Editor's Choice Publick Stews and the genesis of public economics

Bruce Elmslie

Oxford Economic Papers, 2016, vol. 68, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: In 1724, the anonymous essay A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (brothels) arrived in the bookshops of London. Now the essay is widely believed to be the work of Bernard Mandeville. In true heretical fashion, Mandeville detailed the social problems arising from the market in prostitution of his day. The genius of the work comes from the sophisticated tools, previously thought to be the product of the twentieth century, he utilized to analyse the market. These tools included the market failures of externalities and asymmetric information; government failures due to unintended consequences of public policies; and a proposal for regulating the market designed to alleviate these failings. Included in the proposal was a tax consistent with the principles of a first-best policy.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpv060 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:68:y:2016:i:1:p:1-15.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().