What Did Economists Do? Euvoluntary, Voluntary, and Coercive Institutions for Collective Action

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Southern Economic Journal

Volume

80

Issue

4

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

Publication Date

4-1-2014

First Page

926

Last Page

937

Abstract

In his November 1963 Presidential Address to the Southern Economic Association, Nobel laureate James Buchanan asked the audience to consider two rather blunt questions (1964, p. 213): “What are economists doing? What ‘should’ they be doing?” Buchanan's own somewhat disdainful answer to the first question was that, owing to economists' narrow preoccupation with problems involving the “optimal” allocation of scarce means among alternative or competing ends, economics was well on its way to becoming a not very interesting branch of applied mathematics. Echoing Friedrich von 1945, p. 520), 1964, p. 216) remarked that once a behavioral objective function and the constraints on it have been specified, the model's solution is predetermined, and the problem reduces to one of rote computation.

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