James M.

Buchanan

James McGill Buchanan, Jr. October 3, 1919 January 9,

2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, for
which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated
research on how politicians' self-interest and non-economic forces affect
government economic policy. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The
Independent Institute, a member (and for a time the President) of the Mont Pelerin
Society, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, and professor at
George Mason University.
Biography
Buchanan was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the eldest child of James and Lila
(Scott) Buchanan. He was a grandson of John P. Buchanan, a governor of
Tennessee in the 1890s.[2] He graduated from Middle Tennessee State Teachers
College, now known as Middle Tennessee State University, in 1940. Buchanan
completed his M.S. from the University of Tennessee in 1941. He spent the war
years on the staff of Admiral Nimitz in Honolulu, and it was during that time he
met and married Anne Bakke on October 5, 1945; Anne, of Norwegian descent,
was working as a nurse at the military base in Hawaii.

Buchanan identified as a socialist in his youth, and was unaware of the University
of Chicago's strong market-oriented approach to economics. His studies there,
particularly under Frank Knight, converted him to "a zealous advocate of the
market order". Buchanan received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in
1948 for his thesis "Fiscal Equity in a Federal State," in which he was heavily
influenced by Frank H. Knight. It was also at Chicago that he read for the first time
and found enlightening the work of Knut Wicksell. Photographs of Knight and
Wicksell have hung from his office walls ever since.

Approach to economic analysis

Buchanan was the founder of a new Virginia school of political economy.
He taught at the University of Virginia from 19561968, where he founded the
Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy.
He taught at UCLA 19681969, followed by Virginia Polytechnic Institute 1969
1983 where he founded the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC). In 1983
a conflict with Economics Department head Daniel M. Orr came to a head and
Buchanan took the CSPC to its new home at George Mason University.
He also taught at Florida State University and the University of Tennessee.
In 1988 Buchanan returned to Hawaii for the first time since the War and gave a
series of lectures later published by the University Press. In 2001 Buchanan
received an honorary doctoral degree from Universidad Francisco Marroqun, in
Guatemala City, Guatemala, for his contribution to economics.
Buchanan's work focused on public finance, the public debt, voting, rigorous
analysis of the theory of logrolling, macroeconomics, constitutional economics,
and libertarian theory.
Buchanan died January 9, 2013, in Blacksburg, Virginia, at age 93.[7] The New York
Times commented that the Nobel Prize-winning economist who championed public
choice theory influenced a "generation of conservative thinking about deficits,
taxes and the size of government". The Badische Zeitung called Buchanan, who
showed how politicians undermine fair and simple tax systems, the "founder of the
New Political Economy"
Buchanan was largely responsible for the rebirth of political economy as a
scholarly pursuit. Buchanan emphasized that public policy cannot be considered in
terms of distribution, but is instead always a question of the choice over rules of

the game that engender a pattern of exchange and distribution. His work in public
choice theory is often interpreted as the quintessential case of economic
imperialism; however, Amartya Sen argued that Buchanan should not be identified
with economic imperialism, since Buchanan has done more than most to introduce
ethics, legal political thinking, and indeed social thinking into economics. [12]
Crucial to understanding Buchanan's system of thought is the distinction he made
between politics and policy. Politics is about the rules of the game, where policy is
focused on strategies that players adopt within a given set of rules. Questions
about what are good rules of the game are in the domain of social philosophy,
whereas questions about the strategies that players will adopt given those rules is
the domain of economics, and it is the play between the rules (social philosophy)
and the strategies (economics) that constitutes what Buchanan refers to as
constitutional political economy.
Buchanan's important contribution to constitutionalism is his development of the
sub-discipline of constitutional economics. According to Buchanan the ethic of
constitutionalism is a key for constitutional order and "may be called the idealized
Kantian world" where the individual "who is making the ordering, along with
substantially all of his fellows, adopts the moral law as a general rule for
behaviour". Buchanan rejects "any organic conception of the state as superior in
wisdom, to the citizens of this state". This philosophical position forms the basis of
constitutional economics. Buchanan believed that every constitution is created for
at least several generations of citizens. Therefore, it must be able to balance the
interests of the state, society, and each individual.

SUBMITTED BY,
ARYA L