James M. Buchanan Quotes

1919–2013 United States

James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (3 October 1919 – 9 January 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.

United States
Economists
Libertarians
Nobel laureates

Also known as: James McGill Buchanan

Random James M. Buchanan quote

4 quotes

Economics is the study of the whole system of exchange relationships. Politics is the study of the whole system of coercive or potentially coercive relationships.

In What Should Economists Do? (1979)

The hard core in public choice can be summarized in three presuppositions: (1) methodological individualism, (2) rational choice, and (3) politics-as-exchange.

I did not call him "Fritz." To me he remained always "Professor Hayek," despite his own graciousness in treating me as a peer. I shall not attempt to evaluate Professor Hayek's monumental contribution to our understanding of the events of this turbulent century, to the influence of his ideas on these events themselves or even to the development of economic theory in a strictly scientific sense.

A version of the old fable about the king's nakedness may be helpful here. Public choice is like the small boy who said that the king really has no clothes. Once he said this, everyone recognized that the king's nakedness had been recognized, but that no-one had really called attention to this fact.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James M. Buchanan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.