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Two unpublished papers from the 1950s

The two papers presented here were written in the mid-1950s under the following circumstances. Both Jack Wiseman and I were lecturers at LSE, where I had recently been promoted to Reader in Public Finance and Jack had been seconded to cover the economics of public enterprise alongside his obligations to teach micro-economic theory. I could hardly avoid having to give a seminar on the then growing interest in the economics of public spending. The result was having to face the critical audience of staff and selected graduate students in the Lionel Robbins seminar. This is the first re-appearance of my paper, which has never been published. Jack and I ran a graduate public finance seminar where we discussed Samuelson’s modelling of the public goods problem. We joined forces in being severely critical of the supposition that the presence of ‘publicness’ automatically required state provision of public goods. Our attack is contained in the second paper, which was not only unpublished but was rejected without a referees’ report by the Review of Economics and Statistics. We never found the time to work on either paper, concentrating what joint efforts we could spare on our work on the growth in government spending; and I believe this to have been a good decision. I do not suggest that either paper is necessarily worth publishing now or was worth publishing at the time when written. They are more a record of