Public Financiers

The Public Financiers is the sixth book in a series of discussions about the§great minds in the history and theory of finance. While the series addresses§the contributions of scholars in our understanding of modern finance, this§volume addresses the§development of public finance as a field of thought through the twentieth§century.§§Public§finance received little attention from English language scholars until the§latter half of the 20th Century. From that time the discipline blossomed, and new§thinkers added substantially to existing study and research. New perspectives on§rents and profits, the burden of public finance and the mathematics of optimal§taxation introduced a new field of thought within public finance.§§This book explores the great public financiers who brought the discipline back into§popularity and described how tax systems can interact with economies with§minimal distortion. It introduces the work of David Ricardo, Henry George, John§Bates Clark, Frank Ramsey, William Vickrey, and James Mirrlees, who each added new§insight to public finance. The book also examines the work of Knut Wicksell,§Richard Musgrave, James Buchanan, Charles Tiebout and Joseph Stiglitz, who established§how government can be designed to provide the public goods a modern economy§demands. The author explains how the contributions of these great minds combined§to equip modern thinkers with the intuition and knowledge necessary to account§for and even drive the growing federal states of the 20th Century.§§