Mancur Olson 1932-1998

My academic adviser, Mancur Olson, Chair and Principal Investigator of IRIS and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, died on February 19th from a sudden heart attack. He was 66.

He is the author of two ground-breaking books, Logic of Collective Action(1965) and The Rise and Decline of Nations(1982), each of which has been translated into numerous foreign languages including Japanese, and more than a hundred other publications.

He received the Ph.D. degree in Economics from Harvard University in 1963. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford, and has received the M.A. degree from Oxford University and the B.S. degree from North Dakota State University.

He is past President of the Eastern Economic Association and of the Southern Economic Association, of the Public Choice Society, and of the Social, Economic and Political Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past Vice-President of the American Economic Association. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and he has been awarded a Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Distinguished Fellowship at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford.

His most recent work had addressed the origins of public-good-providing governments, the fiscal policies of democracies and autocracies, and the role of property and contract rights in economic development. Recent publications include "The Secular Increase in European Unemployment Rates" in European Economic Review (1995), "The Devolution of the Nordic & Teutonic Economies" in AEA Papers and Proceedings (May 1995), "Why the Transition from Communism is So Difficult" in Eastern Economic Journal (Fall 1995), and "The Economics of Autocracy and Majority Rule: The Invisible Hand and the Use of Force," (with Martin C. McGuire) in The Journal of Economic Literature (March 1996).

Kokyo Sentaku no Kenkyu or Public Choice Studies is preparing his memorial issue.