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2 Const. Pol. Econ. 1 (1991)

handle is hein.journals/constpe2 and id is 1 raw text is: CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, VOL. 2, NO. 1, 1991 JACK WISEMAN: A PERSONAL APPRECIATION James M. Buchanan There is so much still to do: may there be enough time. Academics are lucky people. What better life could there be? Jack Wiseman Cost, Choice and Political Economy There was not enough time. Jack Wiseman died on 20 January 1991, less than a month after his seventy-first birthday, and only two months after he returned to Yorkshire from one of his regular visits to the Center for Study of Public Choice, in Fairfax, Virginia. He described this last visit (September-November 1990) as the most stimulating of the five he had made to Fairfax, after earlier visits both to Charlottesville and Blacksburg. He left us full of vigor and determined to get on with the treatise he had already fully organized in his thinking. Cancer was diagnosed immediately on his return home, and in both conversations and correspondence over those last few weeks, Jack stuck fast to the convictions expressed in the last two sentences of the above citation. And, in an electronic message relayed to my colleague, David Levy,just four days before his death, Jack ended with, Don't be too distressed for me. After all, what has happened is an (unwelcome) vindication of the Wiseman Unknowability Thesis. The Center for Study of Public Choice has lost an Adjunct Research Associate, and one of its most enthusiastic supporters. Constitutional Political Economy has lost a contributing member of its Board of Edi- tors. Professional colleagues and friends on all continents who mourn his death must be counted in the hundreds. My own is, however, a special deprivation, that only I can partially understand, but which, somehow, I must try to express in this note, the writing of which may, in itself, help me to locate Jack Wiseman in that small (and dwindling) set of persons who have been more than colleagues, more than friends. Jack himself told part of the story in his introductory autobiographical essay in Cost, Choice and Political Economy (1989), the closing words of which I used in the preceding epigraph. I first met Jack in 1960, early during one of my four visits to London and LSE in that turbulent decade. Both of us were, in a sense, outsiders I

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