Unboxing The Landlords Game https://youtu.be/ENQPy-d0e8o
モノポリーの原型はヘンリー・ジョージの思想を弘めるために作られた。
＿＿
Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest ...
https://books.google.co.jp › books
Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition John L. Thomas ... What was the challenge confronting American labor if not the hard fact that "the vast majority of men and women and children in New York have no legal right to live ... Together he and his listeners comprised 99 percent of the city's population, but they lived on sufference, forced to pay to the other 1 percent exorbitant rent for the ... John L. Thomas - 1983 - プレビュー - 他の版
Henry George Newsletter - 第 51～56 巻 https://books.google.co.jp › books In 1886, replying to a reporter's question on what his election would do to put his theories into practice, George said candidly ... Most of us -ninety nine per cent at the least -must pay the other one per cent by the week or month or quarter for the ... 1987 - スニペット表示 - 他の版 参考：
ヘンリー・ジョージ定理：都市人口が最適規模である時、地代と地方公共財の費用が等しくなる。
ーーー
Economics Nobel Awarded for Contributions in Public Finance
1 I once heard from an Indian economist that, of all foreign economic advisers, Vickrey had been the most directly helpful, because he had produced new railway schedules that permitted substantial energy saving and improved service.
see also http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp387.pdf William Vickrey: Contributions to Public Policy, Richard Arnott, October 1997. 34 page
Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition John L. Thomas ... What was the challenge confronting American labor if not the hard fact that "the vast majority of men and women and children in New York have no legal right to live ... Together he and his listeners comprised 99 percent of the city's population, but they lived on sufference, forced to pay to the other 1 percent exorbitant rent for the ... John L. Thomas - 1983 - プレビュー - 他の版
Henry George Newsletter - 第 51～56 巻 https://books.google.co.jp › books In 1886, replying to a reporter's question on what his election would do to put his theories into practice, George said candidly ... Most of us -ninety nine per cent at the least -must pay the other one per cent by the week or month or quarter for the ... 1987 - スニペット表示 - 他の版 参考：
From Poverty to Politics: Henry George | The Gilded Age
ヘンリー・ジョージ(1839~1897)
ヴィックリー(1914~1996)
Vickrey, William. 1996. 15 Fatal Fallacies of Financial Fundamentalism
https://nam-students.blogspot.com/2019/11/vickrey-william-1996-15-fatal-fallacies.html
https://nam-students.blogspot.com/2019/11/vickrey-william-1996-15-fatal-fallacies.html
ポズナー＆ワイル ラディカル・マーケット
公共経済学ノート
https://sites.google.com/site/marutaro777/home/public?tmpl=%2Fsystem%2Fapp%2Ftemplates%2Fprint%2F&showPrintDialog=1 ★
ヘンリー・ジョージ定理：都市人口が最適規模である時、地代と地方公共財の費用が等しくなる。
213~215頁
林正義 小川光 別所俊一郎 公共経済学 有斐閣 2010/1？
資本化仮説：地方公共財の供給増がもたらす限界便益の総和は、すべて地代（つまり地主）に帰着する。
地方公共財の限界効用の総和＝限界費用 （サミュエルソン条件）
河野論考
ヘンリー・ジョージ定理は一国における各地域への最適な人口配分を示す定 理である。 この定理が示すものは、公共財の最適な供給量は地代の総額に等し い、ということである。 従って、地代に 100%課税して公共財の供給に充てる ときに、各地域の最適な人口が得られるとの解釈が成立する1)。2010/06/25
II モデル 一国には一定の人口が存在し、各地域に人口が等しく配分されている。各地
域は同質的であり、同質的な個人が住む。各個人は 2 期生きる。第 1 期に働 き、賃金 w を得る。その一部を消費 C1 し、残りを貯蓄する。この貯蓄は土地 の所有権の形で保有する。つまり、第 2 期には地主となるのである。そして 第 2 期には働かず、その土地からの収益である地代と期末には土地を売って、 その代金の合計を第 2 期の消費 C2 に充てる。なお、人口成長はないものとす る。世代は重複しており、したがって、各期に若い労働者と、同じ数の老人の 地主がいる。その消費の合計は (C1N + C2N) である。ここで N を各世代の 人口とする。一方、政府は G の量の公共財を供給する。その費用は、この経 済の生産物をニュメレールとして測って G である。つまり、G の量の公共財を
— 94 —
供給する財源として、住民から税金として生産物を G だけ徴収するのであ る。このように簡単化のために公共財の単位を基準化する。この公共財は消費 財であり、蓄積されない。この国での生産活動は、労働と土地を生産要素とし ている。若者が労働を提供する。また、各地方の土地の量 Z は一定であると する。すると生産関数 f(N, Z) となり、これは一次同次である。なお、土地の 存在量を固定し、簡単化のために Z = 1 とする。
G公共財
C1消費1期
C2消費2期
A Great Iniquity - Wikisource, the free online library
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Great_Iniquity
IV.
People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it. (And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree.)
Лев Толстой: Маковицкий Д. П.: "Яснополянские записки". 1905 г. Июль
http://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/makovickij-yasnopolyanskie-zapiski/1905-iyul.htm
1 «A great iniquity» by Leo Tolstoy («Times», № 37774, l. VIII).
A Great Iniquity - Wikisource, the free online library
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Great_Iniquity
IV.
People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it. (And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree.)
Лев Толстой: Маковицкий Д. П.: "Яснополянские записки". 1905 г. Июль
http://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/makovickij-yasnopolyanskie-zapiski/1905-iyul.htm
1 «A great iniquity» by Leo Tolstoy («Times», № 37774, l. VIII).
関連北野論考
http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/repository/00167835.pdf
ゲゼルへの影響 伊藤誠論考
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/peq/51/4/51_KJ00009847527/_pdf
北沢論考
北沢はマルクスによる批判を紹介
(2)この点については Commons and Associates: History
of Labour in the United States vol. IL. 1918. p. 448-61.
をさしあたり参照されたい。ここでは、ヘンリ·ジョージ
の絶頂期でああうと思われる、一八八六年のニューヨーク
市長選挙に The United Labor Uoionから推されて立
候補した時期が取扱われているが、そのなかで、やがてか
れが社会主義者たちと訣別し、自らのブルジョア的性格を
ますます露骨にしめしていく過程が興味深く知らされる。
なお、ジョージのブルジョア的性格については、マルクスの批判がある。
マルクス.エンゲルス「資本論に関する手紙」下巻、岡崎次郎訳、
一八八一年六月二〇日付、ゾルゲ宛の手紙、310-313頁。
資本論に関する手紙〈下巻〉 (1955年) － – 1955/1/1
ヘンリー・ジョージ
主著
進歩と貧困 (日本語) 単行本 – 1991/11/1
ヘンリー・ジョージ（Henry George、1839年9月2日 - 1897年10月29日）はアメリカ合衆国の作家、政治家、政治経済学者。私的所有をベースとしながらも、自然とりわけ土地は人類の共有財産との考えに基づき、諸税を廃止し地価税への一本化（土地単税）を図る、ジョージズムの提唱者としても知られる。主著は『進歩と貧困』（1879年）。★
ヘンリー・ジョージ
概要
ヘンリー・ジョージは、地代を私的に所有するよりも社会全体に等しく分配すべきとの主張で最も知られており、こうした彼の見解を十全に示したものが自著『進歩と貧困』である[2]。ただ、地代の社会的共有を実行に移すとすれば、一旦土地を国有化した上で賃貸しすることが考えられるが、ジョージは土地所有権が既に個々人の手に委ねられている国においては混乱を招き兼ねないとして地価税を好んだ。この地価税という「単一税」からの収入があれば、国富の増大のほか年金なりベーシック・インカムとして国民への富の再分配が図られ、国富が増大すればやがては如何なる形態の税をも廃絶しうると説いた。なお、高率の地価税が導入されると、それに呼応して地価が下落する恐れがあるものの、ジョージは土地所有者への補償を視野に入れておらず、嘗ての奴隷所有者と同様の対応をとることを主張した。
ジョージズムの支持者は、天然資源から得られる所得（即ち不労所得）や自然独占からの法外な報酬は、特定の個人よりは寧ろ共同体のものとすべきで、地価税以外の税や経済的規制を課してはならないとも主張した。実際、他のあらゆる税を廃止しようとすれば、当然のことながら高率の地価税を設定しなければならず、地価も下落を余儀なくされる。こうした点について、アダム・スミスは自著『国富論』の中で、地代に変化は無いだろうとして、次のように述べている。
影響
ジョージズムが高い知名度を誇るようになると、発祥の地アメリカで、この原理に基づき数箇所の自治体が誕生した。現存する自治体としては、1900年にジョージ・フランシス・スティーブンスやウィル・プライスが資金提供を行ったデラウェア州アーデンや、フェアホープ単一税株式会社[4]の支援を得て設立されたアラバマ州フェアホープがある[5]。また、2004年の同国大統領選挙期間中、ラルフ・ネーダーが演説の中でジョージに言及した[6]ほか、ジョージ並びに地価税関連の研究所[7]や月刊誌[8]が存在するなど、現在でも関心は高い。
中国におけるドイツの膠州湾租借地[9]でも、領内で徴収した6%の地価税を唯一の収入源とするジョージズム的政策が採られた。当時のドイツ政府はアフリカ植民地で土地投機に起因する経済的問題を抱えており、同租借地で地価税を用いるに至ったのも、こうした投機熱を緩和する狙いがあったが、政府の目論見は見事成った[10]。
批判
ジョージズムの影響を受けた著名人
関連項目
脚注
- ^ a b Land Value Taxation: An Applied Analysis, William J. McCluskey, Riël C. D. Franzsen
- ^ George, Henry (1879). “2”. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. VI 2008年5月12日閲覧。
- ^ Foldvary, Fred E. "Geo-Rent: A Plea to Public Economists". Econ Journal Watch(April 2005)[1]
- ^ Fairhope Single Tax Corporation
- ^ ただし、アメリカ国内でも固定資産税を主たる収入源とする自治体は多いものの、同税が建築物の価値をも含むため厳密な意味で「ジョージズム的」とは言えないことに注意
- ^https://web.archive.org/web/20040828085138/http://www.votenader.org/issues/index.php?cid=7
- ^ http://www.lincolninst.edu/aboutlincoln/
- ^ The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 62, 2003, p. 615
- ^ 1898年から1914年までドイツ領、その後日本の占領を経て、1922年には中国へ返還された
- ^ Silagi, Michael and Faulkner, Susan N., , Land Reform in Kiaochow, China: From 1898 to 1914 the Menace of Disastrous Land Speculation was Averted by Taxation, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, volume 43, Issue 2, pages 167-177
- ^ Gaffney, M. Mason. “Henry George 100 Years Later”. Association for Georgist Studies Board. 2008年5月12日閲覧。
- ^ Karl Marx - Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken
- ^ Henry George's Thought [1878822810] - $49.95 : Zen Cart!, The Art of E-commerce
- ^ Critics of Henry George
- ^ Muse return with new album The Resistance
- ^ Transcript of a speech by Darrow on taxation
- ^ Transcript of 1942 interview
- ^ Co－founder of the Henry George ClubArchived 2012年5月25日, at Archive.is, Australia.
- ^ Arcas Cubero, Fernando: El movimiento georgista y los orígenes del Andalucismo : análisis del periódico "El impuesto único" (1911-1923). Málaga : Editorial Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros, 1980. ISBN 8450037840
- ^ Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal Archived2007年8月6日, at the Wayback Machine.
