… is from pages 354-355 of my colleague Larry White’s superb 2012 volume, The Clash of Economic Ideas (original emphasis):
How do we know individuals are willing to pay enough to cover the cost of a supposed public good? When we do not see a good being produced, it need not be that transaction costs or free-rider problems are blocking something that ought to be done. It could be that the good in question is not really worth producing in the eyes of those who would bear the cost. We do not know which it is, and by the inbuilt logic of the construct we cannot know.
