----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Patrick, It is true that Samuelson does not use the language of "exclusion" or "non-exclusion" in his original papers. But, I would contend that the concept is there in his discussion. In his original 1954 paper he defines "collective consumption goods" (a much better term, IMHO, than the implicitly tautological "public goods" (which can somehow mysteriously be "privately provided")) using the "jointness" or non-rivalry language, "each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction from any other individual's consumption of that good" is his initial characterization of such goods (p. 387). However, when he discusses the "Impossibility ofdecentralized spontaneous solution," Samuelson clearly invokes an implicit non-excudability as he describes the phenomenon we now label the "free rider" problem, arising from the "'external effects' basic to the notion of collective consumption goods" (p. 389). After invoking the possibility of everybody acting like a "parametric decentralized bureaucrat" (something he clearly approves of), he notes that "by departing from his indoctrinated rules, any one person can hope to snatch some selfish benefits in a way not possible under the self-policing competitive pricing of private goods..." (thereby making it impossible for "the grand ensemble of optimizing equations to have that special pattern of zeros"...). However, it is certainly the case that Coase served a useful purpose in bringing out more clearly what was involved in this ability of the individual to so "snatch selfish benefits." Barkley Rosser ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]