Mancur Olson

Logic of Collective Action; distributional coalitions.

Olson was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. His 1965 book 'The Logic of Collective Action' demonstrated that self-interested individuals will free-ride on group efforts, upending pluralist assumptions about organised interests. His follow-up, 'The Rise and Decline of Nations' (1982), argued that accumulating distributional coalitions sclerotise economies over time.