Part V
Teacher Education as a Public Good
“A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man is, if possible,
more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in
a still more essential part of the character of human nature. Though the state was to
derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would
still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed (...). The
state, however, derives no inconsiderable advantage from their instruction”
Adam Smith (1937), pp. 739–740.Introduction
The notion of a public good originates quite recently in a paper by the economist
Paul A. Samuelson in his 1954 article,“The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure.”^1
It is a paper devoted to the analysis of optimal public expenditure leading to the
distinction betweenprivate and collective consumption goods which turns on
whether the consumption of a good is enjoyed in common or leads to the sub-
straction of an individual’s consumption. In this mathematic paper Samuelson
attempts to define optimal conditions and notes the impossibility of a decentralized
or market solution adding that it is not the economist’s job to make normative
judgments concerning the desirable states. His paper formalized the concept of
public goods as goods that are non-rival and non-excludable, highlighting the
market failure of free-riding when he wrote:“it is in the selfish interest of each
person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective
consumption activity than he really has”(p. 388). Samuelson is credited with laying
the foundations for the modern theory of public expenditure or public goods. He
was one of the founders of neo-Keynesian economics and acted as an advisor to
both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. As well as his work on the optimal
(^1) Seehttp://www.econ.ucsb.edu/*tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/sampub.pdf.