Happy Birthday James Buchanan

by Don Boudreaux on October 3, 2006

in Current Affairs

My colleague James Buchanan — the 1986 Nobel laureate in Economics — celebrates today his 87th birthday.  Thankfully, Jim is still intellectually vigorous.  Among all living economists, his work is the deepest.

I first encountered Jim’s work during my undergraduate days at Nicholls State University.  For nearly 30 years now I have read (and in many cases re-read, and re-re-read) Buchanan’s papers and books, always profitably.

Here are my ten favorite papers by Buchanan:

1) Order Defined in the Process of Its Emergence (Literature of Liberty, 1982)

2) An Economic Theory of Clubs (Economica, 1965)

3) Globalization as Framed by the Two Logics of Trade (with Yong Yoon) (The Independent Review, 2002)

4) Politics, Policy, and the Pigouvian Margins (Economica, 1962)

5) The Domain of Constitutional Political Economy (Constitutional Political Economy, 1990)

6) The Samaritan’s Dilemma (in E. Phelps, ed., Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory, Russell Sage Foundation, 1975)

7) The Relvance of Pareto Optimality (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1962)

8) Natural and Artifactual Man (in J. Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? Liberty Fund, 1979)

9) Politics, Property, and the Law (Journal of Law & Economics, 1972)

10) Classical Liberalism as an Organizing Ideal (in J. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, 2005).

Any list of ten favorite articles by a scholar as deep, as wise, and as prolific as Buchanan is bound to contain much arbitrariness.  Still, each of these essays has had an especially powerful impact on my own thinking.

By the way, Liberty Fund publishes The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, some of which are available on line here.

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  • KRM

    Happy Birthday Mr. Buchanan!


    Thanks for the Buchanan link, it'll prove to make good subway reading

  • What your fine post does not say is how generous Professor Buchanan has been with students. In the early 1980s I was finishing my doctoral studies at USC. I had a professor who said, anytime you write about a living scholar you should send him a copy of your paper. I was bowled over by the suggestion, but followed it. I wrote a long paper on public choice for a theory course and sent it to Buchanan and Tullock - who were both then at VPI. Both wrote back to me with comments and suggestions. In the end I wrote a dissertation about tax theory and public choice.


    Buchanan should also be thanked for his assidious avoidance of politics. He is a scholar, first, foremost and always.


    You left out his contributions to the development of the theory of Rent Seeking and also to the development of a rich literature (with Tullock) of the (what Tullock called) the theory of public bads.

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