Peter Van Doren joins Aaron and Trevor to answer questions about market failure and the provision of public goods.
What does it mean to say that something is a market failure and that public policy ought to fix it? Can the government actually provide these goods? How often do these situations occur? What does economics have to say about these public goods problems?
Van Doren explains several key economic concepts, including the economist’s definition of a public good, Pareto optimality, and Cosean bargaining.
Peter Van Doren is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of the quarterly journal Regulation .He is an expert in the regulation of housing, land, energy, the environment, transportation, and labor, and has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University), the School of Organization and Management (Yale University), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Peter Van Doren is editor of the quarterly journal Regulation and an expert in the regulation of housing, land, energy, the environment, transportation, and labor. He has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University), the School of Organization and Management (Yale University), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1987 to 1988 he was the postdoctoral fellow in political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. His writing has been published in theWall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Journal of Commerce, and the New York Post. Van Doren has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, and Voice of America. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his master’s degree and doctorate from Yale University.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.