Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mancur Olson – Social Scientist

1999; Oxford University Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 456 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-0297.00444

1742-0350

Avinash Dixit,

Economic theories and models

Isaiah Berlin popularised the saying of the Greek poet Archilochus, 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' For Berlin, the hedgehog stands for the type of thinkers who 'relate everything to a single central vision, in terms of which they understand, think, and feel' (Berlin, 1978). In this sense, Mancur Olson was the ultimate hedgehog of the social sciences. Most of his research can be seen as the exploration and application of one idea, but that idea was very big indeed. It was the problem of collective action, namely how individuals acting in their private interest can fail to secure the provision of goods or services that are collectively in the interests of all. In other words, Olson's focus was on nothing less than what is arguably the most important class of failures of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Today's economics students, who learn about public goods and externalities routinely in their microeconomics courses, and know that a Nash equilibrium of a non-cooperative game does not in general produce a Pareto optimal outcome, may not think this a very startling insight. But in 1965, when Olson's Logic of Collective Action was published, monopoly was almost the only admitted exception to the efficiency of markets. Externalities and public goods were mentioned in the final week of a microeconomics course, more as curiosa than as real economic problems to be taken seriously. Classic examples of externalities were 'bucolic' bees pollinating flowers, and sparks from railway engines setting fire to fields. Olson played a substantial part in the line of research that has so drastically changed our views over the last three decades. His impact in political science was even greater. Many political scientists used to take it as axiomatic that if some outcome would be beneficial to all members of a group, then the group would act in concert to bring it about. They thought in terms of joint rather than individual action, without asking how the joint action would be enforced. In today's terminology, we can say that they were implicitly thinking of social outcomes as equilibria of cooperative rather than non-cooperative games. Olson focused on enforcement issues; he implicitly thought in terms of non-cooperative games. Therefore his book was an important milestone in the path that led all social scientists to a better appreciation of the full extent of the problem of collective action.