James McGill Buchanan Jr. was an American economist best known for The Calculus of Consent, a book he co-wrote with Gordon Tullock, and his subsequent work further developing his outlook on public choice theory first articulated in that book. He was a member of the boards of advisors for both the IEA and the Independent Institute and was a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato institute. During the Second World War, he served as an officer for the United States Navy at Guam and Pearl Harbor as part of Admiral Nimitz’s operations planning staff. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Buchanan spent most of his career as an academic, teaching at the University of Tennessee, Florida State University, the University of California Los Angeles, and others. He received the Nobel prize in 1986 for his “development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.”

The Inconsistencies of the National Health Service (1965)

From Private Preferences to Public Philosophy: The Development of Public Choice (1978)

Monopoly in Money and Inflation: The Case for a Constitution to Discipline Government (1981)

Post-Reagan Political Economy (1989)

Europe’s Constitutional Opportunity (1990)