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From: http://www.businessweek.com/news ... conomist-dies-at-93
Sad news: Economist and Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan has died at age 93, as first reported by his George Mason Univerysity colleague Tyler Cowen.
Bloomberg News
James Buchanan flashes a smile at a news conference announcing he has won the Nobel Proze in economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on Oct. 16, 1986. Photographer: Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images
-By Laurence Arnold on January 09, 2013
-James M. Buchanan, the U.S. economist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of economic self-interest to understand why politicians do what they do, has died. He was 93.
He died today, according to Alex Tabarrok, director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where Buchanan was a distinguished professor emeritus of economics. The cause wasn’t immediately available.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Buchanan the Nobel in economics “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.”
Buchanan was a pioneer in the field known as public-choice theory, which views government decisions through the personal interests of the bureaucrats and elected leaders who want to advance in their careers and win campaigns.
He summarized public choice as “politics without romance” and said it helps explain why established bureaucracies “tend to grow apparently without limit,” why pork-barrel politics endure and why the tax system is defined by “the increasing number of special credits, exemptions and loopholes.” At the time he received the award, his ideas were finding a receptive audience within the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
Rethinking Politics “Buchanan’s contribution is that he has transferred the concept of gain derived from mutual exchange between individuals to the realm of political decision-making,” the Nobel committee wrote. “According to Buchanan, it is often futile to advise politicians or influence the outcome of specific issues. In a given system of rules, the outcome is to a large extent determined by established political constellations.”
As Buchanan put it in “Liberty, Market and the State” (1986), politics is “a process within which individuals, with separate and potentially differing interests and values, interact for the purpose of securing individually valued benefits of cooperative effort.”
He drew on the work of Knut Wicksell, the Swedish economist who studied to what degree different forms of parliamentary government spend money in line with the wishes of taxpayers.
The choice of Buchanan for the Nobel drew some criticism, in part because his area of study was a step away from traditional economics in the direction of political science.
Surprised Honoree Buchanan himself, writing in 1989, said he was surprised to be honored, “because I held myself, my work, and my affiliation, to be too far outside the mainstream both of my own discipline and the American academia.”
James McGill Buchanan was born on Oct. 3, 1919, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His grandfather, John P. Buchanan, had been governor of Tennessee from 1891 to 1893.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Middle Tennessee State University in 1940 and his master’s from the University of Tennessee in 1941. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy on the staff of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948.
He taught at the University of Tennessee and Florida State University. At the University of Virginia, where he taught from 1956 to 1968, he led the economics department and helped found the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy, the research institute through which he continued his work on public-choice theory.
Major Work His best-known book, “The Calculus of Consent,” was published in 1962. He collaborated on it with his research institute co-founder, Gordon Tullock.
Among his students at Virginia was John Snow, who would become chairman and chief executive officer of CSX Corp., an international freight transportation company based in Jacksonville, Florida, and President George W. Bush’s first Treasury secretary.
Buchanan moved to Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1969 and became director of a new Center for Study of Public Choice. He moved with the research center to George Mason University in 1983.
Buchanan and his wife, the former Ann Bakke, married in 1945.
To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in Washington at larnold4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Charles W. Stevens at cstevens@bloomberg.net
布坎南生平：人大经济论坛经管百科介绍——http://wiki.pinggu.org/doc-view-33121.html
布坎南作品：https://s.pinggu.org/search.php?m ... =%B2%BC%BF%B2%C4%CF
布坎南因公共选择（public choice）理论名闻学界，获1986年诺贝尔经济学奖。
公共选择理论利用经济分析方法来分析政治家的行为，尤其是政治家在民主决策中的行为，认为政客也会为了再次当选而采取和经济人一样的作法。但布坎南并不认为自己的理论适用于中国。汪丁丁教授当年访问布坎南时，曾经邀请他来中国演讲。布坎南的回应是：我的理论不适用中国。这个北京荣誉市民蒙代尔形成鲜明对照。
公共选择理论，源于布坎南及合作者塔洛克的书《The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy》。一致同意的计算实际上是说ZF决策不独立于经济之外，而面对公共品的提供，也要从政治家追寻利益最大化去看。
这个公共品问题还涉及到搭便车，例如说国防这样的公共品，个人由于成本和财力恐无法全面提供，而ZF在提供的时候，总是有些人可以少付费甚至不付费而享受国防，搭了别人的便车。但布坎南也不尽然同意ZF由此可以包办公共品供给，在布坎南看来，市场固然可能失败，但ZF同样也会失败。布坎南大量对公共财政问题的研究，主要聚焦的就是此问题。
事实上，按照A. K. Sen(1998年诺贝尔奖得主)的说法，是布坎南重新复活了政治经济学。所以对布坎南来说，政治（politics）和政策（policies）是不同的，政策是在政治规则既定条件下，各个博弈方采取策略最大化自身利益的过程。但政治则是关于“规则”（rule）的竞争。而“什么是好的规则”这类问题应该是政治哲学回答的，经济学仅仅负责回应在规则既定条件下参与者应该采取什么决策的问题。布坎南将自己的这种分析称为“宪政经济学”。
哲学气息浓厚的布坎南，其思想深度远超经济学工匠们。他的“宪政经济学”对中国而言，并非不适用，而是需要再挖掘。而什么是好的规则这样的问题，从霍布斯、马基雅维利到布坎南，也将会一直延续下去。
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