Bob's fourteenth book, on the market for modern art, will be out in 2017 from Oxford University Press (Ekelund, Jackson, and Tollison 2017).

Also noteworthy is that much of Bob's academic work was coauthored. Coauthorship was a hallmark of his research program. He adopted that model, I think, because he was a proverbial fountainhead of research ideas, so many that he could not possibly carry them out from start to finish by himself. So he collaborated with students, younger colleagues, and his academic peers, generously sharing his ideas with others in ways that helped launch and advance their own careers. Those ideas occurred to him while he was in the shower, while he was exercising, and while he puttered around on weekends; I can recall many Saturdays and Sundays when the telephone would ring, and it would be Bob wanting to talk about a new idea for a paper, almost all of which ended up being accepted for publication.

As Bob was entering the academy in the late 1960s (his first appointment as an assistant professor was at Cornell, beginning in 1969), empirical methods in economics were at the toddler stage of development. His comparative advantage lay in ideas, not in quantitative firepower, so Bob frequently asked others to help with formal modeling or econometric testing of theoretical predictions. He insisted on gathering and presenting...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT