Bob Ekelund and the method of price theory

The very first class meeting that I – and Mark Thornton – attended as doctoral students at Auburn University was the fall quarter Microeconomic Theory course. (Auburn was on the quarter system rather than the semester system.) It was 1982 and the instructor was Bob Ekelund. I knew about Bob because of his then-newly published book with Bob Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society (Ekelund & Tollison, 1981) – a book that, by coincidence, I read several months earlier and was much impressed by. Straightforwardly using elementary price theory from the perspective of public choice, this book makes clear the power of the economic way of thinking to illuminate history. I was excited to learn economics from Bob Ekelund.

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