The public financiers: Ricardo, George, Clark, Ramsey, Mirrlees, Vickrey, Wicksell, Musgrave, Buchanan, Tiebout, and Stiglitz

The Public Financiers is the sixth book in a series of discussions about thegreat minds in the history and theory of finance. While the series addressesthe contributions of scholars in our understanding of modern finance, thisvolume addresses thedevelopment of public finance as a field of thought through the twentiethcentury.

Publicfinance received little attention from English language scholars until thelatter half of the 20th Century. From that time the discipline blossomed, and newthinkers added substantially to existing study and research. New perspectives onrents and profits, the burden of public finance and the mathematics of optimaltaxation introduced a new field of thought within public finance.

This book explores the great public financiers who brought the discipline back intopopularity and described how tax systems can interact with economies withminimal distortion. It introduces the work of David Ricardo, Henry George, JohnBates Clark, Frank Ramsey, William Vickrey, and James Mirrlees, who each added newinsight to public finance. The book also examines the work of Knut Wicksell,Richard Musgrave, James Buchanan, Charles Tiebout and Joseph Stiglitz, who establishedhow government can be designed to provide the public goods a modern economydemands. The author explains how the contributions of these great minds combinedto equip modern thinkers with the intuition and knowledge necessary to accountfor and even drive the growing federal states of the 20th Century.