Mancur Olson was born in Buxton, North Dakota. He received his doctorate in economics at Harvard University. He was assistant professor at Princeton University from 1963 to 1967, then worked as the deputy assistent secretary at the Department of Heal th, Education, and Welfare from 1967 to 1969. Since 1969, he has taught economics at the University of Maryland. Olson is best known for his book,"The Rise and Decline of Nations", in which he addresses the issues of economic growth and stagflatio n. According to Olson, the main reason why a country is relatively prosperous or relatively poor is the quality of the institutions and the policies of that country. Olson is unique among economists in that he takes an interdisciplinary approac h to his work. Because of this, his name is not associated only with economics but also with sociology and political science.

The following is an excerpt from, "Economics and Sociology", in which Mancur Olson answers the question,"...why did you..decide to concentrate in economics?:

"One reason for my choices about what to study and to read over the years has been the observation that the economists who do the work that is of the most value to those outside our discipline are those who have the deepest understanding of ec onomics itself. If a person can ultimately reach the point where the hypothetico-deductive reasoning of the discipline becomes part of the software of his mind, he will natrually use this capability on a vast array of problems. Then there is a good chan ce that he will generate results that prove valuable to people outside his discipline.

As I see it, the record suggests that this has been supremely important in generating good interdisciplinary work by economists. John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx were past-masters of the post-Ricardian economics of their day and they also did work that had an appeal beyond the discipline. More recently, economists like Kenneth Arrow, Gery Becker, James Buchanan, and Thomas Schelling have also made contributions that transcend the boundaries of economics, and I believe this is partly because they have assi mulated economics so well. Conversley, it is those economists who do not have quite the command of the subject needed to tackle big problems that most often belittle interdisciplinary work.

Maybe what I have just said will seem preposterous to the many people who have sampled economics and found it depressing. I plead with them that even if economics seems, when first entered, like a dark cave, it is a cave that, if followed all th e way to the end, leads to the other side of the mountain, and to a magnificent view that include even terrain that we conventionally associate only with other social sciences.

The second thing that I have thought deserved the top priority in my education and reading is getting some basic factual knowledge of many different societies and historical periods. Here I have not learned a fraction as much as I should have, but I did take in some lectures and courses in economic history at both Harvard and Oxford, and all my life I have tried to read about other societies. I have long wished that I had the wide erudition that Joseph Schumpeter has. His great contributions to econom ics and to the other social sciences would not, I suspect, have been possible without his broad learning. Unfortunately, many economists today seem to think that it is enough to test any model on the U.S. government data since World War II. This paroch ial perspective is, in my opinion, causing enormous mischief, expecially in macroeconomics.

My sense is that this problem of the lack of even the most rudimentary knowledge of other periods of history and other societies is not nearly so widespread in the other social science disciplines as it is in economics. Probably some sociologists or poli tical scientists are teaching courses that could pass on to economists some appreciation of the value of the incredibly broad learning that Max Weber had, and convey some sense of the value such learning would have to a technically skilled and imaginative modern economist. Every economists ought to take such a course.

Works by Mancur Olson:

• The Rise and Decline of Nations:Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities
  
• The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
  
• The Economics of the Wartime Shortage: A History of British Food Supplies in the Napoleonic War and in World War I and II
  
• Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force, Journal of Economic History
  
• Economics, Sociology, and the Best of All Possible Worlds, Public Interest
  
• The Plan and Purpose of a Social Report, Public Interest
  
• Toward a Social Report
  
• The Relationship Between Economics and the Other Social Sciences, Politics and Social Sciences
  
• The Logic of Collective Action, 2nd Edition