Thursday, January 10, 2013

James Buchanan, RIP

We lost a titan this week.  Nobel-prize winning economist James Buchanan died at age 93.  He was one of the founders of Public Choice Theory and taught for a time at my alma mater (alas, before my time).

The Wall Street Journal includes two [1, 2] tributes to the man and his work in today's editorial/opinion pages.

For an explanation of Public Choice Theory in his own words, read Buchanan's Politics Without Romance.  This Buchanan quote sums it up,

"In a very real sense, public choice became a set of theories of governmental failures, as an offset to the theories of market failures that had previously emerged from theoretical welfare economics."

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