Джеймс Бьюкенен: Американ экономисінің өмір жолы мен еңбектері

American economist (1919–2013)
the political economist

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 1920sby 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. He was completing his last month of training in New York during the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. 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.

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.