Reconstructing a Public Economics
* Article: Reconstructing a public economics: markets, states and societies. Michael A. Bernstein. real-world economics review, issue no. 84, 2018
URL = http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue84/Bernstein84.pdf comments
Part of a special issue on the same theme of 'public economics'
Abstract
"Liberating contemporary economic analysis from the straitjacket of mainstream neoclassical theory is the animating theme of the essays assembled in this special number of the RealWorld Economics Review (RWER). The authors of the works assembled here are all committed to the idea that what is regarded by traditional economic theory as a set of exogenous forces framed and deployed from outside the market mechanisms that are the focus of the discipline – namely, the public sector – is in fact an integral agent that directly affects the very issues and phenomena neoclassical theory claims to explain. Indeed, it is the very failure of traditional economic thinking to account for the “public economy” in any systematic and meaningful fashion that prevents it from explaining how societies actually produce goods and services and, in compensation, constructs inapt and futile framings, such as “market failures,” to explain why governments exist.
In contradistinction to prevailing doctrine, the following articles strive to reconstruct a public economics by embedding the public sector intrinsically within economic models. Rather than separate the “public sector” from economics, understanding collective action as something distinct from the economy, a public economics views the entire economic system – the “macroeconomy” as a whole – as comprised of multiple economic systems: of markets, of public activities, and of domestic interactions."
More information
- The public economy: understanding government as a producer. A reformation of public economics. By June Sekera. real-world economics review, issue no. 84, 2018