Rick was one of the first professors I met at MSU.  Generous with his time and counsel, he greatly influenced my career.   And it was a treat to teach with Rick.  Here is the beginning of a fifty-year friendship with a fine scholar.

I met Rick in 1969 while teaching economic anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana.  Mine was a visiting appointment because IU awarded my PhD.  Thus, I needed a new university position.  Rick helped me accomplish that goal at MSU. 

Rick’s dissertation topic at the University of Washington was the effect of air pollution on environmental quality.  Mine was the economics of the Hutterites.  They are a Christian communist society whose founders came to America from Central Europe in 1870.   A century later, they had grown to 120 colonies with a dozen in my favorite state, Montana. 

Given Rick's strong free market philosophy, he became intrigued with the Hutterite saga of success.  How could a communist society possibly work?  Rick found that a fine political economy question. 

Fifty years ago, Rick and I answered it in the economics journal, Public Choice.  Essentially, the successful Hutterite groups evolved in ways consistent with Public Choice economics.  Hutterites successfully deal with problems involving common pool resources, shirking, and leadership selection:  these doom nearly all communal experiments.

Good intentions do not suffice.  Rick and I co-authored several articles and books with public choice and cultural themes, most were on environmental policy. 

Early in my work with Rick, an MSU ag economist asked me what anthropology adds to economic understanding.  I explained that anthropology includes cultural influences on economic decisions. 

The ag economist responded: "People who use culture to explain decisions are those just too stupid to do econometrics".  Rick was not so arrogant and disagreed with his colleague.  Rick knew through intuition and experience that economics had no monopoly on explaining behavior.  He understood culture, evolution, and religion matter a lot.

Rick Stroup, highly successful in several ways, treated people of every station with respect.  He also was prudently skeptical of politicians.  His tenure at chief economist of the U S Department of Interion beginning in 1981 increased his caution about political promises.

Here's the only liability I recall, and it doesn’t involve character: Rick didn't appreciate cold weather.  Hence, Rick and Jane moved to North Carolina.  While we occasionally saw them, Ramona and I greatly missed Rick and Jane.

We had introduced them while Jane was an editor at Business Week and Rick and I ran an “Economics for Editors” program at our MSU institute, the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources.   This MSU program evolved to become the original edition of PERC (Political Economy Research Center and now Property and Environment Research Center).  I left this organization to found FREE, Foundation for Research on Economics and Environment, in 1985.  These organizations created “Free Market Environmentalism” or, more formally, The New Resource Economics. *

True friends are scarce, people only earn a few during a lifetime.  Rick, Jane, Ramona, and I remained friends across the decades.  And with Rick’s passing, that quad is gone but good memories of times together in Montana, France, Mont Pelerin Society meetings worldwide, and Washington DC endure.

However, this celebration of his life testifies to Rick’s contributions.  The paradigm Rick Stroup and his colleague created at a small “cow college” in the most remote of the lower 48 states is the default model for harmonizing responsible liberty, sustainable ecology, and prosperity.  This is but one of his accomplishments and one that will live on.

*The New Resource Economics Using Private Property, Economic Incentives, and Markets to Solve Environmental Problems

Goodman Inst. July 1, 2017