- ^https://web.archive.org/web/20040828085138/http://www.votenader.org/issues/index.php?cid=7
- ^ .Article on Tolstoy, Proudhon and George. Count Tolstoy once said of George, "People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it". http://www.costadelsolhotels.org/cooperativeindividualismorg/ ？
- ^ Bill Vickrey - In Memoriam http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Vickrey.html ★★
外部リンク編集
★
| 古典派経済学 | |
|---|---|
ヘンリー・ジョージ
| |
| 生誕 | 1839年9月2日 ペンシルベニア州フィラデルフィア |
| 死没 | 1897年10月29日（58歳没） ニューヨーク市 |
| 国籍 |  アメリカ合衆国 |
| 影響を 受けた人物 | ジョン・ロック ジョン・スチュアート・ミル デヴィッド・リカード アダム・スミス フランソワ・ケネー |
| 影響を 与えた人物 | アルバート・ジェイ・ノック ジョン・デューイ フィリップ・ウィックスティード シルビオ・ゲゼル スペンサー・ヒース ハーバート・サイモン |
| 実績 | ジョージズム |
生涯
ペンシルベニア州フィラデルフィアの中下層階級の家庭に10人兄弟の次男として生まれる。14歳で公式の教育課程を終え、1855年4月には15歳にして前檣士となりメルボルンやカルカッタへと渡航した。海外生活を1年数ヶ月で切り上げると帰郷し、植字工の徒弟を務めた後カリフォルニア州に向かう。ゴールドラッシュで一攫千金を狙うも叶わなかったものの、1865年には新聞社に職を得、印刷工を手始めにジャーナリストや編集者を経て社主にまで上り詰めることとなる。
この間、18歳のオーストラリア人女性・アニー・コーシナ・フォックスと恋に落ち、彼女と一緒に暮らしていた叔父（フォックスは孤児であった）の猛反対を押し切った末、1861年結婚。結婚生活は順調に進み、4人の子を儲けた。ジョージ自身は福音派に属していたものの、フォックスの母親がカトリック系アイルランド人であった関係上、子供はローマ・カトリックの信徒として育てられた。このうち、長男のヘンリー・ジョージ・ジュニア（1862年 - 1916年）はニューヨーク州選出の下院議員になった[1]。高峰譲吉の妻キャロラインの妹と結婚し、1906年には来日し、日本の鉄道についての報告を雑誌に発表したりもしている[2]。次男のリチャード・F・ジョージ（1865年 - 1912年）は彫刻家として成功を収めた[1][3] ほか、次女のアンナ・アンジェラ・ジョージ（1879年生）は映画監督セシル・B・デミルの兄ウィリアム・C・デミルと結婚し、女優のアグネス・デ＝ミル[4] やマーガレット・ジョージ・デ＝ミルの母となる[5]。
ジョージは当初リンカーン率いる共和党員であったが、後に民主党へ籍を移し、カリフォルニア州議会議員選挙にも出馬。政治に関わる中で政治腐敗や労働者の惨状に対して強く批判するようになるが、1871年、サンフランシスコ湾に偶然立ち寄った際、運命的な光景を目の当たりにする。
| 「 | とある通行人にこの一帯の地価が如何程か尋ねてみた。すると彼は遠方で草を食んでいる数頭の牛を指差しながら、「詳しいことは分からねえが、向こうに一エーカー当たり数百ドルで土地を売ろうとしている人がいるだろ」と話してくれた。貧富の差が拡大する理由が電光石火のごとく閃いたのはこの時だ。人口が増え地価が高騰すると、そこで働く者は地主により多くの金を払わなければなくなるということを[6] | 」 |
その後訪れたニューヨークで、現地の貧困層が当時発展途上にあったカリフォルニアの貧困層よりも暮らし向きが遥かに劣悪であるという、明白な矛盾に衝撃を受ける。1879年には、これまでの経験を基に『進歩と貧困』を上梓。同書は百版を重ね[7] 300万部を売り上げるベストセラーとなったが、その中で自由市場経済において築かれた富は地主や独占資本家が掌握し、この不労所得の集中こそ貧困の主たる原因との考えを示した。また、生産活動が重税に悩まされる一方で、私的利益が天然資源という限られた手段から得られるのは不正義の極みとして、かかる制度は奴隷制に等しいと主張した。
ジョージがこうした貧困を齎す（もたらす）メカニズムを見出せたのも、彼自身が貧困層であったこと、海外渡航歴から様々な社会を知り得たこと、当時急成長の最中にあったカリフォルニアに住んでいたことが挙げられるが、とりわけカリフォルニアにおける鉄道建設により、地価や地代が賃金の伸び以上に上昇した事実に目を付けていた。
1880年、一躍著名な作家となった[8] ジョージはニューヨークに転居し、自身はイギリス系アメリカ人であったにも関わらず、アイルランド独立を標榜する組織と緊密な関係を持つようになる。また、土地を取得する権利が主たる政治問題であったアイルランドやスコットランドへと足を伸ばしたのも、この時代のことである。
1886年のニューヨーク市長選に統一労働党（中央労働組合の政治部門として短期間存在した政党）から出馬、後に第26代大統領となる共和党候補のセオドア・ルーズベルトを上回る得票数を得たものの、タマニー・ホールが擁立したエイブラム・スティーブンス・ヒューイットに敗北を喫する。翌1887年、ニューヨーク州務長官選にも出馬するが当選には遠く及ばす3位で落選。なお、統一労働党は一連の選挙結果を受け内部分裂を起こし、衰微の一途を辿ることとなる。党執行部はジョージズム支持者で占められていたが、土地と資本との区別を認めないマルクス主義者やエドワード・マクグリン神父の除名に失望したカトリック教徒、そしてジョージの自由貿易政策（後述）を良しとしない党員などが犇めき合う、組織労働者の党であったからである。
政策
独占
自然独占の国有化や課税、規制を支持。電信電話並びに水道事業は公営で行うべきとしたが、鉄道については幾分柔軟で、株式が政府出資によるものであれば民営化でも構わないと述べている。また、政府認可の独占資本家には極めて批判的で、発明や科学部門への投資に対するインセンティブを高めるため、場合によっては政府により特許状を取り上げるなど厳しい措置を提案した。
中国人移民
ジョージを一躍有名にした最初期の文献の中に、中国人移民を制限すべきと説くものが存在する[10]。 移民制限の必要性が最早無い局面を迎えることや、移民問題に関する初期の論考が「未熟」であったことを自ら認めていたものの、こうした見解を変えることは終生無かった[11]。特に低賃金を受け入れる移民が賃下げという好ましくない影響を与えると論じた。
土地単税
ジョージズムも参照のこと
地代は私的所有よりも社会全体に分有すべきとの主張でよく知られ、こうした視点が最も明快に示されているのが『進歩と貧困』である[12]。ただ、地代を社会的に共有しようとすれば土地を国有化した上で個々人に賃貸しする方式を採ることになり、地価税を高率に設定すれば地価が下落することになるが、ジョージは地主に補償を行う必要は無く、嘗ての奴隷所有者と同様の対応をとるべきとした。
自由貿易
保護主義が支配的で歳入の大部分が関税であった時代（当時は所得税が導入されていなかった）にあって、これに反対する立場を貫いた。後年、自由貿易が国政を揺るがす大問題になると、著書『保護主義か自由貿易か』を発行するが、本書が5名の民主党連邦議会議員により議事録に掲載されるなど、論争を巻き起こした。
秘密投票
交換可能通貨及び国債
影響
ジョージの知名度は死後徐々に衰微し、今日ではあまり触れられるケースが多くないのが現状である。しかし、今なおジョージズム関連の研究所が多く存在するし、ジョージ・バーナード・ショー[14] やレフ・トルストイ[15]、孫文[16]、ハーバート・サイモン[17] そしてデビッド・ロイド・ジョージら、有名人の中にも彼の影響を受けた者は少なくない。
関連項目
脚注
- ^ a b http://www.guariscogallery.com/browse_by_artist.html?artist=595
- ^ Government Railroads in Japan
- ^ "SINGLE TAXERS DINE JOHNSON; Medallion Made by Son of Henry George Presented to Cleveland's Former Mayor", The New York Times - May 31, 1910
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0210350/bio
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0313565/bio
- ^ Henry George: Unorthodox American, Part I
- ^ 有賀貞他編『世界歴史大系 アメリカ史2-1877年～1992年-』山川出版社、1993年7月、p.122
- ^ 孫娘にあたるアグネス・デ＝ミルによると、『進歩と貧困』及びその続編がベストセラーを記録したため、アメリカ国内ではマーク・トウェインやトーマス・エジソンに次ぐ有名人となったという [1]
- ^ “Henry George's Death Abroad. London Papers Publish Long Sketches and Comment on His Career”. New York Times. (1897年10月30日) 2010年3月7日閲覧. "The newspapers today are devoting much attention to the death of Henry George, the candidate of the Jeffersonian Democracy for the office of Mayor of Greater New York, publishing long sketches of his career and philosophical and economical theories."
- ^ "Chinese immigration". Library of Economics and Liberty.
- ^ ."Second Period:Formulation of the Philosophy", www.henrygeorge.org
- ^ George, Henry (1879). “2”. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. VI. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. ISBN 0914016601 2008年5月12日閲覧。
- ^ 'Jill Lepore' (2008年10月13日). “'Rock, Paper, Scissors: How we used to vote'”. New Yorker. New Yorker. 2010年8月21日閲覧。
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ [4]。日本における孫文の支援者・宮崎滔天の兄・民蔵が在日宣教師C・E・ガルストとの交流からジョージズムの影響を受けて「土地均享論」を主張し、民蔵との交流を通じて孫文の「耕者有其田」（耕す者に土地を）の論に影響を及ぼすことになった。阪本楠彦（編）『農政経済の名著：明治大正編』（上）、農文協、1981年、332-333頁。
- ^ [5]
- ^ [6]
- ^ 斎藤眞他監修『新訂増補 アメリカを知る事典』平凡社、2000年1月、p.231
参考文献
- George, Henry. (1881). Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; The Remedy. Kegan Paul
著書
Science of political economy, 1898
- 『我々の土地と土地政策』（Our Land and Land Policy）1871年
- 『進歩と貧困』（Progress and Poverty）1879年
- 『土地問題』（The Land Question）1881年
- 『社会問題』（Social Problems）1883年
- 『保護主義か自由貿易か』（Protection or Free Trade）1886年
- 『労働条件』（The Condition of Labor）1891年
- 『当惑した哲学者』（A Perplexed Philosopher）1892年
- 『政治経済学の科学』（The Science of Political Economy）1898年
外部リンク編集
ヘンリー・ジョージの土地制度改革論/山嵜 義三郎（経済・ビジネス）の最新情報・紙の本の購入はhontoで。あらすじ、レビュー（ ...
<書評>山嵜義三郎著『ヘンリー・ジョージの土地制度改革論』(. Yoshisaburo Yamasaki: Henry George's Theory of the Reform ...
国近代土地改革思想を論じる前題としたい。 ... いわれる土地制度論が種々の形をとって現われている。 ... ンでマルクスの『資本論』、ヘンリー・ジョージの『進歩と貧困』を読んだといわれており、前者 ...
★★
Bill Vickrey: "This paper would benefit from an application of Henry George's idea of taxing land values!"
http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Vickrey.htmlBill Vickrey: "This paper would benefit from an application of Henry George's idea of taxing land values!"
Bill Vickrey was a major figure among contemporary Georgists. He died, en route to a meeting of Georgist scholars, a few days after learning he was to be a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996. Here is a collection of tributes which will give you a sense of both the man and his ideas.
Warm Memories of Bill Vickrey
[ed note: William Vickrey, Columbia University, New York, born Victoria, British Columbia, June 21, 1914; died October 11, 1996, aged 82; joint winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics with James Mirrlees of Cambridge University].
The evening of the day Bill Vickrey won his Nobel I impulsively, hesitantly dialed his home. His phone surprised me by ringing unbusy, and Bill surprised me more by answering, and sounding unhurried. After congratulations, I asked "Bill, was this for a lifetime of achievement, or some specific work?" "I don't know," he replied. "Well," I persisted, "Is there a citation? What does it say?" "Yes," he said, "there is one, but I can't understand it." If you and I find it a puzzle, we have good company.
Here's the citation:
(1996) J A Mirrlees and W S Vickrey – for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information;
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Mission performed, I hastened to ring off, but Bill kept me on the line. To Bill, the transaction was incomplete -- too one-sided. He turned things around and said "Tell me about yourself. What are you working on now?" I told him as briefly as I could, and he immediately offered to help. It was not a perfunctory sham offer, he's helped me before. "How are the wife and children?" He really wanted to know, and report back to Cele. That was Bill, thinking of others, in the time of his greatest triumph, at the end of a long, wearying day of praise and celebration. What a saint! And I thank that other saint, my wife, who nudged me to call right away: two days later Bill left us forever.
