The Economics of Non-Human Societies.

• Author: Hafer, R.W.

Like many students who entered the economic graduate program at VPI during the mid-1970s, I worried that Professor Tullock would, at some social gathering, select me as the target of one of his questions. It's not that his questions couldn't be answered. It's just that they often dealt with areas, such as biology, in which economic analysis did not seem to apply. By the time you realized the answer was a straightforward application of microeconomic theory, however, Professor Tullock was off quizzing a fellow student. But we graduate students learned to survive. Just like the ants, termites and bees that are the subject of his most recent foray into non-traditional applications of economics, we learned how to perpetuate our "society" by passing on to the next generation one piece of advice: Change the subject to baseball or classical music and the discussion would end in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, little did we realize that Professor Tullock was simply trying to sharpen our nascent ability to apply the economic concepts that we were supposed to be learning in class.

An endearing characteristic of this book is Professor Tullock's insistence that the goal is not to observe non-human societies in order to better understand human society. Rather, he is "taking [the] tools developed to deal with human society and using them to understand nonhuman societies." The purpose of this book, like quizzing graduate students, is to help students of human society better clarify their ideas. Applying one's knowledge to non-traditional fields makes the familiar much more understandable.

Professor Tullock argues that the coordination of activities in nonhuman societies, specifically ants, termites, bees, mole rats, sponges and slime molds, can be based on the idea that each individual has, for lack of a better phrase, a preference function. This preference function may be the product of some hereditary message or a learned behavioral trait. The preferences of the individual termite, for example, may be completely automatic. As the author notes, even a personal computer has a pre-programmed preference function: there is, after all, a protocol that it follows in determining which commands it will accept and reject. The computer has a "preference" function of sorts.

The key to the coordination of activity in nonhuman societies is what Professor Tullock refers to as "environmental coordination." The idea is that actions taken by individuals affect the environment...