One of the most remarkable characteristics of our friend and mentor, James Buchanan, who passed away on January 9 this winter, was his ability to rethink a question from the foundations unencumbered by what he had written on the topic before. We were fortunate to witness Buchanan’s multiyear rethinking of the foundational question of whether a market economy is stable. (The lectures were recorded and posted on YouTube: 2010, 2011, 2012. The papers themselves can be found on the Jepson School web site: 2010 (link no longer available), 2011 (link no longer available), 2012 (link no longer available).)
The project began after the economic crisis with the question of why Chicago-influenced economists got things so badly wrong.