Bill was born in Victoria, B.C., his mother's home. His middle name was Spencer, as in Spencer's Stores; they had merged with, I believe he said, Eaton's. From the Spencer side he got his sense of how business works. His father was a preacher from Illinois who raised money for starving Armenians -- literally. From him Bill got his firm sense of social justice, plus a reflex against spending money on his own creature comforts. At professional meetings he sought out cheaper lodgings than anyone else, though his expenses were covered. He did it inconspicuously so as not to make others uncomfortable: his humility was not for flaunting, he just lived it. Again, what a saint!
Bill had a degree in mathematics from Yale, before turning to economics at Columbia. He was not one to hide behind phony math, as most economists do now, nor to intimidate others; but none could snow or intimidate him, although many tried. In spite of the phonies, genuine math can be truly useful, and that's when he drew on this skill plus his insight and talent, which went far deeper than mere skill. He gave freely of them. At one point he dashed off a mathematical appendix to an article I had struggled over for months. His page of squiggles pretty well comprehended and tied together and validated all the points I had spread over 50 pages. He gave it to me gratis -- that was Bill. For him, it was effortless: "Just a matter of inverting the order of integration," he explained casually. What a saint!
Bill had high standards, but no false standards. He feared no contamination or loss of caste by consorting with less renowned economists, or supporting ideas that lacked mainline "respectability" and "prestige." If he had a fault, it was projecting his own virtues onto others. He was delightfully ingenuous in personal dealings, and could not impute base, careerist motives to social and professional climbers.
It was in 1964 or so that I called Bill impulsively and hesitantly the first time. Art Becker and Weld Carter and I were growing a committee of economists to meet annually and produce a modern Georgist literature, but who were we in the world? Bill had published works on financing mass transit that breathed a distinct sweet odor of Georgism. Like a bee to a flower, I buzzed him. It was a good impulse; he accepted, suddenly we were somebodies, and other somebodies joined up, too. Soon we had our academic-Georgist Camelot, if only for one brief shining moment. Our committee, named TRED, produced about ten volumes of neo-Georgist literature, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Bill had a chapter in our first volume, and also helped me, as editor, straighten out a headstrong contributor who insisted on turning rents into earned incomes. When Bill wrote, people heeded, and Bill was ever ready to lend a hand. I thought of him as a big brother to call on in need. How I shall miss my big brother!
At Columbia, Bill rubbed elbows with Harold Hotelling, the most brilliant and creative economist of his generation. Hotelling was a closet Georgist who never fully came out, even after a lifetime of professional acclaim for his technical triumphs - a measure of the pressure used to squelch academic Georgists. The nearest he came was to let Will Lissner include him on a roster of "Editorial Advisers" to the AJES. Francis A. Walker, first President of the American Economic Association in 1885, had written "I will not insult my readers by discussing a project so steeped in infamy" as taxing land values. Bill Vickrey, President of the same Association 106 years later, wrote on the same subject that we should tax 'em to the max. He joined Nic Tideman in composing a letter to Gorbachev advising the then-Soviets to base their privatization strategy on taxing land values. Together they signed up 20-30 highly visible economists, including four earlier Nobel laureates. This did not stop Bill from winning his Nobel in 1996. Perhaps our cause has progressed within the ivied walls, after all; or perhaps that is just a measure of Vickrey's personal courage and conscience, and the power of courage and conscience to overcome fear and win confidence -- even of Nobel prize committees.
A reporter asked Bill what he would do with his prize money. Bill said he didn't care about the money, and he spoke truly, for his conscience would not let him live it up while others were down. He said he valued the "bully pulpit" the prize gave him to spread his ideas. He didn't say which ideas; he had many. I am morally certain, however, that near the top of his list was implementing George's proposal to raise public revenues by taxing land values. The last thing he asked me before hanging up was, "Will I see you at the TRED meeting?" Bill never missed.
Bill died, as you know by now, en route to that meeting. He drove at night, true to his principle of easing peak-hour congestion. Had he arrived, I know he would have raised his head from the doze he affected and told some unwary journeyman, "This paper would benefit from an application of Henry George's idea of taxing land values." How do I know? Because he always did. I imagine by now he has mentioned it to God, too; and God has said "Actually, Bill, that's how we've always done it here; but thank you for urging folks to have my will done on earth as it is in Heaven."
Nicolaus Tideman
The 1996 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to two public finance economists, James Mirrlees and William Vickrey. James Mirrlees is Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, in England. Until his death just three days after receiving the Noble Prize, William Vickrey was Professor of Economics Emeritus at Columbia University.
Both of this year's winners have made numerous contributions to economics.
Prof. Mirrlees is most famous for his analysis of "optimal income taxation." In this analysis, Prof. Mirrlees treats the problem of the choice of an income tax schedule as one of maximizing the aggregate utility of the members of a society. One might expect an economist to shun such an approach, on the ground that it requires interpersonal comparisons of utility, which economists generally regard to be unfounded. Instead, Prof. Mirrlees said, "Let's solve the problem in general, and then see what results from different assumptions about the way that the marginal utility of income varies with income." As Prof. Mirrlees conceives the problem, those who choose the income tax schedule must deal with the fact that, the greater the tax that is imposed on income, the less people will earn. The identification of the optimal income tax schedule is then a problem in the calculus of variation, a branch of advanced mathematics. Besides being a very impressive example of the application of mathematics to an economic problem, the analysis offers some interesting insights. One is that under most reasonably plausible assumptions about the way that the utility of income varies with income, the rate schedule that would maximize total utility entails rather modest maximum income tax rates. Another is that, under the rate schedule that maximized total utility, the marginal tax rate of the richest person on his last dollar of income would be zero! (You want to motivate him to work that last minute, and you don't lose any taxes on previous work, because that is all taxed at higher rates.)
Prof. Vickrey wrote a book in the 1940s, suggesting that instead of having just an income tax, it would be sensible for a country to use a combination of an income tax, a consumption tax and a wealth tax. One of his suggestions was for a system of lifetime income averaging. Instead of paying a tax each year on that year's income, one would add this year's income to the sum of previous years' incomes, divide by the number of years to get average income, compute the tax on that amount of income, multiply by the number of years to get the total tax, and finally subtract the total of taxes paid in previous year to get the tax owed this year. Prof. Vickrey was also renown for his suggestions of public pricing schemes that more closely approximated marginal social costs. He may have been the first advocate of the practice of the airlines of seeking (paid) volunteers to wait for the next flight, instead of bumping the last persons to arrive. He was an early advocate of peak-load pricing for electricity, public transit, bridges, tunnels, and for city streets! He estimated that the social cost of an hour of driving in Manhattan at busy times (taking account of the value of the time of all the people who were slowed down by the presence of one more car on the streets) was $20,000! He did not want to charge people this much; he felt that a price of $20 to $50 per hour for driving in Manhattan would probably have brought the amount of driving down to where the benefit matched the cost. Prof. Vickrey was most famous in recent years for a 1961 paper that went virtually unnoticed for the first dozen or so years after it was published, but then came to be seen as the foundation of the theory of efficient auctions. In this paper, Prof. Vickrey introduced the idea of an auction in which each person makes just one bid, the item is sold to the person who makes the highest bid, but that person is only required to pay the second-highest bid. The characteristic of such an auction that has fascinated economists is that, with such a rule, it is in the interest of every bidder to bid exactly what the item is worth to him or her.
In choosing to honor Professors Mirrlees and Vickrey, the Nobel committee has highlighted the contribution that economics can make to the creation of a more productive public sector.
Remembering William Vickrey
by Dick Netzer, a member of TRED reprinted from Land Lines, November 1996, Vol. 8, No.6]
at http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/authors.html
by Dick Netzer, a member of TRED reprinted from Land Lines, November 1996, Vol. 8, No.6]
at http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/authors.html
William Vickrey died on October 11, three days after the announcement of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, while on his way to the Lincoln Institute for the annual research conference of the Committee on Taxation, Resources and Economic Development (TRED).
TRED meetings have been sponsored by the Institute for 20 years, and Bill Vickrey was at every one of those meetings. Indeed, his connection with TRED goes back even further, for he was one of the committee's founding members more than 35 years ago. TRED began in discussions among academic economists who were interested in contemporary applications of the ideas of Henry George and were also concerned with land and natural resources. Over the years, TRED's membership expanded to include public finance and urban economists interested in the use of land and economic phenomena related to how things are arranged over space.
Bill Vickrey was the ultimate intellectual sparkplug of TRED from the beginning. His wonderful inventiveness and irreverence came out in inspired, seemingly off-the-cuff interventions in the discussion, some of which have changed thinking about economics and economic policy forever. For example, in one sally he imagined a linear city in which all structures were truly mobile. This image made it possible to think clearly about location, the effects of the durability and immobility of structures, and appropriate land policies, without being trapped by peripheral issues. No one could cut to the quick like Vickrey.
TRED member Ed Mills of Northwestern University spoke to our assembled group at the Institute shortly after hearing the news of Bill's untimely death. "Bill Vickrey lived his life exactly as he wished, right to the end," Mills said. "He died with his boots on." Those of us who have been honored to know Bill for some time have been shaped by our contact with him, and we will miss him.
Dick Netzer
TRED member and visiting senior fellow of the Lincoln Institute
TRED member and visiting senior fellow of the Lincoln Institute
Here are a few more bits and pieces picked up online that will give you a sense of who Bill Vickrey was:
Marc Lavoie wrote:
Am I wrong, or is William Vickrey the old fellow that we often see hanging around at Post Keynesian sessions, say at the meetings of the EEA?
A stunned Marc Lavoie!
To Marc Lavoie about Bill Vickrey:
The answer is, Mais Oui! He is, and gave all of us young whippersnappers a good dose of his more old-fashioned Keynesian concern with achieving full employment no matter what at the Post Keynesian session at the EEA, as did Ingrid Rima.
Actually I have been somewhat amused to observe over a number of years people at the EEA treating him with less than proper respect. Two years ago I chaired a session for the nonlinear crowd that does its thing at the EEA and Vickrey was "imposed" on it by the EEA with a paper on deficit financing to achieve full employment, which he presented. I knew that the sub-organizers were kind of annoyed, so I made sure that I was the discussant, and treated the presentation with proper respect, if not necessarily full agreement (I expressed concern about the impact of unlimited foreign indebtedness, to which he cannily smiled, obviously looking like one who had heard that one before!).
I have noticed in previous years that he would sometimes show up for odd sessions with very small audiences, but which were actually extremely innovative and interesting. He is a very original and innovative thinker who remains close to the edge of the profession at a deeper level, even if not what is generally accepted as such by the mainstream. He has accomplished much and I applaud his selection. For once the Nobelers have been not so bad.
Barkley Rosser
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996
From: Max B. Sawicky
To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT
Subject: Bill Vickrey -- Live Like Him
From: Max B. Sawicky
To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT
Subject: Bill Vickrey -- Live Like Him
--------------------
Response by Max B Sawicky:
The very same. He also used to frequent National Tax Association meetings, although I haven't seen him at the last few. If you chanced to meet him on the street, you might feel the urge to buy him a sandwich.
As Peter Passell wrote in the NY Times, Vickrey is famous for appearing to snooze through seminars, then rise at the end to edify the group with "razor-sharp questions."
My best Vickrey story comes from a tax meeting a couple of years ago. He was sitting alone down in front doing a crossword puzzle while corporate types babbled tediously about the international aspects of the Federal corporate income tax. When Q&A time came, he gets up in his gruff voice and says, "Don't you think you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?"
------------------
Response by Max B Sawicky:
The work on which Vickrey's reputation is based defies the prejudices of many on this list: he is rigorously neoclassical in his microeconomics, but his choice of subject and application of n-c theory are of great help to anyone doing applied public finance from a liberal or progressive viewpoint. Other examples of such people are William Baumol, the pre-CEA Joseph Stiglitz, and a few people on this list whom I will decline to embarrass by naming them. To be sure, this has some un-progressive features: Vickrey and some others are dedicated free-traders and tend to take a jaundiced view of "labor monopolies" (e.g., trade unions).
