James Buchanan: Clubs and Alternative Welfare Economics

摘要

With "An Economic Theory of Clubs," Buchanan (1965a) was trying to do much more than just fill in the conceptual gap between the extremes of pure public goods and pure private goods. He was not even trying to define a category of goods. He sought to develop a different form of welfare economics, in which there is no social welfare function and in which utility functions cannot be "read" by external observers, but where individual preferences can instead only be revealed by actions taken in response to prices. Buchanan adopted this perspective to analyze the pricing of public goods and to discuss clubs. Buchanan explicitly presents his clubs as a means to replace Samuelson's condition for optimal spending on public goods (1965a, 6). Indeed, Buchanan's clubs are foreign and incompatible with the role that club goods play in traditional Samuelson-style public economics.