Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe ed. by Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong

2021; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2021.0073

1549-4721

Margaret A. McKean,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Reviewed by: Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe ed. by Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong Margaret McKean (bio) Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe. Edited by Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong. University of California Press, Oakland, 2019. xiv, 331 pages. $34.95, paper. Open Access. Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong examine early modern governments that provide nonmarket goods to benefit a substantial segment of their population. Governments taking on this new problem-solving role exhibit a sense of competence (they are neither irrelevant nor powerless), effectiveness (they can produce the desired outcomes), and ambition. Many earlier works include Japan in the study of political change—rising imperialism, democracy, or militarism. A large literature examines economic change within Japan, establishing firmly that early modern Japan saw per capita economic improvement and protoindustrial growth. But this volume may be one of the first to look at government provision of benefits to society as a phase of early modern economic history, with Japan as the primary foundation for comparison. Readers may find the historical details about any particular country elusive. For instance, the wonderful chapters on Prussia lack the technical details that some readers may need to understand lodgers, cottagers, peasants, burgraves, margraves, electors, lords, dukes, and kings. But the broad comparative and chronological sweep looking at a break-out phase in economic history is what makes the book valuable to economic and political historians, both comparativists and area specialists. The thoughtful organization by theme makes it possible to compare countries, leaders, economic trajectories, resources, policies, problems implementing policy, and welfare outcomes. The editors use "public goods" in the title and know the definition used in economics, but they want to stretch the meaning to include any nonmarket goods. This request is my only complaint—I prefer the precision of the technical definitions that incorporate the incentives and challenges of producing and maintaining both public and common-pool goods. Economists developed the theory of clubs and defined pure public goods by using two distinctive qualities of any good: excludability (can one exclude noncontributors from consuming the good?), and rivalry or subtractibility (does the good diminish in quantity when consumed?).1 These are traits of [End Page 547] the good, not of producers, consumers, or owners; markets occasionally produce pure public goods/bads, and governments can also produce private goods. Nonexcludable goods are chronically underprovided because producers cannot capture gains from providing them. Subtractible goods can disappear, and with crowding many ostensibly nonrival public goods degenerate into common-pool goods, becoming harder to provide and easier to deplete. Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom combined both traits to develop a typology that covers all possible goods and takes us beyond the binary of private and public,2 as Wong hopes for (p. 142): Exclusion easy Exclusion difficult or costly Subtractible or rival in consumption, so depletable Private goods: trees, sheep, fish, chocolate cake Common-pool goods: forest, pasture, fishery, irrigation systems, surface or groundwater Nonsubtractible or nonrival in consumption Club or toll goods: ambiance at a party or restaurant Pure public goods: national defense, internet, TV broadcasts, level of inflation, lighthouse beams, viewscapes, sunshine I have argued for care in using the terms "public" and "private,"3 because we also use them merely to distinguish government from nongovernment (private) entities or activities; worse, what we call the general public is actually a collection of private individuals. Below, I use the classical definitions of goods and use "government" rather than "state" to refer to particular regimes. Predatory regimes may refuse to provide infrastructure that might facilitate rebellion against them, so Mobutu of the Congo, the Duvaliers of Haiti, Nikolai I of Russia, and Metternich of the Hapsburgs all refused to build roads.4 But other preindustrial governments see such investment as averting famine and resentment in society. Takehito Tō considers the Chinese [End Page 548] idea of a "shapeless" treasury—preventing disaster instead of helping afterward—as thinking befitting the modern welfare state (pp. 212–13). Governments may speak of the Confucian moral duty of benevolent rule or of "the common good" in medieval Brandenburg...