The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What We Can Do About It

by F.H. Buckley

There’s a juste milieu, represented by an upside-down U-shaped curve called the Magee curve, invented by Stephen Magee. The curve plots GDP growth on the vertical axis against number of lawyers per thousand population on the horizontal axis. At the top of the curve, things are copacetic, but moving to the right by adding more lawyers represents a cost to the economy. That’s intuitive, but what is controversial is just where the apex of the curve might be, and Magee puts it significantly to the left of the American level of 3.65 lawyers per 1,000 people. We’d be worse off economically with no lawyers, but we’d be even better off if we had 33 percent fewer lawyers, says Magee, and he calculates that the excess of lawyers costs the American economy more than $1 trillion in GDP.24 That’s speculative and open