Samford University economics faculty members, Art Carden and Clara Piano, presented their research at the Public Choice Society conference in Nashville, Tennessee, March 11-13, 2022. Their presentations were part of a seminar titled “Faith, Religion, and Buchanan” which marked the 60^th anniversary of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s 1962 book The Calculus of Consent.

 

“The Calculus of Consent is a landmark book that started the entire subdiscipline we call ‘public choice’,” Carden said. “It’s fitting to remember it by seeing how the ideas contained in it interact with the obligations of our faith.”

 

During the session, Piano presented a paper she’s writing with Samford student Anna Claire Noblitt titled “Three to Get Married? Religious Marriage as a Cooperative Game.” Carden presented a paper he coauthored with Jaime Carini, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, and Nathanael Snow, assistant professor of economics and Ball State University, titled “Discussion, Dictation, and Decisions Among Natural Equals.”

 

Piano has written extensively about the economics of marriage, the family and religion.

 

Carden has written many academic pieces about Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winning economist from 1986, including: 

• “Going Far By Going Together: James M. Buchanan’s Economics of Shared Ethics” (with Gregory W. Caskey and Zachary Kessler, forthcoming in Business Ethics Quarterly); 
• “Situating Southern Influences in James M. Buchanan and Modern Public Choice Economics” (with Vincent Geloso and Phillip W. Magness, forthcoming in a volume to honor the late John E. Murray); 
• “James M. Buchanan and the Public Choice Tradition” (with M. Scott King, Audrey Redford, and James Hanley, forthcoming in a volume to be published by Argentina’s Fundacion Libertad); 
• “James M. Buchanan and the Political Economy of Desegregation” (with Phillip W. Magness and Vincent Geloso, Southern Economic Journal 2019); and
• “James M. Buchanan’s Constrained Vision inCost and Choice” (with M. Scott King, Audrey Redford and James Hanley for the Journal of Private Enterprise in 2021). 

Additionally, he wrote an obituary for Buchanan for Forbes.com in 2013 and this piece about his book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.