Vickrey's macroeconomic views are certainly heterodox. He was quoted in the Washington Post to the effect that "balancing the budget is insane and would drive the economy into a depression." He also thinks the unemployment rate can be driven down to two percent, and that the NAIRU theory is positively evil. Vickrey has written a little on his scheme for "inflation warrants" which would levy a tax on firms that raised their prices; it resembles a value-added tax and would not be designed to collect much revenue -- only to enable the Fed and the Fisc to drive unemployment to perdition. On the whole, however, Vickrey has not done scholarly papers on macro; it's more like an avocation for him, though you would never know it judging by the strength of his feelings.
It is worth noting (and not surprizing, if you know Passell) that while Passell's piece in the Times was complimentary, he gave no hint of Vickrey's views on macro policy.
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996
From: James K. Galbraith
Subject: Nobel to Vickrey
From: James K. Galbraith
Subject: Nobel to Vickrey
I want to echo Paul Davidson and to congratulate Professor William Vickrey on his Nobel prize, which ought to raise the visibility of Post Keynesian economics in the wider world. Vickrey is a dogged and stalward progressive who remembers exactly what the unemployment rate was in 1926 (1.9 percent in peacetime) and thinks that was a pretty good example. He also has no patience for the balanced budget nonsense that has once again taken over economic policy discussion in this country. Congratulations, Bill, and see you at the next meeting wherever it may be!
James K. Galbraith
LBJ School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin TX 78713
LBJ School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin TX 78713
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996
From: Timothy A. Canova
University of Miami School of Law
Subject: Re: The Vickrey loss
From: Timothy A. Canova
University of Miami School of Law
Subject: Re: The Vickrey loss
See: William Vickrey, "Today's Task For Economists", Challenge, March-April 1993:
According to Vickrey:
"There is no reason inherent in the real resources available to us why we cannot move rapidly within the next two or three years to a state of genuine full employment." Vickrey goes on to define genuine full employment as "a rate of unemployment, as currently measured, of between 1 and 2 percent. Practically, the desirable situation ought to be one in which any reasonably responsible person willing to accept available employment can find a job paying a living wage within 48 hours."
See also Vickrey's article in American Economic Review 83 (March 1993).
Vickrey was an advisory board member and active with the National Jobs For All Coalition, a coalition of scholars and advocacy groups based in New York. Vickrey proposed tradeable or "marketable growth markup warrants", with penalties or taxes for those corporations retaining fewer warrants than the excess of sales revenues over amounts paid for non-prime inputs in the preceding period. This was a variant of Abba Lerner's plan to control inflation by creating a market in rights to raise prices. For discussion of the above, see: Jobs For All, by Sheila D. Collins, Helen Ginsburg, and Gertrude Goldberg (Apex Press, 1994), p. 55.
William S. Vickrey
June 21, 1914 — October 11, 1996
By Jacques H. Drèze
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WILLIAM VICKREY DIED ON October 11, 1996, three days after the announcement that the 1996 Bank of Sweden prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel was being awarded to him and to Professor James Mirrlees of Cambridge "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information." Vickrey was eighty-two years old and had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since April 1996. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences refers specifically to his work in the mid-forties on income taxation, then in the early sixties on auctions. With characteristic independence, Vickrey reacted by privileging instead his work of the late thirties on cumulative averaging of income for tax purposes and his then current concern with unemployment. Early insights, lifetime dedication, and late recognition are unmistakable traits of a truly remarkable career devoted to economics in the service of the public sector.
William Vickrey was born in 1914 in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada). He attended Yale, obtaining a science B.S. degree in 1935 and then went to Columbia University for graduate work in economics, obtaining an M.A. in 1937. The Ph.D. degree was awarded there in 1947 after completion of the "Agenda for Progressive Taxation," his 496-page doctoral dissertation included in 1972 among the Reprints of Economic Classics. The intervening ten years, including World War II, had been spent in various research or advisory positions related to taxation.
Vickrey joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1946 and never left, except for a few sabbaticals. His working life was devoted mostly to teaching and research, but it also included a significant amount of advisory and consulting services on behalf of public institutions and utilities, and a fair amount of non-specialist writing and lecturing.
The advisory and consulting missions encompass the major areas of Vickrey's applied research: taxation, public utilities, transportation, and urban problems. In 1949 he and his Columbia colleague Carl Shoup laid the foundation for the postwar tax structure of Japan. This was followed by a number of tax missions, notably to Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Liberia. Vickrey also spent a year as an adviser on fiscal matters for the United Nations, working in Singapore, Malaysia, Iran, Zambia, Ivory Coast, Libya, and Surinam.
The work on public utilities started with the electric power industry in 1939 and gained momentum in 1951 with the famous study of subway fares performed for the Mayor's Committee for Management Survey of the City of New York. In 1959 he studied traffic congestion in Washington. Further studies on urban planning and transportation took him to India, Argentina, and Venezuela. Over the years, he developed ideas for efficient pricing of electricity, telephone services, urban transportation, street and road use, municipal services, and airlines. He also kept up with every conceivable technological development in these areas, visiting experimental designs on-site and attending specialized conferences.
The quest for efficiency of public services made him a crusader, advocating innovations not only through lectures for the National Tax Association, the NBER, public utility conferences, and transportation symposia, but also through testimony at hearings and letters to the New York Times. Often there is an expression of impatience at the slow acceptance of new ideas by regulatory and operating agencies. In recent years this impatience with blatant inefficiencies has been focused on the macroeconomic field. But the crusade goes on. Irrational budget accounting, excessive concern with inflation, and insufficient attention to wasteful unemployment had become favorite themes on which Vickrey hoped to capture more attention because of the notoriety of the Nobel award.
Response to practical challenges is only one facet of our late friend's intellectual curiosity. His interest in ethics and philosophy led to several publications. Interdisciplinary contacts always appealed to him, in particular through seminars. Bill Vickrey's fearsome participation in seminars was part of his legend, and in particular earned him the Rip van Winkle award from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences "for deep and uninterrupted concentration while attending seminars." At Columbia, he showed up at seminars in many fields, and invariably attended the interdisciplinary ones.
Vickrey was a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association (president, 1992) and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He was a past president of the Metropolitan Economic Association and the Atlantic Economic Association. Among various honors he received were the F. E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and a doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Chicago.
William Vickrey's career was exceptionally rich, having extended over a full sixty years. His work included highly original contributions over a broad spectrum and displayed some distinctive methodological traits. His publications included eight books and some 140 articles, of which a selection with introductory reviews was published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press under the title Public Economics. The following illustrates the originality with reference to incentives and information, suggests the spectrum in regard to public economics, and concludes on methodological traits.
| INCENTIVES AND INFORMATION |
A central concern of economics is the extent to which decentralized decisions by a myriad of economic agents (consumers, workers, producers, asset holders, and public authorities) are compatible with efficiency and equity. Efficiency is a property of economic situations where it would not be possible to improve any one individual's circumstances without impairing those of another; in short, there is no waste. Equity is a more demanding and more controversial property; it relates the distribution of benefits across individuals to ethical premises.
Efficiency of decentralized decisions becomes possible when individual decisions are based on information and incentives reflecting correctly common values. In relatively simple situations, competitive prices for commodities (goods and services) provide correct information and incentives, as was recognized in 1776 by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:
the marginal relative values of commodities are the same for all, since all face the same prices (information), which they cannot manipulate (incentives); further exchanges could not benefit both parties.
The "simple" situations correspond to a surprisingly broad range of economic activities, yet fall substantially short of universality. For instance, public services, like transportation and utilities, are produced under scale economies, which suggest a single producer (monopoly). Decreasing marginal costs lead to losses under competitive pricing. Either prices are not competitive or losses are covered by taxes and transfers. But taxes distort relative prices and affect incentives. Also, taxation raises at once equity issues.
In 1938 Carl Shoup, professor of public finance at Columbia University, and his research assistant Vickrey were discussing methods of taxing capital gains (i.e., wealth increments due to appreciation of assets, such as houses and shares of stock):
The idea emerged that ideally, at least, the method of taxation should be such that the tax should be completely neutral with respect to the time at which a gain is realized (i.e., that the tax payer should have no incentive in the long run for preferring to realize at one time rather than another on account of the tax). From this it was a short step to requiring neutrality with respect to the time of realization or reporting of all forms of income. It then remained only to work out the implications of this requirement for the formulation of the tax, and to devise procedures for the assessment of the tax that would be administratively feasible (1972).
The procedure devised by Vickrey, cumulative averaging, is quite simple once you think about it. It considers "all payments of income tax, with respect to income reported since some base starting date, as interest-bearing deposits in a taxpayer's account with the treasury. The accumulated balance on this account would then be available as a credit against whatever tax is found to be due for the entire period to date, on the basis of the total income thus far reported for the period . . . inclusive of the interest credited on the tax deposit account (which is, in effect, to be treated no differently from interest earned on any other type of deposit)" (1972). This simple scheme would achieve the required neutrality with respect to the time at which a gain is realized, that is, the tax system would become incentive-compatible with efficient economic decisions.
Cumulative averaging has not been applied on a significant scale, for the same reason perhaps that major revisions or simplifications of the income tax, whatever their nature, do not come into being. Still, the merits stand: neutrality, equity with regard to fluctuations and sources of income, simplification of the tax law, and elimination of loopholes.
A few years later, Vickrey was concerned with the proper graduation of progressive taxation. He investigated the prospect for implementing the so-called utilitarian approach outlined by Francis Edgeworth in 1897. Assume that the benefits of a higher real income could be measured by a function of income, labeled utility. Edgeworth posed the problem of income taxation as that of maximizing, through taxes and transfers, the total utility derived by a population from a given fixed aggregate income. Vickrey's contribution was twofold. First, he sought a way of defining and measuring utility that would be germane to the problem. Second, he recognized that income tax distorts incentives to earn income, so that the aggregate income cannot be treated as given and fixed.
The first contribution consisted of adopting the method of representing choices among risky alternatives by comparisons of expected utilities, a method introduced in the eighteenth century by Daniel Bernoulli and axiomatized in 1945 by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour. If a person is indifferent between an income prospect of $50,000 and a fifty-fifty chance of either $20,000 or $100,000, the utility difference between 50,000 and 20,000 is set equal to the utility difference between 100,000 and 50,000. Vickrey recognized as follows the relevance of this construction to the Edgeworth problem: "If utility is defined as that quantity the mathematical expectation of which is maximized by an individual making choices involving risk, then to maximize the aggregate of such utility over the population is equivalent to choosing that distribution of income which such an individual would select were he asked which of various variants of the economy he would like to become a member of, assuming that once he selects a given economy with a given distribution of income he has an equal chance of landing in the shoes of each member of it" (1945). The gedanken- experiment introduced by Vickrey is the basis of modern utilitarianism, an important branch of contemporary social choice theory. It is also used, under the name of "original position, behind the veil of ignorance" in Theory of Justice by John Rawls.
The second contribution is well described by the Swedish Academy:
Vickrey's analysis emphasized that a progressive tax schedule would affect individuals' incentives to exert themselves. He therefore reformulated the problem with respect to both incentive problems--that each individual takes the tax schedule into account when choosing his work effort--and asymmetric information, that in practice, the productivity of individuals is not known to the government.
Vickrey formulated the mathematical problem associated with optimal taxation and derived an appropriate Euler equation, but he went no further, and left it to James Mirrlees to give an explicit characterization twenty-five years later.
The Swedish Academy emphasized the link thus established between incentives and information. It stressed the role of that link in lively developments of contemporary economic research and also related it to Vickrey's work on auctions.
Asymmetric information is also an essential component of auctions, where potential buyers have limited knowledge about the value of the asset or rights up for sale. Vickrey analyzed the properties of different kinds of auctions in two papers in 1961 and 1962. He attached particular importance to the second-price auction or, as it is now often called, the Vickrey auction. In such an auction, an object is auctioned off in sealed bidding, where the highest bidder gets to buy the item, but only pays the next highest price offered. This is an example of a mechanism which elicits an individual's true willingness to pay. By bidding above his own willingness to pay, an individual runs the risk that someone else will bid likewise, and he is forced to buy the object at a loss. And vice-versa, if an individual bids below his own willingness to pay, he runs the risk of someone else buying the item at a lower price than the amount he himself is willing to pay. Therefore, in this kind of auction, it is in the individual's best interest to state a truthful bid. The auction is also socially efficient. The object goes to the person with the highest willingness to pay, and the person in question pays the social opportunity cost which is the second highest bid. Other researchers have later developed analogous principles, for example in order to elicit the true willingness to pay for public projects. Thus, Vickrey's analysis has not only been momentous for the theory of auctions; it has also conveyed fundamental insights into the design of resource allocation mechanisms aimed at providing socially desirable incentives.
