 One thing that strikes me about the literature on corruption and rent-seeking and political influence is what is sometimes here called the Tullock Paradox. Gordon Tullock worked in this building and Tullock raised the question of given how much is it stake in politics? In the US it's about 40% of GDP. In Europe it may be above 50% of GDP. Tullock was actually surprised in a way relative to that. How little was spent on lobbying. So for him there's some kind of structural barrier story. But what's your take on the Tullock Paradox? Why aren't we even more corrupt yet given what percent of GDP in this country is allocated through mechanisms of a mix of force and democratic whatever you want to call it rather than voluntary exchange? Yeah first of all let me spend the war to praise Gordon Tullock and they saw he pass away recently and I'm even more sorry that he wasn't celebrated the way he deserved to be celebrated. In my view he was an extremely insightful economist who made the point of there's not enough money in politics in 1972 if I'm not mistaken. Long time ago yeah. Long time ago at a time where there was much less money in politics. So first of all he got clearly the derivative right because from 1972 to today the amount of money in politics exploded. So I think he was very farsighted in understanding this. The second is in my view the reason why we don't see enough money is twofold. Number one there is ideology so you can't really pay everybody but people have some preferences especially when they're not paid a lot for some position and so that decreases the power of money. But the most important fact is that some people find it very easy to collect the money which are vested interests. They organize because they're small this is Manco Olson. They organize much faster they can collect the money faster. In the public at large find it difficult to collect the money. So the paradox of Tullock and the way I like to describe the Gordon Tullock paradox is the following. Imagine you have some lottery tickets in which unlike most lottery which the state gets most of it is pure sort of actually fair. So you know that you are going to buy let's say five trillion dollars the payoff and you start to sell the tickets. You know that by buying all the tickets for sure you're going to get five trillion dollars. So it seems that why the collective amount of tickets doesn't sell for five trillion dollars. And that's basically what Tullock is saying is saying why if we are purely cynical and we try to buy all the votes if you buy all the votes in Congress and for president you get to allocate a lot of goodies. So that value the value of the votes collected should be at least the value of the rents you get on all the goodies you allocate which we can discuss how much this but is of the order of trillions of dollars. So the point is that the public at large is not able to coordinate and beat very much for those votes. So those votes sell cheap. Why they sell cheap because the party are not well organized. Now since the time of Gordon Tullock to today people got more and more organized and so the price is going up but there is way to go if we don't do something there is way to go and spend more. So I think that Gordon Tullock is absolutely right. But the interesting thing is that Gordon Tullock implicitly because the type of game he designed for this is a game in which there is a benefit for society to put some limits. Sure. And I actually enjoy in my book to pick a little bit on Robert Barrow because Robert Barrow defends restrictions in basketball and baseball but not anywhere else in the United States. So I don't understand why in the United States the only thing that is really non-competitive is sport. In Europe the only thing that is really competitive is sport. In Italy soccer you are the first division or second division you are promoted or demoted according to your performance you don't buy your way into the NFL or the major league etc. Here you buy the franchise and once you're in no matter how sort of incompetent you are you stay there which is completely un-American.