James Ahiakpor wrote:  
"I was hoping with my questions to motivate Sumitra Shah to rethink her  
position regarding childcare, eldercare, and the usefulness of  
attempting to impute values to home production.  Her response shows that  
I failed.  Let me restate the conclusions to which I was trying to  
direct her."  
  
  
   
I thank James  for his dispassionate post. But he is right, I was not persuaded to rethink
my positions he mentioned.
   
To the definition of "purely" public goods  I would add externalities to expand the
concept to a generally acceptable level. Please refer to any introductory textbook where
education is mentioned as a quasi-public goods along with some others due to their
positive spillover benefits. Taxes have their opportunity costs, but as a society we make
public choices about which benefits overweigh the costs. Economists can help in making the
cost-benefit analysis.
   
Adam Smith's stand on the need for public education for the workers because of the mind-
numbing effects of the division of labor is well-known.  In his famous passage he says:
   
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,....He naturally
loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant
as it is possible for a human creature to be."  Smith concludes the passage: "But in every
improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is,
the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to
prevent it."
   
I am not minimizing Smith's emphasis on martial virtues (and thus on national defense) as
an important motive in recommending public education, but on balance it seems like more
expansive a moral sentiment to me. Smith was pessimistic about the future of capitalism
whose virtues he extolled. Would his pessimism have been tempered knowing that it evolved
and adjusted sometimes in ways he did not foresee?
   
In the final analysis, James and I will have to agree to respectfully disagree. That is
not a bad thing among economists...
   
Sumitra Shah