To Buchanan: Six Windows in Economics
I recently attended a cool nerdy economics event called <a href="https://ppe.mercatus.org/events/thirty-years-after-nobel-james-buchanans-virginia-political-economy">Thirty Years after the Nobel: James Buchanan's Virginia Political Economy, hosted by the Mercatus Center at GMU.
Dr. Michael Munger gave a wonderful keynote in which he emphasized Buchanan's use of relatively absolute absolutes, apparently coming further from <a href="http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=248">Frank Knight. One illustration of the application of this quasi-objectivist worldview was an analogy to windows: If we look over a field from several windows we may come to slightly different conclusions, but they are ultimately all reconcilable views of the same objective truth.
<a href="https://soundcloud.com/hayekprogrampodcast/keynote-lecture-thirty-years-james-buchanan-nobel-virginia-political-economy">Keynote audio here - I'm trying to get the powerpoint. begins at 9:25. 32 minute point is nietzsche's windows
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan">Buchanan is also said to have insisted that there is no question beyond scholarly scrutiny, that there is no window in the house of economic thought which should be prohibited from use.
In this article I would would like to propose six windows for exploration, and suggest that Buchanan as a person is a key scholarly path toward synthesizing Neoclassical and Austrian economics.
The six windows are:
- Normative Economics
- Heterogeneous Preferences
- Paternalistic Optimization
- Spontaneous Property Rights
- Bliss Points