Recent years have witnessed spectacular application of auctions theory, in particular to bidding for band spectrum licenses. It is surprising that, to the very end, Vickrey would label this work "one of my digressions into abstract economics, at best of minor significance in terms of human welfare."
| PUBLIC ECONOMICS |
Concern about human welfare pervades the sixty years of Vickrey's professional life. Considered in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, his numerous and widely scattered contributions come close to retracing the history of the field of public economics as it evolved over the last forty years. The field is concerned with the economics of the public sector, with government's effect on the economy. It is today a broad field, where microeconomic theory is applied on the one hand to the revenue side, in particular taxation; and on the other hand to the sphere of real activities carried out or regulated by the public sector. It is a difficult, complex field. On the revenue side, efficiency calls for second best analysis (i.e., minimizing the dead-weight burden of taxation), whereas equity goes straight to the ethical roots of social choice theory. On the real side, if public intervention makes sense, there must be a reason why the market mechanism is not fully operative--like externalities, non-convexities, or information asymmetries. The challenge is thus to invent mechanisms that somehow succeed where the market fails--a challenge that is never trivial.
Reference has been made above to William Vickrey's seminal role in the emergence of modern utilitarianism. Shortly thereafter, he had the good fortune of supervising Kenneth Arrow's doctoral dissertation "Social Choices and Individual Values." Vickrey himself devoted several papers to the area. As early as 1960, he discussed in that context strategic misrepresentation of preferences, a topic that figures prominently in the work on auctions and in an extensive literature on demand-revealing mechanisms.
Reference has also been made to cumulative averaging, Vickrey's "proudest accomplishment" in the area of taxation. It was, however, only one out of twenty-one specific recommendations listed in the Agenda for Progressive Taxation (1947). One particularly innovative chapter deals with inheritance taxes, resting again on a neutrality principle (1944). In the ensuing years, the tax treatments of corporate income, government interest, land values, and charitable contributions retained Vickrey's attention. An overall evaluation of these contributions is worded as follows by Anthony Atkinson, a leading British specialist: "Bill Vickrey occupies a unique position among public finance economists. His contributions to taxation, simultaneously analytical and policy-relevant, are characterized by an inventiveness which is unrivaled. They derive from a powerful, yet essentially simple, view of the logic of taxation, a logic which has quizzed his writing over more than half a century."
On the real side of public economics, Vickrey's work is equally extensive. Much of it derives from his interest in marginal cost pricing, "a device for improving the efficiency with which we use various facilities" (1970). The principle is straightforward in simple situations, for instance, when a specific good or service is consumed at a constant rate over time and produced under conditions of constant or increasing marginal cost. Marginal cost is then well defined and defines in turn the efficient, competitive price. Fluctuations in demand or cost over time and space or in response to imperfectly foreseen circumstances, decreasing marginal costs or heterogeneous production complicate matters. Marginal cost pricing then becomes a subtle art, calling for skillful application of theoretical guidelines. The relevant concept is that of short run marginal social cost (SRMSC) to the proper definition of which Vickrey has contributed several useful precisions. This is not the place to review theoretical intricacies, but it is possible to give a flavor of some of the more innovative applications devised by Vickrey in the areas of public utilities and urban transportation. Here are some illustrations, listed in chronological order to bring out the extent to which they anticipated current developments.
In 1948 Vickrey was concerned with the assessment of SRMSC over time, when the demand for a service at a given future date is imperfectly predicted by the seller, but is known to some buyers apt to make advance reservations. Seats on long-distance flights or rooms at vacation resorts provide examples. He suggested "a fairly elaborate pricing scheme in which the price quoted would vary according to the proportion of seats on a given flight already sold and the time remaining to departure, in simulation of what an ideal speculator's market might produce, the price at any time being an estimate of the price, which, if maintained thereafter, would result in all the remaining seats being just sold out at departure time" (1948). Today, some airlines and tour operators follow precisely this advice, using a technique known as yield management, for which elaborate software is produced commercially.
In 1950-51 Vickrey was consulting for the Mayor's Committee for Management Survey of the City of New York. He was assigned the problem of subway fares, with the aim of reducing the drain of the transit deficit on the city's finances. Evaluation of the SRMSC led him to suggest replacing the prevailing 15-cent flat fare with an efficient set of fares varying from 5 cents to 25 cents according to time of day and trip definition (origin and destination). He even designed a new electromechanical turnstile permitting automatic implementation. Today, such differentiated fares are commonplace in many cities, with implementation facilitated by magnetic cards and electronic processing.
Subways operate under marginal costs that decrease with overall traffic. Pricing at SRMSC entails losses. If budgetary considerations place a ceiling on these losses, a second-best solution calls for raising prices above SRMSC to an extent determined by demand elasticities (and just sufficient to meet the ceiling). That principle had been discovered and translated into mathematical formulae by Frank P. Ramsey in 1927. That contribution had fallen into oblivion, however. Spurred by the practical subway challenge, Vickrey computed the Ramsey solution and extended it in one important respect. Instead of accepting an arbitrary ceiling on the losses, he evaluated the social cost of the distortions associated with revenue raising by the city, summarized in a marginal cost of public funds (MCPF). He then proposed a fare structure such that the marginal inefficiencies associated with reducing the losses matched exactly the MCPF. The subway study stands out as a classic in applied public economics, the reading of which is still instructive today.
In 1959 Vickrey studied road transportation in Washington, D.C., stressing the quantitative importance of the underpricing of rush-hour auto travel. He estimated that, if a suburbanite gave up bus commuting to drive a $3,500 automobile into town, it would cost $23,000 in infrastructure investment to keep road congestion unchanged. The solution was to impose road tolls in amounts corresponding to SRMSC. These tolls would vary with the time of day, culminating at the rush hours. They would help spread the peak and encourage bus travel.
Here again Vickrey faced a technical problem of implementation: toll booths slow down the flow of traffic. He proposed instead the use of vehicle identifiers that could be read electronically without slowing down the traffic and obtained a prototype and cost estimate from a manufacturer. Today, that system has been fully developed, is being used in a few places, and is seen as the way of the future.
Further investigation of the optimal tolls led ten years later to a paper described by specialist Richard Arnott as "almost certainly the most important in urban transport economics over the last quarter century."That paper models the dynamics of rush-hour congestion by treating the departure-time decisions of commuters as endogenous variables. The extended problem is made tractable by modeling congestion as a queue behind a bottleneck. That model has received strong empirical support from detailed traffic flow studies, and has changed the way traffic engineers think about the problem. An interesting property of equilibrium is that it leaves commuters at least as well off as before, so that the toll revenues come free. Road tolls are an example of responsive pricing (i.e., prices varied from moment to moment in response to observed congestion levels). The concept has been applied repeatedly by Vickrey to public utilities, like telephone and electricity, but also water supply.
In 1963 Vickrey published a first paper on pricing and financing of urban services, such as fire protection, water provision, parks and recreational facilities, and education. Fire protection (which accounted at the time for 8% of all general expenditures by cities) is an interesting illustration. Vickrey noted that a given grade of fire protection is a matter of providing an engine company within a suitable number of minutes of travel time, and concluded that the appropriate charge should be a matter of land area (rather than property value under current practice).
The interest of Vickrey for urban problems spread to other areas, like land value taxation. Here again he extended and clarified the theoretical basis by showing how, in equilibrium, "the aggregate of the land rents generated by the urban agglomeration produced by the existence of activities with economies of scale within the city will equal the subsidies required to enable these activities to sell their output at prices equal to their respective marginal costs" (1977). (This is a modern extension of an approach introduced by Henry George, of which several variants were published in the 1970s.) That result sets the problem of land value taxation and financing of public services in a general equilibrium framework.
| STYLE AND METHODS |
The review above is partial, as it leaves out altogether Vickrey's interest in macroeconomic stabilization, which became his major concern from the mid-eighties on. It also leaves out most of his writings about ethics and justice and sundry contributions on such topics as "The Prevention of Gerrymandering" (1961), "Application of Demand Revealing Procedures to International Disputes" (1978), and many more.
The momentous research output of William Vickrey has some distinctive features that give him a very special place among contemporary economists.
- First, it should be clear from the foregoing that his work combine depth and breadth--depth, by grounding specific research firmly in the theory of economic efficiency (leading, for instance, to a correct definition of SRMSC), as well as in a modern approach to equity and social choice; and breadth in the treatment of a wide range of topics covering the revenue as well as the real side of public economics.
- Second, the starting point of Vickrey's investigations is always rooted in real world problems. His interest was to solve the problem at hand. To that end, he brings in general principles, and his proficiency as a theorist pays off. Often he is led to extend the principles into new theory, but he is hardly interested in theory for its own sake--only to the extent that it carries policy implications.
- Third, and related, Vickrey was unique among his contemporaries for his determination to carry out theoretical contributions all the way to practical application. This is illustrated already in his work on cumulative averaging, which led him to develop concrete proposals for legislation. Further examples are found in his work on subway fares and road pricing, and there are many more.
- Fourth, and again related, there is "a certain characteristic style of understatement and specificity of application in Vickrey's work, which has in some ways helped, in perhaps more ways hindered, the full understanding of his originality." Vickrey's papers contain little or no mathematics. Where they do, he is apologetic. Intricate reasoning is typically encapsulated in a sentence or two, as exemplified in the four original quotations used above. Important statements like these repeatedly appear as side remarks in the discussion of a specific application. The generality is hardly stressed except through reference to further applications. The modern economic style of proceeding from numbered assumptions to numbered theorems was quite foreign to Vickrey, in spite of his familiarity with, and thorough understanding of, the relevant literature--a refreshing exception, given the richness of content.
There is no doubt that William Vickrey was a powerful theorist, capable of abstraction and conscious of generality. It is also clear that he was eager to communicate. He was not writing for himself, but to be read. He was particularly eager to be understood by policy makers. Relying on the simplicity of basic reasoning and expressing it verbally was for him a natural vehicle of broad communication. Mostly, he was himself. His relative neglect of systematic theoretical construction probably reflected the little need he felt for it, being able to understand quickly principles and their main implications. He could himself dispense with spelling out details, unless directly relevant to his immediate purpose.
Given Vickrey's talent and analytical ability, some of us regret that he did not put more systematic theoretical effort into his favored topics. Given his bend of mind, it is hard to tell how successful that different orientation would have been. Indeed, creative theoretical work is often produced by researchers primarily interested in real-world problems; and imaginative practical solutions often come from gifted theorists. Vickrey's bend of mind was indispensable to bridge the gap between theory and application. And it was probably an efficient division of labor that he would let others refine the theory, while he himself stayed on the development frontier, demonstrating the fruitfulness of an approach that too few among us are capable of pursuing with excellence.
Ultimately, William Vickrey's forte was originality and creativity, reaching out of the boundaries of standard frameworks to develop a different viewpoint. In so doing, he was saved from esoterism by his uncompromising logic. His style of writing partook of his originality, and may have interacted with the originality of the ideas to explain late recognition, a feature stressed in the citation presenting him as a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association in 1978:
Many of us have had the experience of thinking we were the first to show the neutrality of a particular tax scheme, to prove the incentive characteristics of a particular bidding institution, to deduce the redistributive implications of the expected utility hypothesis, to invent a demand revealing process, and so on, only to find that William S. Vickrey had done it earlier--sometimes much earlier--and whereas our "original contribution" may have contained minor or even a substantive error, Vickrey had done it correctly. Some great scholars receive recognition from the beginning, but inscrutably, with others it takes a little longer. His numerous works, appearing in all the leading journals in economics, law, operations research, finance and taxation, contain many seminal contributions, and many more that would have been seminal but for the fact that the profession was not yet ready for his ideas.
| NOTES |
2 Vickrey's presidential address to the Atlantic Economic Association in October 1992, entitled "My Innovative Failures in Economics," begins as follows: "You are looking at an economist who has repeatedly failed in achieving his objective, even though achieving considerable esteem among his fellows."
