"Tells how William F. Buckley Sr., father of the later-famous conservative commentator, left his native Texas as a young man in 1909 and built a fortune in the nascent oil industry while caught between revolution-racked Mexico and the United States."

We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting...