IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01475760.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Musgrave, Samuelson, and the Crystallization of the Standard Rationale for Public Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

    (Centre Walras-Pareto - UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This paper provides a narrative of the emergence of the standard textbook definition of public goods. It focuses on Richard A. Musgrave's contribution in defining public goods as nonrival and nonexcludable—from 1937 to 1973. Although Samuelson's mathematical definition is generally used in models of public goods, the qualitative understanding of the specificity of pure public goods owes a lot to Musgrave. I argue that the evolution of Musgrave's writings on public goods reflects his intention to justify his view of the role of the state in providing goods and services to citizens with an argument that would be convincing to the community of U.S. economists in the mid-twentieth century. Musgrave's definition highlights his lifelong concern for a comprehensive, realistic, and useful normative theory of the public sector.

Suggested Citation

  • Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, 2017. "Musgrave, Samuelson, and the Crystallization of the Standard Rationale for Public Goods," Post-Print hal-01475760, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01475760
    DOI: 10.1215/00182702-3777158
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Beatrice Cherrier & Jean-Baptiste Fleury, 2017. "Economists’ interest in collective decision after World War II: a history," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 23-44, July.
    2. Gerasimos T. Soldatos, 2020. "Merit goods and excise taxation in quasilinear markets for complementary private consumption," Public Sector Economics, Institute of Public Finance, vol. 44(4), pages 551-566.
    3. Luca Fiorito & Massimiliano Vatiero, 2018. "Positional goods and social welfare: a note on George Pendleton Watkins’ neglected contribution," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(3), pages 460-472, May.
    4. June Sekera & Andreas Lichtenberger, 2020. "Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need," Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality, Springer, vol. 5(3), pages 1-28, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01475760. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.