3 I have often heard a younger colleague report: "I went to give a talk at Columbia. There sat that tall white-haired man, asleep with his head against the wall. All of a sudden, without raising an eyelid, he mumbled the most penetrating question, and I wondered for a while whether I still had a paper . . . ."
4 Strahan and Cadell, Glasgow.
5 F. Y. Edgeworth. The pure theory of taxation, III. Econ. J. 7(1897):550-71.
6 See D. Bernoulli. Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis. Comment. Acad. Sci. Imp. Petropol. 5(1738):175-92.
7 Princeton University Press, Princeton.
8 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
9 Cf. Scand. J. Econ. 99(1997):175.
10 Cf. Scan. J. Econ. 99(1997):177.
11 Cf. J. Macmillan. Selling spectrum rights. J. Econ. Perspect. 8(1994):145-62.
12 Quoted by D. O'Flaherty. William Vickrey, 1914-1996. The Independent. London, October 13, 1996.
13 See also J. Drèze. Forty years of public economics. J. Econ. Perspect. 9(1995):111-30.
14 Wiley and Sons, 1951.
15 Quoted from W. Vickrey. Public Econ., op. cit., p. 101.
16 F. P. Ramsey. A contribution to the theory of taxation. Econ. J. 37(1927):47-61.
17 Public Economics, op. cit., p. 274.
18 Quoted from K. Arrow in Public Econ., op. cit., p. 13.
19 Quoted from J. H. Drèze. Research and development in public economics: William Vickrey's inventive quest of efficiency. Scand. J. Econ. 99(1997):194.
| SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY |
- 1939 Averaging of income for income tax purposes. J. Polit. Econ. 47:379-97.
- 1944 The rationalization of succession taxation. Econometrica 12:215-36.
- 1945 Measuring marginal utility by reactions to risks. Econometrica 13:319-33.
- A reasonable undistributed profits tax. Taxes, pp. 122-27.
- 1947 Agenda for Progressive Taxation . New York: Ronald Press.
- 1948 Some objections to marginal cost pricing. J. Polit. Econ. 56:218-38.
- 1949 Resource distribution patterns and the classification of families. Stud. Inc. Wealth 10:266-97, 324-29.
- 1950 Ethics and economics: An exchange of questions between economics and philosophy. In Goals of Economic Life, ed. A. D. Ward, pp. 148-77.
- 1952 The Revision of the Rapid Transit Fare Structure of the City of New York. Technical monograph no. 3, finance project, Mayor's Committee for Management Survey.
- 1955 A proposal for revising New York's subway fare structure. J. Oper. Res. Soc. Am. 3:38-68.
- 1957 Expenditure, capital gains, and the basis of progressive taxation. The Manchester School, pp. 1-25.
- 1959 The optimum trend of prices. South. Econ. J. 25:315-26.
- Statement on the pricing of urban street use. Hearings: U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Metropolitan Washington Problems, pp. 466-77.
- 1960 Utility, strategy and social decision rules. Q. J. Econ. 74:507-35.
- 1961 On the prevention of gerrymandering. Polit. Sci. Q. 76:105-10.
- Counterspeculation, auctions, and competitive sealed tenders. J. Finan. 16:8-37.
- 1962 One economist's view of philanthropy. In Philanthropy and Public Policy, ed. F. G. Dickinson, pp. 31-56. New York: NBER.
- Auctions and bidding games. In Recent Advances in Game Theory. Princeton University Conference, pp. 15-27.
- 1963 Pricing in urban and suburban transport. Am. Econ. Rev. 52(2):452-65.
- General and specific financing of urban services. In Public Expenditure Decisions in the Urban Community, ed. H. G. Shaller, pp. 62-90. Resources for the Future.
- 1969 Congestion theory and transport investment. Am. Econ. Rev. 59:251-60.
- 1970 Defining land values for taxation purposes. In The Assessment of Land Value, ed. D. M. Holland, pp. 25-36. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
- Responsive pricing of public utilities services. In Economics of the Regulated Communications Industry in the Age of Innovation. New England Telephone Company, mimeo, pp. 61-68.
- 1972 Cumulative averaging after 30 years. In Modern Fiscal Issues: Essays in Honor of Carl S. Shoup, eds. R. M. Bird and J. G. Head. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Airline overbooking: Some further solutions. J. Transp. Econ. Policy 6(3):257-70.
- 1977 The city as a firm. In The Economics of Public Services, eds. M. S. Feldstein and R. F. Inman.
- 1978 Application of demand revealing procedures to international disputes. Peace Sci. Soc. 28:97-104.
- 1992 Today's task for economists. Am. Econ. Rev. 82:1-10.
- 1993 My innovative failures in economics. Atl. Econ. J., pp. 1-9.
- 1994 Public Economics, Selected Papers by William Vickrey . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
see also http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp387.pdf William Vickrey: Contributions to Public Policy, Richard Arnott, October 1997. 34 page
ヘンリー・ジョージの「土地税」と「モノポリー」ゲーム
先に述べたヘンリー・ジョージは、独占問題を解決する方法を提唱した。そのアイデアはおそらく経済学者の間で最も傑出したものだろう。共同所有を達成するうえで、国有化よりも「もっと単純で、もっと容易で、もっと穏やかな方法」とは、「公共の用途のために地代を租税として徴収することである」と、ジョージは説いた★15。
ジョージの土地税は、今日の固定資産税とは違っていた。固定資産税は一般に税率が1～2％と低いが、土地と家屋を合わせた評価額がベースになり、評価額は政府の鑑定士が査定して決めるのがふつうである。一方、ジョージの土地税は税率がはるかに高い。土地を占有するために支払わなければいけない地代の100％になる。ただし、土地の上に建てられている構造物の価値には課税されない。鑑定人は、最近売却された近隣の空き地の事例に基づいて、家屋の価値のうち、家屋の下にある改良されていない土地から生じている部分がどれだけあるか（つまり、家屋が解体された場合にその土地にどれだけの価値があるか）を判定する。この土地の価値はすべて税金で没収されるが、土地の上にある構造物が超過価値を生み出せば、その分は住宅所有者のものになる。
そうした「地代」に100％課税されると、所有者は土地の上に建てたものの価値はすべて享受できるが、土地そのものの価値については、その全額を政府に払わなければいけなくなり、土地を借りた人とまったく同じことになる。「土地の独占はもう割に合わなくなる。いまは価格が高くて他の人が締め出されている何百万エーカーもの土地が放棄されるか、わずかな金額で売却されるだろう★16」。政府が土地の所有に課税すれば、自分の土地を生産的に使うことができる人はそうするので税金を払うことができるが、土地税がなかったら土地を遊ばせて安閑としていたであろう人たちは、土地を売却して、税金を逃れようとする。
ジョージの提案はたちまち大衆の心をとらえた（図1・1参照）。ボードゲームの歴史で最も有名なものといえる「モノポリー」は、「地主ゲーム」と呼ばれたゲームが原型になっている。ジョージのアイデアを大衆に教えるために、エリザベス・マギーが1904年に考案した。いまはおなじみのルールでは、プレイヤーは土地を独占して、他のプレイヤーを破産に追い込み、ゲームから脱落させようとする。ところが、オリジナルはルールが違っていた（イーベイでフォコーポリー・プレス版を買うことができる）。地代に税金をかけて（土地の上に建てられている家屋には課税されない）、それが公共工事の財源になるので、プレイヤーは公共会社と鉄道をタダで利用できるし、いまは「GO」と呼ばれているところを通過すると社会的配当を受け取り、サラリーが増える★17。こうしたルールがあるため、1人のプレイヤーが独占を達成することはできず、誰かが自分の土地を開発すると、すべてのプレイヤーがその恩恵にあずかれる。
…
ジョージ主義の欠陥
だが、ジョージ主義には深刻な欠陥があった。構造物の下にある土地の価値に100％課税されて没収されるなら、所有者は土地に投資することはおろか、手入れをするインセンティブすらなくなってしまう。これは投資非効率という問題だ。当時、土地の投資非効率は問題とされていなかった。土地を保守管理する必要はない、土地に価値を付け加えることができるのは、家屋のような地上構造物だけだと考えられていたからだ。しかし、こうした前提は環境に与える損害を無視していた。生態学者のギャレット・ハーディンは後年になって、単独の所有者がいない土地は往々にして過放牧に陥り、浸食され、汚染されると考察した。これはハーディンが「共有地の悲劇」と呼ぶ状況である★19。鉱山からとれる金属、油井からとれる石油など、枯渇する可能性がある天然資源では、それ以上に大きな問題にぶつかった。土地に100％課税されると、そうした資源の所有者はできるだけ早く石油や鉱石をとりだそうとするので、資源が浪費されてしまう。
くわえて、ジョージの提案が実現していたら、行政にとっては悪夢になっていただろう。ジョージは自然の賜物である土地と、土地の上に建っているか、土地を使用しているあらゆるもの（ジョージのいう「人工資本」）とを区別し、前者には課税すべきだが、後者には課税すべきではないとした。この線引きはたぶんに人為的なものだった。工場は鉱山からとられた金属で建てられており、工場は一度建てられると、土地とまったく同じように独占されやすい。また、工場は簡単に動かせないし、工場が地域の発展を後押しするかもしれない。そうなれば土地の価値は上がる。そのため、土地から生まれる価値とその上に建っている構造物の価値を区別するのは至難の業だ。
この点を、エンパイア・ステート・ビルを例に考えてみよう。このビルの下にある土地の純粋な価値はどうなのだろう。隣接する土地の価値と比較して推定することもできる。しかし、ビルそのものが周辺地域の土地に価値を与えている。ビルがなくなれば、周囲の土地の価値はほぼ間違いなく変わるはずである。土地と建物、場合によっては周辺地域は互いに強く結びついているので、それぞれの価値を別々に算定するのは難しい。他の地域もそうだろう。純粋に物理的な立地条件よりも、建造物の外観やイメージ、建物や通り、公園、小道との関係性といった、それ以外のさまざまな要素によって決まる部分のほうが大きい。
…
設計によって競争を促進する
ヴィックリーが提示したオークションという制度
しかし、すべての思想家がスティグラーに追随したわけではなかった。ヴィックリーは独占問題を認識して、共同所有というジョージのビジョンに敬意を払い、独自の解決策としてオークションという理想の制度を提示した。想像の世界での架空のオークションを「序文」で取り上げた。すべての財産──あらゆる工場、住宅、自動車が共同で所有されていて、お金を払ってそれを使う権利が絶えずオークションにかけられる。（レンタル料の形で）いちばん高い値をつけた市民は、別の市民がそれよりも高い入札価格をつけるまで、その財を保有する。どの工場、どの住宅、どの自動車も、現時点での最高入札価格が開示され、その金額が、現在の保有者がその資産を使うために政府に支払うことに同意した賃借料になる。これよりも高い価格を入札すれば、誰でもそれを使う権利を主張できる。賃借料として徴収したお金は、公共財の財源に使われ（第2章を参照）、社会的配当として分配される。ヴィックリーはこのユートピア的なビジョンを直接描いてはいないが、彼のアイデアと結びつく部分があまりにも多いので、ヴィックリーが死の直前まで実現したいと願っていた壮大なビジョンの一部だったのではないかという気がしている。そこで、本書ではこれを「ヴィックリー・コモンズ」と呼ぶことにする。
