James M. Buchanan Jr. (1919-)

Premio Nobel  1986

Economista norteamericano obtuvo el Premio Nobel de Economía en 1986 por su desarrollo de las bases contractuales y constitucionales de la teoría de la adopción de decisiones económicas y políticas.

Buchanan estudió en las universidades de Tennessee y Chicago y ejerció la docencia en las de Pennsylvania y Virginia. Especialista en Hacienda Pública, realizó interesantes estudios sobre el papel de la inflación como impuesto y sobre la naturaleza de la Deuda Pública. Es líder y teórico de la corriente Public Choice que analiza la forma en que se adoptan las decisiones públicas que influyen en el funcionamiento del sistema económico.

Obras:

• "Individual Choice in Voting and the Market", 1954, JPE
• "Social Choice in Voting and the Market", 1954, JPE
• Public Principles of Public Debt, 1958.
• "Positive Economics, Welfare Economics and Political Economy", 1959, J Law Econ
• Fiscal Theory and Political Economy, 1960.
• "Externality", with W.C. Stubblebine, 1962, Economica
• The Calculus of Consent: Logical foundations for constitutional democracy, con G. Tullock, 1962.
• "What Should Economists Do?", 1964, Southern EJ
• "Ethical Rules, Expected Values and Large Numbers", 1965, Ethics
• "Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors", 1966, in Krupp, editor, Structure of Economic Science
• Public Finance in Democratic Process, 1967.
• Demand and Supply of Public Goods, 1968.
• "An Economist's Approach to Scientific Politics", 1968, in Parsons, editor, Perspectives in the Study of Politics.
• Cost and Choice: An inquiry into economic theory, 1969.
• "Is Economics the Science of Choice?", 1969, in Streissler, editor, Roads to Freedom
• "Notes for an Economic Theory of Socialism", 1970, Public Choice
• Academia in Anarchy, with N.Devletoglou, 1971.
• "Equality as Fact and Norm", 1971, Ethics
• "Before Public Choice", 1973, in Tullock, editor, Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy
• The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan, 1975.
• "Public Finance and Public Choice", 1975, National Tax Journal
• "A Contractarian Paradigm for Applying Economic Theory", 1975, AER
• "Barro on the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem", 1976, JPE
• "Methods and Morals in Economics", 1976, in Breit and Culbertson, editors, Science and Ceremony
• Democracy in Deficit: the political legacy of Lord Keynes, with R.E. Wagner, 1977.
• "Markets, States and the Extent of Morals", 1978, AER
• Freedom in Constitutional Contract, 1978.
• What Should Economists Do?, 1979.
• The Power to Tax: the analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution, with G. Brennan, 1980.
• "The Homogenization of Heterogeneous Inputs", with R.D. Tollison, 1981, AER
• "The Domain of Subjective Economics: Between predictive science and moral philosophy", 1982, in Kirzner, editor, Method, Process and Austrian Economics
• "Order Defined in the Process of Emergence", 1982, Literature of Liberty
• The Reason of Rules: constitutional political economy with G. Brennan, 1985.
• Liberty, Market and the State, 1986.
• Economics: between predictive science and moral philosophy, with G. Brennan, 1988.
• Explorations in Constitutional Economics, 1989.
• The Economics and Ethics of Constitutional Order, 1991.