Thread by @PaulLew16394851

I’ve just listened to a really interesting episode of Econtalk on two fascinating essays by James Buchanan, namely 'What Should Economists do?' and 'Natural and Artifactual Man.' Lots of interesting points were discussed. @EconTalker @econlib (Thread.)

Those points included:
1. Buchanan as an advocate of an approach that focuses on exchange under particular institutional conditions (rather than on the allocation of resources, as set out most famously by Lionel Robbins).
2. The importance of comparative institutional analysis

3. The shortcomings of viewing people’s decisions as ‘engineering’ (constrained optimisation) problems, whereby they seek to satisfy given preferences, and the benefits of viewing them as ‘artifactual’ beings who can impose rules on themselves and thereby shape their preferences.

But I want to bring out a point that was, I think, only hinted at in the excellent discussion, namely that Buchanan was promoted to reflect on people’s artifactual nature by a desire to “explain satisfactorily to myself just why …

the ‘constitutional attitude’ seems so foreign to so many of my fellow economists” (all quotes from Natural and Artifactual Man). By the term ‘constitutional attitude’ Buchanan meant “the attitude that we create the institutions within which we interact, that we construct ...

the rules that define the game that we all must play”. Constitutional choice involves the capacity, central to artifactual man, to depart from routine utility maximisation and impose constraints on one’s own conduct. For Buchanan, behaviour of this kind cannot be reduced to ...

routine utility maximisation and is therefore unintelligible to those whose analytical vision is confined to neoclassical choice theory. As he writes, “I was led to ask, however, whether persons who do not and cannot conceive themselves to be artifactual (even if, in fact, ...

they are and must be), can easily conceive of artifactual social institutions, artifactual rules of the game, to be chosen apart from the simply selection of strategies to be played in the complex interaction process defined by the rules of the order. Does the manner in which ...

men model their own behaviour affect, and perhaps profoundly, the way that they model the social institutions under which they live? If individuals conceive themselves in the teleological image of modern economics, can they shift gears to a nonteleological image of a community?”

On this view, the model of man presupposed by neoclassical choice theory impedes our efforts to understand the constitutional moment in political-economic life. Once man is conceived as an artifact who constructs himself through his own creative, open-ended choices, then “it...

becomes relatively easy for him to envisage changing the basic rules of social order in the direction of imagined good societies” and the constitutional moment can be subject to fruitful analysis."

It’s worth noting, too, that Buchanan takes the notion of artifactual man from Vincent Ostrom ( jstor.org/stable/3110256…), a scholar whose work – as in that of his wife, Elinor Ostrom - emphasised people's efforts to govern themselves by crafting rules (i.e., self-governance).

For more on all this, see this paper, co-authored with @MalteDold academic.oup.com/cje/article/44…

Also available here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…