斬新な概念のほとんどは、最初は現実離れしているように見えるものだ。いまから10年前には、アパートをオンラインで見知らぬ人にお金を取って貸すなど、考えられないようなことだった。すでにみなさんの頭には、「ヴィックリー・コモンズができると日常生活が混乱してしまう」という反論が浮かんでいるに違いない。この点については、この章の後のほうで取り上げる。だが、心にとめておいてほしいことがある。ヴィックリーのアイデアは、私たちが毎日訪れるウェブやフェイスブックのページに広告枠を割り当てるのにすでに使われている。数秒ごとに、ヴィックリーが提案したオークションデザインを通じて、そのときにいちばん高い値をつけている人に枠が与えられているのだ★29。
政府もオークションを使っている。コースは連邦通信委員会（FCC）を説得して、放送用電波の周波数帯の利用権を与えたり、政府が決めた価格で売却したりするのではなく、オークションにかけるようにさせた★30。これに対応して、経済学者のロバート・ウィルソン、ポール・ミルグロム、プレストン・マカフィーがヴィックリーの研究を発展させて、周波数帯を売却するためのオークションを設計した★31。しかし、この設計は独占問題を一時的に解消したにすぎなかった。電波オークションは頻繁に行われるわけではなかったので、オークションの勝者は周波数帯を何年も、場合によっては何十年も保有し続けることができた。何年も前に利用権を競り落とした会社は、いまでは利用権を最も高く評価している所有者ではないかもしれない。新しい会社がその帯域を買いたいと思っても、帯域の保有者がとんでもなく高い金額を要求してくるかもしれない。以下に述べるように、そのとおりのことが実際に起きている。
ヴィックリーの後継者の筆頭にあげられるロジャー・マイヤーソン（このトピックに関する自身の研究でノーベル賞を受賞）とマーク・サタースウェイトは、ヴィックリーのアイデアを使って、財産の独占性に関するジェヴォンズとワルラスの洞察を深く掘り下げた★32。2人は、単純すぎるコースの解釈が成り立つのは、買い手が売り手よりも資産を高く評価していることを、買い手と売り手の両方が確信しているという例外的なケースだけであることを数学的に示した。それ以外の状況では、交渉によって独占問題を克服し、それをいちばんよい形で利用する（いちばん高く評価する）人のところに資産が移動し続けるようにする方法はない。この研究によって、なぜ電波市場では周波数帯が新しい用途になかなか再配分されないのか、そしてなぜ、インターネット広告枠のオークションのほうがはるかにうまくいっているのか、その理由に一部説明がついた。独占問題を解決して、配分効率性を生み出すには、使用のための正当なオークションを継続的に行うしかない。
オークションの問題点とその解決策
しかし、オークションを継続的に行うと、問題が起きる可能性もある。それは投資効率性の問題だ。自分が保有しているものがいつ他人に取り上げられてしまうかもしれず、入札の売上金も受け取れないことを保有者がわかっていたら、財産を手入れして改良しようとは思わなくなるだろう。こんな状況では、自宅を荒れるに任せてしまうかもしれない。ジョージの土地税案と同じで、ヴィックリー・コモンズは人々に投資を促すインセンティブをもたらさない。
この問題に対応するものとして、投資を促進するインセンティブが配分効率性よりも重要になる私有財産権（ジョージのいう「人工資本」）と、配分効率性が投資効率性よりも重要になる共有財産（ジョージのいう「土地」であり、使用はオークションを通じて分配される）を使うことが考えられる。実際に、アメリカの現行の所有権制度がそれに似ていなくもない。私有財産制は広く浸透しているが、政府は国土の大部分をはじめとする莫大な資源を所有して、それを賃貸したり、無償で使用させたりしており、電波のようにオークションにかけるときもある。しかし、あらゆる財産をこのような極端な型に押し込めては、資源の無駄遣いになる。投資効率性の面からも、配分効率性の面からも、きまって非常に非効率な結果になってしまうからだ。大半の種類の財産には投資がプラスになる。また、大半の種類の財産は、耐用期間に人の手から人の手に移っていくし、そうなるべきである。
もっとよいアプローチは、求められる投資効率性と配分効率性のバランスをとる道を見つけることである。このアプローチを「部分共同所有」と呼ぶことにする。これは共同所有と伝統的な私的所有の中間にある形態だ。部分共同所有にすれば、一つの財産制度の中で配分効率性と投資効率性が最適化される。共同所有によって独占力が生まれるのを阻止できる一方、私的所有によって投資が促されるからだ。1980年代後半、経済学者のピーター・クラムトン、ロバート・ギボンズ、ポール・クレンペラーが財産権を共有する方法を提示し、イリヤ・シーガルとマイケル・ウィンストンがこれに重要な改良を加えた★33。
会社の所有権を決める入札システム
いま、あるスタートアップ企業の2人の創業者が大げんかし、袂を分かつことになったとしよう。パートナーシップがすんなり解消されることはまずない。各パートナーがパートナーシップを解消することに同意しなければいけないが、誰の持ち分を多くするべきか、あるいはパートナーシップの価値をどう評価するかできまって意見が対立するので、話し合いは行き詰まってしまう。まさに独占問題の別バージョンだ。クラムトンらの提案（法学の世界では「テキサス・シュートアウト」とも呼ばれている）では、各当事者が会社の価値を評価して入札し、高い価格を入札したほうが落札者となる。落札者は、両当事者の平均価格で相手の持ち分を買い取らなければいけない。…
TheEconomicTheoryofSocialism,4ReviewofEconomicStudies1（1936）であるようだが、ランゲはこの概念はワルラスによるものだとしている。ランゲの思想については後に詳しく見ていく。
★14Walras,StudiesinSocialEconomics,234.
★15George,ProgressandPoverty（『進歩と貧困』）,223.
★16George,ProgressandPoverty（『進歩と貧困』）,244.
★17http://landlordsgame.info/.
★18GeorgeR.Geiger,ThePhilosophyofHenryGeorge.IntroductionbyJohnDeweyxxii（MacMillanCo.,1933）.
★19GarrettHardin,TheTragedyoftheCommons,162Science1243（1968）.
★20HaroldSchiffrin,SunYatsen'sEarlyLandPolicy:TheOriginandMeaningof“EqualizationofLandRights,”16JournalofAsianStudies549,555（1957）.
★21JosephA.Schumpeter,Capitalism,SocialismandDemocracy（Harper&Brothers,1942）（邦訳シュンペーター著、大野一訳『資本主義、社会主義、民主主義Ⅰ、Ⅱ』日経BP社、2016年）.
★22OskarLange&FredM.Taylor,OntheEconomicTheoryofSocialism（BenjaminE.Lippincott,ed.,1938）（邦訳ランゲ、テーラー共著、土屋清訳『計画経済理論──社会主義の経済学説』社会思想研究会出版部、1951年）;AbbaP.Lerner,TheEconomicsofControl:PrinciplesofWelfareEconomics（Macmillan,1944）.
★23LudwigvonMises,EconomicCalculationintheSocialistCommonwealth（S.Aldertrans.,LudwigvonMisesInstitute,2012）;FriedrichA.Hayek,TheUseofKnowledgeinSociety,35AmericanEconomicReview519（1945）（邦訳ハイエク著、嘉治元郎、嘉治佐代訳「社会における知識の利用」『ハイエク全集第3巻──個人主義と経済秩序』西山千明、矢島釣次監修、春秋社、1990年に収録）.20世紀半ばの論争に関する議論については、SamuelBowles,Microeconomics:Behavior,Institutions,andEvolution475‐476（PrincetonUniversityPress,2006）（邦訳ボウルズ著、塩沢由典、磯谷明徳、植村博恭訳『制度と進化のミクロ経済学』NTT出版、2013年）も参照。一連の論争はエピローグで再び取り上げる。
★24こうした批判を受けて、後の現代社会主義思想家はさまざまな混合経済関係を提唱するようになる。生産をより民主的な管理下に置く労働者協同組合や、労働者の雇用主への依存を減らす経済的権利の強化がその例である。SamuelBowles&HerbertGintis,DemocracyandCapitalism:Property,Community,andtheContradictionsofModernSocialThought（BasicBooks,1986）;AlecNove,TheEconomicsofFeasibleSocialismRevisited（Routledge,2ded.,1991）を参照。
★25FriedrichHayek,TheRoadtoSerfdom（Routledge,1944）（邦訳ハイエク著、西山千明訳『隷属への道』春秋社、1992年）.
★26ある限定された実証研究によって、特にコースが好んで使った事例では、交渉がきわめて困難になるときがあるという弁護士の直感が正しいことが確認されている。HoytBleakley&JosephFerrie,LandOpeningsontheGeorgiaFrontierandtheCoaseTheoremintheShortandLongRun（2014）athttp://www.personal.umich.edu/~hoytb/Bleakley_Ferrie_Farmsize.pdfおよびWardFarnsworth,DoPartiestoNuisanceCasesBargainafterJudgment?AGlimpseInsidetheCathedral,66UniversityofChicagoLawReview373（1999）を参照。非常に競争的な環境でも、経済的な証拠によってこうした発見が裏付けられている。BradleyLarsen,TheEfficiencyofRealWorldBargaining:EvidencefromWholesaleUsedAutoAuctions,NBERWorkingPaper20431（2014）を参照。
★27コースが示したかったのは、問題を起こしそうな人物（この例では音楽教師）を規制するのが常に最善であるとは限らず、両当事者間で合意させるほうが合理的な場合もある、ということだった。
★28これは法と経済学の3つの代表的な教科書に認められる。3冊とも私有財産を正当化するものとして投資問題に重点を置いている。私有財産が存在しなかったら、投資の見返りを得られると確信できないので、財産を改良するために投資しないだろう。StevenShavell,FoundationsofEconomicAnalysisofLaw11‐19（HarvardUniversityPress,2004）（邦訳シャベル著、田中亘、飯田高訳『法と経済学』日本経済新聞出版社、2010年）;RobertCooter&ThomasUlen,Law&Economics76‐80（Pearson,6thed.,2012）（邦訳クーター、ユーレン共著、太田勝造訳『新版法と経済学』商事法務研究会、1997年）;RichardA.Posner,EconomicAnalysisofLaw40‐42（AspenPublishers,9thed.,2014）を参照。いずれも独占問題にはさらっとしか触れられていない。高額要求問題とそれに関連する戦略的行動問題が財産の移転を阻む可能性があることは認識されているが、工場汚染のように、財産の使用が大勢の人に影響を及ぼすケースに概ね限定されると考えられている。
★29BenjaminEdelman,MichaelOstrovsky,&MichaelSchwarz,InternetAdvertisingandtheGeneralizedSecondPriceAuction:SellingBillionsofDollars'WorthofKeywords,97AmericanEconomicReview242（2007）;HalR.Varian,PositionAuctions,25InternationalJournalofIndustrialOrganization1163（2007）を参照。
★30R.H.Coase,TheFederalCommunicationsCommission,2JournalofLawandEconomics1（1959）;ThomasW.Hazlett,AssigningPropertyRightstoRadioSpectrumUsers:WhyDidFCCLicenseAuctionsTake67Years?,41JournalofLawandEconomics1（1959）.
★31PaulMilgrom,PuttingAuctionTheorytoWork,108JournalofPoliticalEconomy245（2000）.
★32RogerB.Myerson&MarkSattherwaite,EfficientMechanismsforBilateralTrading,29JournalofEconomicTheory265（1983）.
★33PeterCramton,RobertGibbons,&PaulKlemperer,DissolvingaPartnershipEfficiently,55Econometrica61（1987）;IlyaSegal&MichaelD.Whinston,ASimpleStatusQuothatEnsuresParticipation（withApplicationtoEfficientBargaining）,6TheoreticalEconomics109（2011）.
★342人のパートナーの持ち分が、それぞれがパートナーシップに投じてきた労力に比例しているのであれば、このケースは自然であるように思うかもしれない。会社を引き継ぐ最善のパートナーは、会社にいちばん労力を投じてきたパートナーである可能性が高いからだ。ところが、各パートナーの持ち分に労力が反映されているだけでなく（「スウェット・エクイティ」）、金銭の投資（「キャッシュ・エクイティ」）も反映されている場合や、会社への関与が時間とともに変化している場合はその限りではない。
★35E.GlenWeyl&AnthonyLeeZhang,DepreciatingLicenses（2017
…
Three years later, Henry George and Mary Lease helped to form the People's Party. “We are ... The richest 1 percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the nation's wealth, and the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent. Populists didn't ...
Jill Lepore - 2018 - プレビュー
Henry George: From Poverty to Politics | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/gilded-age-henry-george-poverty-politics/Henry George: From Poverty to Politics
| Digital Short
Henry George’s 1879 book Progress and Poverty articulated the problem felt by many people during the Gilded Age — that despite the booming economy, many people were left behind in poverty. The book was a bestseller, and George became wildly popular, eventually being drafted to run for Mayor of New York City in 1886 as a candidate for the United Labor Party. Henry George’s message about the haves and the have nots helped ignite a movement of working people that swept the nation. Filmmaker Sarah Colt introduces Henry George.
