Tag: James Buchanan. Public Choice Theory

The Political Economy of James Buchanan

Among the many economists I have deep respect and reverence for are the classical economists like Adam Smith, David Hume, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Among the neoclassicals are William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras, Carl Menger, Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis Edgeworth, and Lionel Robbins.

Jevons, Walras, and Menger were the founding figures of the marginalist revolution that established neoclassical economics, with Jevons and Walras independently developing the theory of marginal utility in the 1870s.

Alfred Marshall synthesized classical and neoclassical ideas in his influential textbook Principles of Economics. Pareto, a successor to Walras in Lausanne, Switzerland advanced the field, especially in general equilibrium theory. Edgeworth developed a mathematical economic theory based on utility maximization, and later economists like John Hicks and George Stigler helped broaden the scope of neoclassical thought. Continue reading “The Political Economy of James Buchanan”

Institutions, not People

James McGill Buchanan, Jr

In my tribe, I’m particularly fond of two people: Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006) and James M. Buchanan (1919 – 2013). Both were associated with the University of Chicago. Both were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics: Friedman in 1976 and Buchanan in 1986.

About Friedman, the wiki states: Continue reading “Institutions, not People”

Democracy – Part 3

Namdhari store at the Orion Mall in Bengaluru

In part one of this series, I baldly stated that I think democracy is a bad idea. I do not think it is totally worthless but it does not scale.

Here I explore democracy in terms of scope. I hope to argue that if you wish to have democracy scaled up, then you have to severely limit its scope; thus only to the extent that its scope is limited can it be scaled up.

The TL;DR version: scale up democracy to your heart’s content to the extent that you are willing to limit its scope; and increase democracy’s scope as much as you wish if you limit its scale. Scale and scope are opposed. The more of one you wish to have, the less of the other you may have. Continue reading “Democracy – Part 3”