What passes for common sense....

An AP story about former president Clinton's appearance at Harvard said the following: "disasters such as worldwide famine and an obesity epidemic threaten the country's stability unless politicians begin to look ahead and cooperate." How the former president tied together obesity and famine is beyond me but there is a larger story.

The story went on to say that the Kennedy School, which is Harvard's school of government/public administration - is "spending $1.5 million over two years to study why governments across the world have failed to act on threats such as heat waves and hurricanes, even when they know they are coming." They might want to look to the literature of Public Choice Economics and not do all that research.

For example, Gordon Tullock, one of the two founders of the field, wrote an article some time ago called the Theory of Public Bads. In 1954 Richard Musgrave wrote a paper which is considered seminal in the field which tried to define something called public goods. Musgrave was a renowned scholar on public finance. When I was doing my doctorate that paper and his text on public were required reading. Unfortunately, Musgrave's theory was prone to expansionism. While the orginal paper limited the class, his other writings were a bit more excited about ways to extend the provision of activities through the public sector. Most of his writings made a, what seems to me somewhat naive assumption, that when something moves into government the risks of negative externalities (or consequences) was somewhat reduced. Tullock argued that a lot of the literature on public goods assumed no negative consequences from governmental actions - and thus we should besides looking at the good that could be created from governmental action that we should also look at the potential problems.

I would suggest that Harvard could profitably spend some of its time looking at the role of self-interested behavior in governmental decisions. Many of what seem to be odd or negligent decisions in government come about because self interest is not parked at the door - as writers like Musgrave seemed to implicitly believe.