Showing posts with label Gordon Tullock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gordon Tullock. Show all posts

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Public Choice Theorist James Buchanan R.I.P.

Nobel prize winner and Public Choice theory co-founder James M. Buchanan passed away yesterday at the age of the age of 93 yesterday. Gordon Tullock has been Mr. Buchanan's partner in developing Public Choice.

I join the exponents of free markets in paying tribute to Mr. Buchanan with this resonant quote on “government failure”, which Mr. Buchanan embellished as Politics without Romance:
Public choice then came along and provided analyses of the behavior of persons acting politically, whether voters, politicians or bureaucrats. These analyses exposed the essentially false comparisons that were then informing so much of both scientific and public opinion. 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. Or, as I put it in the title of a lecture in Vienna in 1978, public choice may be summarized by the three-word description, 'politics without romance'.
“Politics without romance” included Mr. Buchanan’s strident aversion to public debt finance as summarized by the Independent Institute’s Jeremy H. Tempelman (italics mine)
1. The burden of public debt falls on future generations.
2. Public debt constitutes negative capital formation.
3. Ricardian equivalence does not hold because of fiscal illusion.
4. Keynesian macroeconomics is the principal cause of the disappearance of the unwritten balanced-budget norm that existed prior to the 1930s.
5. Barring constitutional constraints, public deficits will be a permanent phenomenon.
6. Public debt is immoral because future generations bear a financial burden as a result of spending and borrowing decisions in which they did not participate.
7. A constitutional balanced-budget amendment is required to remedy the tendency in elective democracy for government to borrow and spend rather than to tax and spend, and to spend much rather than little.
Such lessons have increasingly been valid and or applicable in today’s world which has been undergoing tremendous friction from the ongoing collision between deepening politicization and the forces of decentralization from the information age.

Thanks for the wonderful insights.

Rest in Peace.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Quote of the Day: Economics is a Policy Science

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of influencing future policy, the elementary teacher is more important than I. I hope that my work will trickle down to the elementary teacher and through him to the large number of potential voters, potential Congressman, and potential newspapermen in his class. This is however merely hope. I don't actually do anything to make that more probable. It is true that my writings are, generally speaking, much more accessible to the ordinary person than most economic writings. This may help somewhat.

Nevertheless, the present situation is in my opinion very undesirable. Economics is a policy science and we should be trying to influence policy.
This is from law and economics Professor Gordon Tullock known for his work with Professor James Buchanan on the Public Choice Theory, as quoted by Professor Peter Boettke at the Coordination Problem Blog.

For the Austrian school, economics is basically value free (Wertfreiheit) or neutral with regards to all value judgments.

However this does not take away analysis through the provision of “praxeological critique of inconsistent and meaningless ethical programs” and the analytical exposition of “all the myriad consequences of different political systems and different methods of government intervention” (Rothbard). This implies that economic education is the principal way to influence public opinion on politics, as well as, on social policies.