Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

40 James M. Buchananregularly scheduled basis. In addition, Coase’s mind was (is) simply too imaginativelyunique to allow him to lecture on standard textbook material. RonaldCoase’s influence on the Virginia program was largely exercised through facultycolleagues, although he did administer the written PhD preliminary examinationsfor several semesters.The intellectual climate in the faculty, and among graduate students, waspermeated with opportunity-cost thinking, either objectively (Coase 1938, 1960) orsubjectively (Buchanan 1969). And scholars in political economy were comingincreasingly to accept Wicksell’s unanimity norm as a benchmark for any evaluationof collectively considered options (Wicksell 1896). Given these two elementsof analysis, Coase’s resolution of “the problem of social cost” emerged quitenaturally (1960), and I distinctly recall the shared surprise those of us at Virginia feltwhen we learned that Coase’s seminar presentation at the University of Chicagohad stirred such controversy. Political economy at Virginia was, indeed, quitedifferent from that at Chicago.Rutledge Vining’s graduate course attracted only a few students, in part becausehe refused to adjust either to orthodox subject matter or method. As base, Vining’sideas were difficult to transmit, and, in fact, they were well in advance of his time(Vining 1984). A temporal displacement of four decades, until the years whencomputer simulations could generate stochastic patterns as desired, would haveallowed Vining to present his provocative ideas on economic diagnoses much morestraightforwardly. Nonetheless, Vining’s critical stress on the relevance of rules wasan important and continuing element in the constitutional direction that politicaleconomy was to take, a direction that is further discussed in the next section.Gordon Tullock occupied the role of conversational gadfly, coming off his considerabletalents as at least one-half of a true Renaissance man (the scientific andhistorical, but relative illiteracy in arts and letters), who kept us all on our toes withhis insistence that Homo economicus was alive and kicking almost everywhere.Tullock also provided me, personally, with a feedback of confidence required topush research and analysis toward the “political” part of the two-word subject“political economy,” a thrust that Warren Nutter would never have supportedother than reluctantly. Tullock and I informally organized a new coequal partnership,perhaps somewhat irritating to Nutter, when we sponsored an initial exploratoryconference in 1963, from which the origins of what later became the PublicChoice Society may be traced. For purposes of this narrative, I should emphasize,however, that the strictly defined “public choice” emphasis arrived relatively late inthe Virginia decade.Constitutional political economyModern public choice theory can be subdivided into two distinct research programs.The first includes analyses of particular outcomes that emerge underparticular rules and institutions that are used or may be used for reaching collectivedecisions, along with the analyses of the behavior of the agents who are constrainedto act within these rules. The second research program includes analyses of the