James Buchanan’s Influence: A Personal View

Abstract

James Buchanan began influencing me before I even met him Prices, Income, and Public Policy: The ABC’s of Economics (McGraw-Hill, 1954) is a concise Principles text written by Clark Lee Allen, James M. Buchanan, and Marshall R. Colberg. I used that excellent book in teaching a one-semester course at the University of Maryland. It helped me face two challenges: of distinguishing between essential ideas and fringe refinements of economics and of putting the essentials across to students in one semester. Although ensuing years offered me fewer and fewer opportunities to teach the Principles course, I never thought that teaching it was a degrading chore. Economists avid to demonstrate technical expertise should remember that the strands of economics of which ignorance does the worst damage are precisely the basics, not technicalities giving rise to the most easily gradable test questions.