April 5, 2012 4:59PM # Richard Wagner on Remembering Bill Niskanen By [Mark A. Calabria](https://www.cato.org/people/mark-calabria) --- SHARE Perhaps it is fitting, at least to me, that George Mason University Economics Professor Richard Wagner has written a useful overview and remembrance of Cato’s William Niskanen for the journal *Public Choice*. Fitting in that I was first exposed to Niskanen’s work, long before I came to Cato, in Wagner’s graduate public choice class. Niskanen’s classic book [*Bureaucracy and Representative Government*](http://www.amazon.com/Bureaucracy-Representative-Government-Willam-Niskanen/dp/0202309592/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333659132&sr=1-2) is, as Wagner notes, “a major contribution in the earliest days of public choice.” It was certainly one of the bigger influences on my own economic thinking. The survey ([free and on-line](http://www.springerlink.com/content/00072817155k2q13/)) begins with Niskanen’s time at Chicago before moving to a discussion of the connection and significance of Liberty and economic science. As someone who partly came to libertarianism via the study of economics, I found this section relevant to my own experiences, as I am sure many other economists will also be able to relate to. Wagner’s essay also helps remind us that Bill was not just a great champion of Liberty, which he was, but also a significant contributor to the development of public choice economics. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).