Книги

The title, "The Demand and Supply of Public Goods," has been selected to emphasize those features that set the book apart from orthodox public finance and at the same time tie it to neoclassical economics. Public finance, traditionally, has neither contained a theory of demand nor one of supply. Public goods and services have not been central to this subdiscipline. Public finance has been rather straightforward applied price theory, and its scientific content has been limited to predictions about the reactions of individuals and firms to fiscal institutions. The scholar from outer space, coming to earth in the post-Marshallian era, might have concluded on perusing the English-language literature that governments exist wholly apart from their citizens, that these units impose taxes on individuals and firms primarily to nourish the state; and he might have thought that positive public finance consists in predicting the effects of these taxes. Normative public finance, observed alongside the positive elements, consists in pronouncements about how taxes should be imposed.

The book is based on materials that I have presented in a second-year graduate seminar at the University of Virginia from 1957 to 1968. These materials have been modified each year, I hope with gradual improvement. They were first written up in manuscript form in the fall of 1961, when eight lectures were delivered at Cambridge University, where I spent the 1961-62 academic year. The version presented here was actually written during the 1964-65 and 1965-66 academic years, and the summer of 1966. Final revisions were made in late 1966 and early 1967.