Adam Smith
Alfred Marshall
Arthur Cecil Piquo
David Ricardo
Jagdish N. Bhagwati
James Buchanan

James Tobin
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Maynard Keynes
John Stuart Mill
Joseph Shumpeter
Joseph Stigler

Karl Marx
Ludwig Von Mises
Milton Friedman
Paul A. Samuelson
Robert E. Lucas
Robert Solow
Ronald Coase
Thomas R. Malthus
Thorstein Veblen
William Stanley Jevon

Story of James Buchanen (1919 - )

His Life
James M. Buchanan was born in Murfreeboro , Tennessee , USA , and has spent most of his academic life in Virginia . He is currently Advisory General Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at George Mason University , and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics and Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

James Buchanan is the cofounder, along with Gordon Tullock, of “Public Choice Theory”, which changed the way economists analyse economic and political decision-making behaviours of voters, politicians, and government officials. Together, they started the academic journal Public Choice.

In 1962, they published the classics “The Calculus of Consent”, which identify a two-level structure of collective decision-making, after reading an article by Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. The 1896 article's message was that only taxes and government spending that are unanimously approved could be justified. That way, argued Wicksell, taxes used to pay for programs would have to be taken from those who benefited from those programs. Wicksell's idea contradicted the mainstream forties' view, still the mainstream view, that there need be no connection between what a taxpayer pays and what he receives in benefits.

Further details

Buchanan and Tullock showed that the unanimity requirement is unworkable in practice. They then considered modifications to the rule, what they called "workable unanimity". They distinguished between “ordinary politics”, consisting of decisions made in legislative assemblies, and “constitutional politics”, consisting of decisions made about the rules for ordinary politics. Doing so allowed them to answer the questions posed previously: From the perspective of both justice and efficiency, majority rule may safely be allowed to operate in the realm of ordinary politics, provided that there is generalized consensus on the constitution, or on the rules that define and limit what can be done through ordinary politics. It is in arriving at this constitutional framework where Wicksell’s idea of requiring unanimity – or at least super majorities – may be practically incorporated.

Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics for "his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision making."

Major Works of James M. Buchanan

• The Calculus of Consent: Logical foundations for constitutional democracy , with G. Tullock, 1962.
• Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal institutions and democratic choice, 1967.
• Demand and Supply of Public Goods , 1968.
• Cost and Choice: An inquiry into economic theory , 1969.
• The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan , 1975.
• "Public Finance and Public Choice", 1975, National Tax Journal
• Democracy in Deficit: the political legacy of Lord Keynes , with R.E. Wagner, 1977.
• The Power to Tax: the analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution , with G. Brennan, 1980.
• The Reason of Rules: constitutional political economy with G. Brennan, 1985.
• Liberty , Market and the State , 1986.
• "The Constitution of Economic Policy", 1987, AER
• Better than Ploughing and other personal essays . 1992
• Collected Works of James M. Buchanan , 1999