Understanding the Private‐Public Divide: Markets, Governments and Time Horizons.AvnerOffer, (Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 200. 18 figures, 4 tables. ISBN 9781108791663, Pbk. £23.99)
本书从实证和规范角度分析公私部门分工的历史演变与应然状态，提出投资回报期长短决定应由市场还是政府主导，并批判新自由主义市场化转向导致的腐败与低效。
I had the great pleasure of sitting beside Avner Offer at a dinner in February 2011. Our conversation covered a multitude of topics. I had met someone driven by intellectual curiosity. His latest book bears all the hallmarks of that dinner conversation. As was the meal itself, his book is delectable to the intellectual palate yet easily digestible (I read it in one sitting). Offer's book provides a new approach to the public sector. From a positive perspective, he explains the division of labour between the public and private sectors and how these have changed over time, and from a normative perspective, he lays out where this division of labour ought to be. Those familiar with Offer's recent work will be unsurprised to find that he reserves much of his intellectual ire for the neoliberal market turn ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. There are many things that the private sector should not do and cannot do on its own. Offer uses a wide range of policies in the United Kingdom and the United States over the past century to make his point. The core of Offer's argument revolves around finance and the concepts of patient capital and the payback horizon for investments. These concepts help us understand where the division of labour between public and private sectors ought to be. When a project or investment has a short and certain duration, it should be undertaken by market competition in the private sector. However, the government, the family, and social enterprises should provide those projects where the payback period or duration is long or uncertain. When these demarcations are traversed in either direction, the results are inefficiencies, failure, or corruption. For society, the ultimate risk-taker is the government, not the private sector. Offer's chief example of how transversing these demarcations can result in failure and corruption is the cause celebre of the UK's Private Finance Initiative. After a brief excursion which helps the reader understand how public corruption and graft were addressed in the nineteenth century through meritocracy and professionalization of the civil service, Offer unfolds how ‘New Corruption’ has emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States after the neoliberal market turn. The Weberian integrity revolution of the nineteenth century gave way to New Public Management, where parts of the public sector were handed over to or subcontracted to the private sector. This dependence on government for business results in the private sector capturing it and corrupting politicians and bureaucrats. Offer gives countless examples of this, but particular ire is reserved for the likes of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Bill Clinton. He tantalizingly dangles the conclusion that perhaps the neoliberal market turn was really a plutocratic power grab rather than an ideological faux pas. Offer then tries out his payback horizon argument on education and social security in the form of pensions. Raising a child and creating an adult is an investment with a long time horizon and uncertain payback duration. For this reason, Offer argues that education from kindergarten to university should remain in the hands of the public sector. He highlights how attempts to marketize education in the United States and the United Kingdom have been a failure. He also argues that the attempts to privatize pension arrangements in the United Kingdom and the United States have been unsuccessful because, although they have worked well for the better off, for the vast majority of people, modern pension schemes provide inadequate retirement income at an excessive cost. One thing that this reader would like to understand better is how the changing nature of family structure and the rapid decline in the replacement ratio places pressure on investments in children and providing for old age. Is there more of an onus on governments to make up for those who do not have the two-parent privilege? How will the old be cared for with population shrinkage? Will there be adequate resources to provide a cradle-to-grave social safety net? And what does all this mean for the very future of social democracy itself? Housing in the United Kingdom since the nineteenth century is given a lengthy treatment in the book. Houses last for a century or so, but impatient lenders need their money back much sooner than that. Offer tells the story of how housing has moved from petty capitalism (where most people were renters and housing was expensive or poor quality) to social democracy (where the government sought to provide adequate housing for all) and finally to financialization (where housing finance has been turned over to bankers and the financial system). Offer concludes that this neoliberal market turn has produced bad outcomes for society in this realm as well. The penultimate chapter addresses climate change. The theme of the book is whether the private or public sectors are best placed to deal with the long term and make the best decisions regarding the future of society. Unsurprisingly, Offer rounds on several notable neoclassical climate economists and argues that they are wrong to think that markets will address the issue of climate change. For Offer, tackling climate change is a task for the public sector. This book is provocative, and readers will not agree with every argument proffered. Nevertheless, its strident defence of social democracy and its pillorying of the neoliberal market turn in the economics profession makes it an illuminating as well as entertaining read. Offer's book is intellectual fine dining at its absolute best. This reader gives it a five-star rating and cannot wait for the next meal that one of the finest economic historians of this generation will serve up.