Gordon Tullock diplomat

Gordon Tullock’s interaction with the U.S. Department of State from 1947 to 1956 involved diplomatic postings in Tianjin, Hong Kong, and Korea, alongside Chinese language training at Yale and Cornell. His nine-year tenure exposed him to bureaucratic hierarchies and inefficiencies, which he later critiqued in The Politics of Bureaucracy. He observed self-interested behavior, information distortions, and overstaffing, shaping his rational choice model of bureaucracy and public choice theory. While he likely performed standard diplomatic tasks, his key contribution was translating these experiences into a seminal critique of bureaucratic behavior, though his conclusions may overemphasize dysfunction due to his theoretical bias.