地域通貨花子１ (@TiikituukaHana)
返信削除2020/09/25 12:33
@s_karaqui @MMT20191 参考
《「モノポリー」は、「地主ゲーム」…が原型…。[ヘンリー]ジョージのアイデアを大衆に教えるために…1904年に考案。…1人のプレイヤーが独占を達成することはできず、誰かが自分の土地を開発すると、すべてのプレイヤーがその恩恵にあずかれる。》『ラディカルマーケット』
https://twitter.com/tiikituukahana/status/1309335173180211200?s=21
ケイトラワース
返信削除ドーナツ経済学
Toshi Kurokawa
5つ星のうち5.0 「公正と環境の経済学」を提示する力作
2018年5月22日に日本でレビュー済み
力作だ。朝日新聞の書評では、これほどよくできた本とは分からなかった。題名が良くないのだと感じる。「公正と環境の経済学」とでも呼ぶべきだろう。ドーナツの形そのものが本質的ではなく、社会的な公正と公平の線と、環境を破壊しないという線の上下の線で区切られた範囲が「正しい」経済学の位置だということだ。
形ということでは、本文中でも「コンパス（羅針盤）」という表現があるが、むしろその方がメタフォーとしては適切だろう。ドーナツという食品を思い浮かべるとなんでドーナツ経済学なんだと戸惑ってしまう。
前書きで、21世紀の正しい経済学のための7つの思考法が示されて、それがそのまま本文の7章になっている。そこで、まずは目次：
経済学者になりたいのは誰か?
第1章 目標を変える―GDPからドーナツへ
第2章 全体を見る―自己完結した市場から組み込み型の経済へ
第3章 人間性を育む―合理的経済人から社会的適応人へ
第4章 システムに精通する―機械的均衡からダイナミックな複雑性へ
第5章 分配を設計する―「ふたたび成長率は上向く」から設計による分配へ
第6章 環境再生を創造する―「成長でふたたびきれいになる」から設計による環境再生的経済へ
第7章 成長にこだわらない―成長依存から成長にこだわらない社会へ
今や誰もが経済学者
付録――ドーナツとそのデータ
謝辞
訳者あとがき
著者が強調しているのは、経済学を説明するモデル、図が、経済活動や経済政策がどうあるべきかを規定するということ。だから、その考え方、立ち位置を変えることで、経済活動そのものが変わるということだ。Rethinking Economicsという、学生たちの活動が紹介されている。経済学が、いま世界が必要とすること、学生が学びたいことを扱わず、世界の不公正に加担しているという批判がこういう活動として行われている。
本書では、経済学の現在がどうしてこうなったかという説明と、これから変えるのはどこをどのようにという説明をデータとともに示しているので、結構細かいことがらまで述べられている。
第1章では、GDPがどのようにして導入されたかの経緯を含めて、その歪みを正すために公正な社会基盤を確保して、環境に対して負荷をかけないというドーナツ形の経済の枠組みを提示する。第7章でGDP成長神話がいかに問題をはらんでいるかの説明があるが、GDPだけを経済指標とすることの問題が述べられている。
第2章では、市場が問題になる。第3章の合理的経済人というモデルとも関係するが、「市場が万能」ではないことが論じられる。「マッチを擦る前と同じように、市場を始める前には注意しなくてはならない。何を燃やし尽くし、灰にしてしまうか、わたしたちにはわからないのだから。」とまとめられている。
市場に関して興味深かったのは、ボードゲーム「モノポリー」のお話。「ゲームの開発者エリザベス・マギーは、土地を人類全員の共有財産と考えるヘンリー・ジョージの思想の熱烈な支持者で、1903年に最初にこのゲームを考案したときには、二種類のまったく異なるゲームのルールを用意していた。「繁栄」と名づけられたルールでは、誰かが新しい土地を獲得するたび、すべてのプレーヤーにお金が配られ、元手がもつとも少なかったプレーヤーの資金が二倍になったところで、ゲームの決着がついた(全員が勝者だった)。いつぼう「独占者(モノポリスト)」と名づけられたルールでは、プレーヤーは自分の土地に止まったあわれなプレーヤーから地代や賃料を徴収して、お金を増やした。ゲームの勝者は、ほかのプレーヤーを全員破産させ、最後まで残ったプレーヤーだった。マギーが二種類のルールを設けたのは、「現在の土地の収奪システムからいかに尋常ではない結果や影響がもたらされるかを、プレーヤーたちに具体的に示し」、土地の所有権の扱いかたしだいで、社会にまったく異なる結果が生まれることを理解してもらいたかったからだ。」とある。パーカー・ブラザーズが1930年代に特許を買い取ってから、今の「モノポリー」だけと改変されたという。
市場以外にも、企業：任せる→目的を持たせる。金融：ぜったいに誤らない したがって信頼せよ→利用するものである したがって社会の役に立たせよう。貿易：双方を満足させる したがって国境を開放せよ→諸刃の剣である したがって公平にしよう。国家：無能である したがって干渉させるな→不可欠である したがって責任を明確にしよう。家計：家庭の問題である したがって女たちに任せよ→中核である したがってその貢献を重んじよう。コモンズ：悲劇である したがって売り払え→創造性の源である したがってその可能性を引き出そう。社会：存在しない したがって無視せよ→土台である したがってそのつながりを育もう。地球：無尽蔵である したがって好きなだけ使え→生命を支える したがってその許容限界に配慮しよう。勢力：無関係である したがって問題にするな→どこにでも生じる したがって濫用を防ごう。
と、経済学の要素を組み替える必要を説く。
第3章は、これも悪評高い「合理的経済人」の批判。社会にとって好ましくないこのような人を経済学部が生み出している状況が語られる。
第4章では、経済システムを「均衡理論」から、よりダイナミックな複雑系に切り替えることを説き、「今日の経済は、無策により、分断的かつ非環境再生的である。明日の経済は、設計により、分配的かつ環境再生的なものにしなくてはならない。」とまとめている。経済学者は「機械工から庭師に」というスローガンも用意されている。
第5章は、格差の問題に取り組む。従来の「経済成長すれば格差は解消する」という主張が破綻しているのは、ピケティの「21世紀の資本論」でも明示されているとおりだ。「不平等の解消のため、経済成長が進むのを待つのは止めよう。そうはならないから。代わりに、設計により分配的な経済を築こう。」とまとめられている。
興味深かったのは、コミュニティ通貨とブロックチェーンの組み合わせで、地域振興という観点。仮想通貨をこう把握することもできるのだ。また、オープンソースを引き合いに出して、知的資産のコモンズが語られる。Digital Technologyが勝者総取りの格差拡大だけでなく、共有化の可能性もあるということだ。
第6章では、地球環境の問題を取り上げる。
前提抜きに経済成長を是とする考えには、地球の資源や環境を無尽蔵に好きなように使えるという前提があることが論じられ、さらには、「経済が成長すれば環境もよくなる」という議論がなされる。これに対して、「環境再生的な経済設計に支えられて初めて、環境再生的な産業設計は真に実を結ぶ」と、当初から、環境再生を目指した政策、社会経済環境を整える必要性を説く。ここでは、コモンズの位置づけも従来の無用とするEnclosure以来の考え方を改め、むしろ、コモンズの適切な管理によって、環境再生的な基盤が整備されるとする。asknatureというサイトも紹介されて、知財もまたコモンズを通じて、このような環境保全の文脈で使われるべきだと論じる。
第7章では、今の経済理論の最大の欠陥。経済成長のこの後、どうなるのかを取り上げる。私がこの議論に最初に接したのは、Sutterさんの「経済成長神話の終わり 減成長と日本の希望」だったが、状況はあまり変わっていないようだ。原発ですら最終処分費用が不明でも、ランニングコストが安価などという議論がまかり通るから、いつまでも経済成長を続けることを前提とした政策がまかり通るわけで、まさに、無理が通れば道理が引っ込む状況だ。
経済理論が実社会をまともに扱うなら、GDPの上限があることは自明で、それをクラッシュではなく、まともに扱えるモデル構築が求められるし、そのような中で、GDPに取って代わる、願わくばわかりやすい指標が望まれる。本書の議論を通じて感じたのは、いわゆる「幸福指数」も、人間の狭い了見から来ているように見えることだ。むしろ社会・環境への貢献度、保全度のようなものを用いたほうが良いのではないかと感じる。
付録には、議論の材料となる種々のデータも示されている。「公正と環境の経済学」は、まだ出来上がってはいないが、それを論じるための基礎は、本書でかなりカバーされている。著者が希望しているように、これがこれからの経済学の基本となれば、世の中も少しは良くなると期待されるのだが、さて、どうなるか。
The Landlord's Game 1904 Patent - Rules
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The Landlord's Game 1904 Patent - Rules
http://landlordsgame.info/
rules/lg-1904p_patent.html
世界中に愛好家がいるモノポリーのルーツを巡る泥沼劇とは？ - GIGAZINE
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パーカー・ブラザースからマギー氏に支払われた額は約500ドルで、The Landlord’s Gameの名前やルールを改変しないことが条件に含まれていたとのこと。マギー氏は売却に関してはとても前向きで、その理由は大きい出版会社から発売されることで大勢の人に遊んでもらえるからだったそうです。
ただし、アメリカの特許は｢出願日から20年」または「特許付与日から17年」のうちいずれか遅く終了する期間までが存続期間となるため、訴えられたAnspach氏は「モノポリーはパブリックドメインである」と主張し、裁判の争点はモノポリーがパブリックドメインであるか否かに移っていきます。
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"THE HISTORY OF THE LANDLORD'S GAME & MONOPOLY"
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https://twitter.com/landlordsgame
Mason Gaffney, Warm Memories of Bill Vickrey （1996）, http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Vickrey.html. ガフニーは神はこう答えただろうとしている。「ビルよ、われわれはここでずっとそうしてきている。しかし、天国と同じように地上で私の意志が果たされるよう、民を促してくれていることに感謝する」。
返信削除Bill died, as you know by now, en route to that meeting. He drove at night, true to his principle of easing peak-hour congestion. Had he arrived, I know he would have raised his head from the doze he affected and told some unwary journeyman, "This paper would benefit from an application of Henry George's idea of taxing land values." How do I know? Because he always did. I imagine by now he has mentioned it to God, too; and God has said "Actually, Bill, that's how we've always done it here; but thank you for urging folks to have my will done on earth as it is in Heaven.
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Bill Vickrey was a major figure among contemporary Georgists.
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《Bill Vickrey was a major figure among contemporary Georgists. …》
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Henry George (1839-1897)
WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MONEY
What can be clearer than that a note directly issued by the government is at least as good as a note based on
a government bond? Yet special interests have sufficed with us to institute and maintain a hybrid currency for which no valid reason can be assigned than private profit. - Protection or Free Trade 1886
Henry George (1839-1897)
Greenbackism (so-called from the popular name of the direct issue of paper money made by the national government during the Civil War) was, in original and rational form, the recognition of the fact that this money needed no backing of deposited
bonds or gold reserves, and was the cheapest and fairest form of money, giving to the greater part of the country what it had never had before, a uniform and convenient medium of exchange, and utilizing for the benefit of the whole people the enormous economies effected by the substitution of paper for the precious metals.
Beneath the Silver Question, The Sterling Library, April 1894
お金について知っておくべきこと
政府が直接発行する債券は、少なくとも国債を元にした債券と同じように良いということ以上に明確なことがあるでしょうか。
政府債に基づく紙幣と同等であること以上に明確なことがあるでしょうか。しかし、特別な利害関係者は、私的な利益以外に正当な理由のないハイブリッド通貨を制定し、維持するために、私たちと十分な関係を築いてきた。- 保護か自由貿易か 1886年
ヘンリー・ジョージ（1839-1897）
グリーンバック主義（南北戦争中に政府が直接発行した紙幣の通称）とは、元来、合理的な形で、この紙幣が預託金や金準備金の裏付けを必要としないという事実を認識したものである。
この貨幣は、国債や金準備金の裏付けを必要とせず、最も安価で公正な貨幣形態であり、国の大部分に、それまで持っていなかった均一で便利な交換媒体を与え、貴金属を紙に置き換えることによってもたらされる膨大な経済性を、国民全体の利益のために利用するものである、という事実を、本来の合理的な形で認識したのである。
銀の問題の下に、スターリング・ライブラリー、1894年4月号