{"id":30016,"date":"2015-02-03T02:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T07:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30016"},"modified":"2025-05-21T09:05:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T13:05:04","slug":"senator-elizabeth-warren-doesnt-really-understand-what-public-goods-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/03\/senator-elizabeth-warren-doesnt-really-understand-what-public-goods-are\/","title":{"rendered":"Senator Elizabeth Warren doesn’t really understand what “public goods” are"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Worstall<\/a> on what’s wrong with Senator Warren’s most recent proposal to claw back profits that are derived from government-sponsored research:<\/p>\n

The answer being that finding out basic knowledge is something we call a public good. This has a specific economic meaning and it really means that private actors, whether people or companies, will do too little of this whatever it is. Because it\u2019s just simply too difficult to make money out of having done this whatever it is. That\u2019s really what \u201cpublic good\u201d means. It doesn\u2019t mean goods supplied to the public nor even things that it is good for the public to have.<\/p>\n

So, given that private actors won\u2019t do these things but we also think that it would be just great for lots of these things to be done, well, we\u2019ve got to do something about it then. And the answer to that is government. Even the most minarchist of us (although perhaps not the anarchists) would agree that some of the public goods provided by government are pretty good. A military to defend us from the ravening Canadian hordes, a criminal justice system to protect us from crime, a Constitution to protect us from politicians. All seem pretty good to me. The answer really is government in those cases.<\/p>\n

The argument gets extended: that basic research is a public good. It\u2019s very difficult to make a profit from it therefore not enough of it gets done in the private sector. So we should get government to go do it for us. Excellent, so, when we get that research being done then we\u2019re getting what we pay our taxes to get government to do. We\u2019ve got our public good.<\/p>\n

What both Warren and Mazzucato are arguing is that government should then come back for a second bite of the cherry. They should get some of the profits from that basic research. But there aren\u2019t any profits from that basic research: that\u2019s why we\u2019re getting government to do it because you can\u2019t make a profit from having done the research. If we can make a profit from having done this research then government shouldn\u2019t be doing it because it\u2019s not a public good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Worstall on what’s wrong with Senator Warren’s most recent proposal to claw back profits that are derived from government-sponsored research: The answer being that finding out basic knowledge is something we call a public good. This has a specific economic meaning and it really means that private actors, whether people or companies, will do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,16,13],"tags":[755,1595,513],"class_list":["post-30016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-science","category-usa","tag-incentives","tag-publicgoods","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7O8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30017,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30016\/revisions\/30017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}