My article, co-authored with Phil Magness and Art Carden, on James Buchanan and the political economy desegregation is now forthcoming at the Southern Economic Journal. In this article, we do two things: 1) we respond to the claims made by Nancy MacLean (Duke University) in Democracy in Chains that nobel laureate James Buchanan was a closeted racist and segregationist and show that the opposite was true; 2) we situate public choice within debates over racism and desegregation. The article can be downloaded here on SSRN and the abstract is below:
Recent historical works, most notably 2017’s Democracy in Chains, claim that 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan’s formative contributions to political economy were inspired in significant part by hostility to Brown v. Board of Education. This argument suggests that the research agenda of public choice economics emerged from an opportunistic alliance with Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to school integration and should…
View original post 131 more words
Recent Comments