James McGill Buchanan Jr. ( bew-KAN-ən; October 3, 1919 – January 9, 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory originally outlined in his most famous work, The Calculus of Consent, co-authored with Gordon Tullock in 1962. He continued to develop the theory, eventually receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute as well as of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) and MPS president from 1984 to 1986, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, and professor at George Mason University.
Early life and education Buchanan was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the eldest of the three children of James and Lila (Scott) Buchanan. His paternal grandfather, John P. Buchanan, was governor of Tennessee from 1891 to 1893. According to Buchanan's 1992 memoir, when his father, James Buchanan Sr., married in 1918 and began his family he borrowed heavily to mechanize and improve the farm, including the acquisition of a herd of Jersey cattle. The Buchanan farm suffered during the 1920s—by the time James Buchanan Jr. was old enough to work on the farm, all the work was done either manually or with mules and horses. Buchanan described his life on the farm as "genteel poverty" with neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. The house did contain his grandfather's library of books on politics. Unlike in other farm families where children regularly stayed home to help as farm labor, his mother insisted he never miss a day of school. While completing his first university degree in 1940 at Middle Tennessee State Teachers College he continued to live at home and work on the farm. In 1941 he completed his M.S. at the University of Tennessee.
World War II Buchanan attended the United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School in New York starting in September 1941. He was assigned to Honolulu, Hawaii in March 1942, where he served as an officer on Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's operations planning staff in the United States Navy. Buchanan attributed his dislike of what he considered "Eastern elites" to his six months of Navy officer training in New York in 1941. He believed that there was overt discrimination against young men from the South or West in favor of those who had attended what he called establishment universities in the Northeast. In a 2011 interview, Buchanan said that out of twenty "boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked against a background of a total of 600 [men]." He was completing his last month of training in New York during the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Buchanan said that "in balance" his work in operations planning during the war was "easy." He was discharged in November 1945.
Education With the support of his wife, Ann Bakke, and the generous G.I. Bill education subsidy available to war veterans, Buchanan applied to graduate school. In his 1992 autobiography, Buchanan said that when he began his graduate studies in 1945 at the University of Chicago, he was unaware of how market-oriented the Chicago school of economics was. He stated that he was essentially socialist until he enrolled in a course taught by Frank Knight. Knight, who also taught leading economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Within six weeks of starting his studies, Buchanan said he was "converted into a zealous advocate of the market order". Knight became Buchanan's "de facto" PhD supervisor, and his 1948 dissertation, "Fiscal Equity in a Federal State", was heavily influenced by Knight. Buchanan did not consider himself as belonging to the Austrian or the Chicago schools of economics. But he was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and served as its president from 1984 to 1986 just before he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He did share many of their common beliefs. As Buchanan puts it: "I certainly have a great deal of affinity with Austrian economics and I have no objections to being called an Austrian. Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises might consider me an Austrian but, surely some of the others would not." Buchanan went on to say that: "I didn't become acquainted with Mises until I wrote an article on individual choice and voting in the market in 1954. After I had finished the first draft I went back to see what Mises had said in Human Action. I found out, amazingly, that he had come closer to saying what I was trying to say than anybody else." It was also at Chicago that he first read and found enlightening the work of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. Photographs of Knight and Wicksell hung on his office walls ever after.
Academic career After completing his PhD in 1948, Buchanan taught at the University of Tennessee as associate professor and later full professor from 1948 until 1951. He was a professor of economics at Florida State University from 1951 until 1956 and served for two years as the department chair. From 1955 to 1956 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1956 to 1968, UCLA from 1968 to 1969, and Virginia Tech from 1969 to 1983, where he held the title Distinguished Professor of Economics. In 1998, Buchanan returned to Virginia Tech as a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Economics and Philosophy where he contributed in organizing and providing funds for workshops, symposium, and lectures, including the annual James M. Buchanan lectures. In 1983 he became a professor at George Mason University where he remained until his retirement, after which he continued with emeritus status.
Professional organizations
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