Death of Richard Musgrave

On Wednesday, we blogged the death of Richard A. Musgrave (Harvard) at the age of 96.  The New York Times today published a detailed obituary.  Some highlights:

Mr. Musgrave took about 20 years to conceive, write and publish the 1959 work for which he is best known, “The Theory of Public Finance,” an analysis of how governments allocate resources and respond to social needs. “It still stands unchallenged,” the economic historian Mark Blaug wrote decades later. "Anyone with a question in the theory of public finance can be told even now, 'it’s all in Musgrave.'” ...

He saw the government as having an important economic role and developed a theory on the way taxes and other factors interact in areas where goods and services — roads, schools, courts and national defense, for example — were best provided by the government. In essence, Mr. Musgrave’s theory broke down governmental economic activity into three parts: the allocation of resources; the distribution of goods and services; and the stabilization of the broader economy.