Just listened to an excellent discussion on Buchanan’s life and ideas between Don Boudreaux and Russ Roberts. They discussed two important essays by Buchanan, ‘What should economists do?’ and ‘Natural and artifactual man’, which illuminate Buchanan’s view on human nature and choice.
Some personal takeaways:
- Buchanan was chiefly known as the founder (or a co-founder) of public choice economics, and rightly so. But he is also more than a pioneer of public choice. Buchanan was a very productive scholar and has written on a wide range of issues in economics.
- Buchanan maintains that it is nonsensical to combine people’s preferences into a unified set of preferences. People exchange with one another not because they’re seeking to achieve a single collective goal, as if they’re subsumed under a collective conscious. Rather, people see the possibility of better achieving their own goals by meeting other people’s goals in exchange for their help.
- As such, economics is not about explaining (much less engineering!) how individual goals are unified to bring about the best allocation of resources in society, but explaining how diverse and even conflicting individual preferences are respected and reconciled through voluntary exchange in markets, civil society, and politics.
- Man is not just a creaturely being but also a becoming; while humans tend to make choices according to their character and habits, their choices also shape their character and habits. Hence our lives are ‘artifactual’ in the sense that we have the freedom and responsibility to choose what kind of person we want to become.
- Incentives matter but are not the end of the world. Economists must guard against overplaying the incentive card in modelling and depicting humans as solely driven by their impulses to maximise pleasure or ‘utility’. Our immediate impulses influence but not determine our actions.
Listen to the podcast here.