Paul doesn’t know what I’m talking about:
I’m a little bit unclear what you mean by public-wealth. Are you defining private-wealth as rich people and public-wealth as everybody else? Or are you defining private-wealth as the wealth of citizens and corporations and public-wealth as that of the government?
So let me clarify. I’ll start with definitions. Private wealth, to my mind, means having large access to private goods, goods that we own and enjoy in the private sphere, to the exclusion of other people. Private goods include things like big TVs and fast cars and fancy watches.
Public goods, on the other hand, are those goods that we own and enjoy collectively. They are, in economic terms, “non-excludable” — meaning, you can’t prevent others from enjoying them — and “non-rivalrous” — meaning, when others enjoy them, it doesn’t reduce your enjoyment in turn — and they include things like the law, clean air, good infrastructure, scientific discoveries, and decent education. Public wealth means being rich in public goods.
My contention as a progressive is that national prosperity depends in large part on our collective investment in these public goods. This is the progressive belief that national “greatness” must be achieved, as a nation, through work, community investment and patriotic unity. Conservatives, on the whole, disagree. They rebuke studies like this, which relate economic growth to public education spending, or like this, which tie attitudes of tolerance to city housing values. They focus, instead, as a matter of economic policy, on aggrandizing the private wealth of the very rich. Because bigger TVs and faster cars for the rich will trickle down wealth to the rest of us and will move our nation forward. Except of course, in those cases when they won’t — like, for example, in the case of America for the past 30 years.
Update: Check out Ravi’s Crimson column for today. He’s spot on:
Economists generally agree that one of the most crucial factors contributing to a nation’s long-term growth is its stock of human capital—the skills, capabilities, and potential of its citizens to create, innovate, and produce goods.
Photo credit: MIT
