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We seem to be pretty close, J. Barkely, but at the same time quite a 
distance apart. In discussing Samuelson's contribution, you say that 
"there are in fact very few such pure collective consumption goods." 
I would argue that there are  _no_ pure collective consumption goods. 
The question raised by Samuelson's analysis is whether it is practically 
useful (relevant) to divide goods into classes based on whether they are 
purely private, purely public, impurely private, and impurely public, as 
he defines these mathematically. Unless one also addresses the issue of 
ownership (or, more generally, legal rights to control actions) and the 
institutions, dispositions, and incentives associated with it, I do not 
believe it is. Or perhaps in a more conciliatory tone, nothing you have 
said persuades me that this division is relevant to policy, which I take 
to be the ultimate goal of introducing the concept of a public good. 
 
Samuelson himself makes a claim that is similar to the one that you appear 
to 
make, in his 1954 paper about polar cases: "[T]o say that a thing is not 
located at the South Pole does not logically place it at the North 
Pole."(356) 
It is interesting to note, however, that although he gives the appearance 
of 
writing about the private-collective goods dichotomy, he is in fact 
referring 
to what he calls "public functions." He is concerned about whether 
"education, 
the courts, public defense, highway programs, police and fire protection" 
fit 
into his private-collective goods scheme. 
 
To me, he gets confused by his own scheme. A good is certainly not a public 
function and to assume that it is or to describe it as such puts the cart 
before the horse. The important question is whether the classification 
scheme 
he proposes helps us decide whether indeed the government (and which 
government) has a function in a particular respect. In this respect to call 
courts, public defense, and police protection public goods, pure or impure, 
is 
to confuse the provision of the conditions necessary for a market system 
with 
the provision of supplementary services. 
 
Samuelson writes more about the "intermediate cases" in his1958 paper. In 
this 
paper, he avoids the confusion caused by the term "public functions," 
focusing 
on the goods that exhibit characteristics of jointness and non-exclusion. 
He 
even recognizes the exclusion problem in his discussion of descramblers for 
TV 
signals. 
 
His argument starts with the idea of the achievement of the social optimum 
(335). Aside from the fact that he approaches the subject from the 
perspective 
of the theoretical welfare economist, the interesting thing about this 
paper, 
from the standpoint of my argument, is the absence of any acknowledgment 
of "the obstacles individuals face in reaching the optimal solution through 
exchanging rights to control actions."(my last post) Samuelson's discussion 
is 
about whether market prices will be optimal, as if the question with which 
he 
is concerned is theoretical and not practical. Yet he appears to want to 
say 
something practical. He appears to be associating every case of 
nonoptimality 
with some function for government or supplementary service. But to do this, 
one 
must assume that market pricing is optimal for so-called pure private 
goods. 
This assumption is unrealistic also, since it implicitly assumes a strictly 
enforced and costless property system and the absence of costs of making 
exchanges. The ultimate question here concerns the relevance of the pure 
private-pure public good dichotomy for evaluating government policies. This 
is 
where Samuelson comes up short. 
 
It is precisely in this respect that the characteristics of jointness and 
non-exclusion, when properly understood from the property rights 
perspective, 
show their relevance. And it is precisely for this reason that I regard 
Samuelson's exercises as part of the dark ages. At best, it seems to me, he 
can 
be credited with stimulating deeper thought on the matter, an exercise that 
seems to have begun with Head's work. This makes him analogous to Marx, who 
stimulated economists like Clark and Bohm Bawerk to produce the marginal 
productivity theory of distribution. By showing in extremes how a 
theoretical 
system (in Marx's case, classical economics) is not especially relevant to 
the 
conditions that one aims to describe or the problem that one aims to solve, 
a 
writer can often stimulate otherwise complacent minds to cause intellectual 
revolutions. 
 
Let me return to the question of whether Samuelson's public goods papers 
made 
an important modern contribution. I think that they did, but it was not to 
the 
theory of public goods. It was to theoretical welfare economics. So I will 
grant that his work is part of the history of that field. But I don't think 
that theoretical welfare economics is relevant to the concerns of students 
of 
public goods and market failure, as defined in the modern sense. 
 
Samuelson is a brilliant man and it is possible that if he had turned his 
attention to the problems that concerned Coase and the property rights 
theorists, he would have contributed to the further development of this 
subject. But I don't see how mathematical models of goods that do not 
exist, 
based on the assumption of fully enforced property rights and zero 
transactions 
costs, can be of much help in dealing with the practical problems of public 
policy toward legal rights in economic interaction and toward freedom of 
enterprise. 
 
 
Samuelson, Paul A. (1955). "Diagrammatic Exposition of a Theory of Public 
Expenditure." Review of Economics and Statistics. 37: 350-6. 
 
Samuelson, Paul A., "Aspects of Public Expenditure Theories," Review of 
Economics and Statistics, November, 1958. 
 
Pat Gunning 
 
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