Mançur Lloyd Olson Jr. (; January 22, 1932 – February 19, 1998) was an American economist and political scientist who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most influential contributions were in institutional economics, and in the role which private property, taxation, public goods, collective action, and contract rights play in economic development. Early life and education Olson was born on January 22, 1932, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to a family of Norwegian immigrants. He grew up on a farm near Buxton, North Dakota, next to the state border with Climax, Minnesota. Olson claimed that his given name, Mançur, was common throughout Scandinavian-immigrant communities in North America and was a variation of the Arabic name Mansoor. Olson graduated from North Dakota State University in 1954 and was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford until 1956, before earning a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1963. He also served in the U.S. Air Force for two years from 1961 to 1963. Career While serving in the U.S. Air Force, Olson became a lecturer in the Economics Department of the United States Air Force Academy from 1961 to 1963. He then became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 1963. Afterwards, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare for two years in Washington, D.C. In 1969, he left government and joined the economics department of the University of Maryland, College Park, where he remained until his death. Family life and death Olson married his wife, Allison, in 1959, and the couple had three children. At the time of his death, he was a resident of College Park, Maryland. On February 19, 1998, Olson, then 66 years of age, suddenly collapsed outside his office after returning from lunch. He never regained consciousness and died on the same day. The cause of death was later determined to be a heart attack. Legacy Academic work In his first book, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965), he theorized that what stimulates people to act in groups is incentive; members of large groups do not act in accordance with a common interest unless motivated by personal gain (economic, social, etc.). While small groups can act on shared objectives, large groups will not work towards shared objectives unless their individual members are sufficiently motivated. In 1982, he expanded the scope of his earlier