The Lighthouse in Economics

Last updated

"The Lighthouse in Economics" is a 1974 academic paper written by British economist Ronald H. Coase, the 1991 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Contents

This paper challenges the traditional view in economics that lighthouses are public goods, and more specifically the prevailing consensus that the private construction and operation of lighthouses was not feasible. Coase's arguments are based on the experiences of Britain from the 17th to 19th centuries. Coase aligned lighthouses more with club goods because they are excludable by way of charging port fees. While some characterize the paper as discursive, [1] it is generally viewed—for example, see Posner (1993) [2] —as providing insight into the dimensions of public goods.

The paper has been criticized by Van Zandt (1993), Bertrand (2006) and others for not fully appreciating the characteristic of non-excludability of public goods. Historical records showed that those lighthouses which ran on voluntary payment did not survive long and eventually had to be granted the right to collect a light due by the government. However, in the British case, Coase argues that private lighthouses did not survive, not because they were insolvent, but rather because of deliberate policy initiatives. The British government ordered that the private lighthouses be purchased by Trinity House (an association which Coase and other writers implicitly view as an arm of the British government, at least with respect to lighthouse provision). Coase notes that some of the lighthouses sold for what would, in today's values, be many millions of dollars.

Although many lighthouses were depicted by Coase as privately operated, the right to collect non-negotiable light dues was supported by a patent from the crown. In other words, they were not privately provided via the free market as understood by the earlier writers. Some have contended that government support was so pronounced that it is misleading to portray these lighthouses as private.

In a 1997 interview [3] with Reason Magazine, Coase pushes back against such criticisms:

[I]f you look into what actually happens you discover that there's a long period in which lighthouses were provided by private enterprise. They were financed by private people, they were built by private people, they were operated by the people who had the rights to the lighthouses, which they could bequeath to others and sell. Some have said what happened in lighthouses wasn't really private enterprise. The government was involved in some way in setting the rights and so on. I think that's humbug because you could say that there's no private property in houses by that logic, since you can't transfer your rights to a house without the examination of title and registration and without obeying a whole series of regulations, many enforced by government.

Critics have maintained that these rights (to collect light dues etc.) were withdrawn or the lighthouses were bought up by the authorities because the total light dues paid by ships were inflated as a result of rent-seeking activities by lighthouse operators. In his article, Coase, however, suggests that the impetus for nationalizing the lighthouse industry arose from shipping interests, who preferred that the costs of providing lighthouses be shifted away from shippers, who directly benefited from the service, and towards British taxpayers more generally.


See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Coase</span> British economist and Nobel laureate (1910–2013)

Ronald Harry Coase was a British economist and author. Coase was educated at the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental economics</span> Sub-field of economics

Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues. It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or empirical studies of the economic effects of national or local environmental policies around the world. ... Particular issues include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming."

In the social sciences, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods and common pool resources do not pay for them or under-pay. Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature. Free riders are a problem for common pool resources because they may overuse it by not paying for the good. Consequently, the common pool resource may be under-produced, overused, or degraded. Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature, the presence of free-riders causes cooperation to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Externality</span> In economics, an imposed cost or benefit

In economics, an externality or external cost is an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's activity. Externalities can be considered as unpriced goods involved in either consumer or producer market transactions. Air pollution from motor vehicles is one example. The cost of air pollution to society is not paid by either the producers or users of motorized transport to the rest of society. Water pollution from mills and factories is another example. All consumers are made worse off by pollution but are not compensated by the market for this damage. A positive externality is when an individual's consumption in a market increases the well-being of others, but the individual does not charge the third party for the benefit. The third party is essentially getting a free product. An example of this might be the apartment above a bakery receiving the benefit of enjoyment from smelling fresh pastries every morning. The people who live in the apartment do not compensate the bakery for this benefit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Market failure</span> Concept in public goods economics

In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic value. Market failures can be viewed as scenarios where individuals' pursuit of pure self-interest leads to results that are not efficient – that can be improved upon from the societal point of view. The first known use of the term by economists was in 1958, but the concept has been traced back to the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Market failures are often associated with public goods, time-inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal–agent problems, or externalities.

"The Nature of the Firm" (1937) is an article by Ronald Coase. It offered an economic explanation of why individuals choose to form partnerships, companies, and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market. The author was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 in part due to this paper. Despite the honor, the paper was written when Coase was an undergraduate and he described it later in life as "little more than an undergraduate essay."

Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which is owned by a state entity, and from collective or cooperative property, which is owned by one or more non-governmental entities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public good (economics)</span> Good that is non-excludable and non-rival

In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Use by one person neither prevents access by other people, nor does it reduce availability to others. Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person. This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, its simultaneous availability to more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Law and economics</span> Application of economic theory to analysis of legal systems

Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law. The field emerged in the United States during the early 1960s, primarily from the work of scholars from the Chicago school of economics such as Aaron Director, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The field uses economics concepts to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated. There are two major branches of law and economics; one based on the application of the methods and theories of neoclassical economics to the positive and normative analysis of the law, and a second branch which focuses on an institutional analysis of law and legal institutions, with a broader focus on economic, political, and social outcomes, and overlapping with analyses of the institutions of politics and governance.

In law and economics, the Coase theorem describes the economic efficiency of an economic allocation or outcome in the presence of externalities. The theorem is significant because, if true, the conclusion is that it is possible for private individuals to make choices that can solve the problem of market externalities. The theorem states that if the provision of a good or service results in an externality and trade in that good or service is possible, then bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property. A key condition for this outcome is that there are sufficiently low transaction costs in the bargaining and exchange process. This 'theorem' is commonly attributed to Nobel Prize laureate Ronald Coase.

A Pigouvian tax is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities. The tax is normally set by the government to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, social cost includes private cost and external cost caused by negative externalities. This means the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product. Often-cited examples of negative externalities are environmental pollution and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">State ownership</span> Ownership of industry, assets, or businesses by a public body

State ownership, also called public ownership or government ownership, is the ownership of an industry, asset, or enterprise by the state or a public body representing a community, as opposed to an individual or private party. Public ownership specifically refers to industries selling goods and services to consumers and differs from public goods and government services financed out of a government's general budget. Public ownership can take place at the national, regional, local, or municipal levels of government; or can refer to non-governmental public ownership vested in autonomous public enterprises. Public ownership is one of the three major forms of property ownership, differentiated from private, collective/cooperative, and common ownership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armen Alchian</span> American economist (1914–2013)

Armen Albert Alchian was an American economist. He spent almost his entire career at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A major microeconomic theorist, he is known as one of the founders of new institutional economics and widely acknowledged for his work on property rights.

Regulatory economics is the application of law by government or regulatory agencies for various economics-related purposes, including remedying market failure, protecting the environment and economic management.

New Institutional Economics (NIE) is an economic perspective that attempts to extend economics by focusing on the institutions that underlie economic activity and with analysis beyond earlier institutional economics and neoclassical economics. Unlike neoclassical economics, it also considers the role of culture and classical political economy in economic development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Demsetz</span> American economist (1930–2019)

Harold Demsetz was an American professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Property rights are constructs in economics for determining how a resource or economic good is used and owned, which have developed over ancient and modern history, from Abrahamic law to Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Resources can be owned by individuals, associations, collectives, or governments.

The Problem of Social Cost (1960) is a law review article by Ronald Coase, then a faculty member at the University of Virginia, dealing with the economic problem of externalities. It draws from a number of English legal cases and statutes to illustrate Coase's belief that legal rules are only justified by reference to a cost–benefit analysis, and that nuisances that are often regarded as being the fault of one party are more symmetric conflicts between the interests of the two parties. If there are sufficiently low costs of doing a transaction, legal rules would be irrelevant to the maximization of production. Because in the real world there are costs of bargaining and information gathering, legal rules are justified to the extent of their ability to allocate rights to the most efficient right-bearer.

Marian Moszoro Մարիան Մոշորո is a Polish economist. In 2005-2006 he was Undersecretary of State, Deputy Minister of Finance of Poland, the youngest ever in the history of the Ministry.

Public economics(or economics of the public sector) is the study of government policy through the lens of economic efficiency and equity. Public economics builds on the theory of welfare economics and is ultimately used as a tool to improve social welfare. Welfare can be defined in terms of well-being, prosperity, and overall state of being.

References

  1. Cornes, Richard; Sandler, Todd (1996). "The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Club Goods".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. Posner, Richard A. (December 1993). "Ronald Coase and Methodology". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 7 (4): 195–210. doi: 10.1257/jep.7.4.195 . ISSN   0895-3309.
  3. "Looking for Results: An Interview with Ronald Coase". Reason.com. 1997-01-01. Retrieved 2019-12-05.