"The basic idea of Buchanan's constitutional economics was that public decision really comes in two stages, not one: the constitutional stage, and the political stage. People generate constitutions that create an institutional environment constrained in ways that they perceive to be beneficial. This has implications for how we think about the subsequent political stage. It rejects that Lysander Spooner take on things that says that unanimous consent is required for just policy decisions, because people will consent to a constitutional arrangement where legislation passes with less than unanimous consent because they think that the whole package of policy that such an institutional environment produces is preferable to policy produced in a unanimous consent environment. You can think about it as a sort of nested optimization."
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Nobel laureates from the United StatesLibertarians from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in EconomicsPeople from Tennessee
Original Language: English
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Daniel Kuehn, "Constitutional Economics" (2013)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan
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James M. Buchanan
James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (3 October 1919 – 9 January 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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