Important personalitiesBack

James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (/bjuːˈkænɨn/; 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 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. 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 5 October 1945; Anne, of Norwegian descent, was working as a nurse at the military base in Hawaii.

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.[citation needed] Photographs of Knight and Wicksell have hung from his office walls ever since.

Buchanan was the founder of a new Virginia school of political economy.

He taught at the University of Virginia from 1956–1968, where he founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

He taught at UCLA 1968–1969, 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 Marroquín, 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. 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".