James Buchanan Awarded National Humanities Medal

by Don Boudreaux on November 9, 2006

My GMU colleague James Buchanan is among the 2006 recipients of the White House’s National Humanities Medal. This award is both much-deserved and most-appropriate: no living economist has done as much as Jim to ground economics in the humanities — to show that economics, properly and wisely done, is not a species of social engineering but the core of the science of understanding that human society is organic.

Here’s the report on the award in today’s Washington Post.

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Neel

A well-deserved prize indeed for a great scholar - my favorite living economist. This prize comes just 40 years after James Buchanan's paper on "Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors" and, of course, 20 years after the Nobel Prize.

pb

A government awarded medal? Certainly the humanities medal can be awarded more efficiently by a private entity. In fact some revenue can be generated by selling the rights so it is the FedEx Qualcom Humanities Medal. It's interesting, libertarians hate government and rant and rave against it at every opportunity, but when the government deigns to recognize their achievements, libertarians swell with pride.