Abstract
Throughout his career, James Buchanan displayed a remarkable consistency regarding the didactic role of the properly trained economist. As he would say, it takes varied iterations to force alien concepts upon reluctant minds. What he regarded as the role of the properly trained economist is just a variation on his understanding of constitutional political economy. According to Buchanan, properly trained economists occupy dual, roles as economic scientists and political economists. As economic scientists they understand how spontaneous orders emerge as a result of self-interested behavior under alternative institutional arrangements. As political economists they may propose changes to existing institutions for the purpose of better facilitating the mutually shared goals among free and responsible individuals. Such proposals are not technical advice to a benevolent dictator, but conjectures about Pareto improvements to be tested through democratic deliberation. These related, but distinct, roles, have a non-normative and didactic basis, which is to teach citizens of a democratic society that there are opportunities for mutual gains from trade.
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- 1.
As F. A. Hayek has written, “it is probably no exaggeration to say that every important advance in economic theory during the last hundred years was a further step in the consistent application of subjectivism” (1952, p. 31). “This is a development,” Hayek argues further, “which has been carried out most consistently by L.v. Mises and I believe that most peculiarities of his views which at first strike many readers as strange and unacceptable are due to the fact that in the consistent development of the subjectivist approach he has for a long time moved ahead of his contemporaries” (1952, pp. 209–210, fn. 24, emphasis added; see also Knight 1940).
- 2.
Contrary to this standard interpretation, however, we have written elsewhere that Tullock’s methodological and analytical understanding of economics fits more closely with Mises (see Boettke and Candela 2018).
- 3.
As Wagner argues in his latest book, James Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy : A Rational Reconstruction, Buchanan ’s unique contributions to public finance, and political economy more broadly, can be traced back to his 1949 paper, “The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach,” in which he rejects what he refers to as an “organismic theory the state” as a single decision-making unit acting for society as a whole, seeking to maximize some conceptually quantifiable social welfare function. This rejection of preexisting social welfare function, existing “out there” and independent of human choice and valuation, is what resonates throughout Buchanan ’s work.
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Boettke, P.J., Candela, R.A. (2018). James Buchanan and the Properly Trained Economist. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_4
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