PF1215 | Public Finance – Justice, Choice and Value

The narrative of public finance has been restricted to economics, which has prevented its true understanding to emerge. The conventional narrative of public finance is simply that the sovereign raises taxes in order to pay for public goods, which is the accord that binds citizens with the state. This narrow framing does not reveal much about the substantive and normative reasoning for why public spending needs to be employed, what it needs to be employed towards and how this employment is to be done. Public decision-making on the above would entail understanding the causal reasoning, evaluative criteria and the context in which public spending is employed. No single convention – be it economics, law, or political theory – provides the explanation needed for the same. The political theory on justice, distribution and welfare needs to be read with the Constitutional and legal arrangements and institutions in which they are manifested; as well as the normative economics which they inform. The reasoning involved cannot arise in the partial explanations contained in these individual conventions of knowledge. Unlike the natural sciences, it is not possible to rely on objective causal relationships and meaning of concepts and values within the inherently subjective social sciences. This course is aimed at the composition of a mechanistic explanation, relevant to the social sciences, that takes into account the true diversity of causal relationships and subjectivity of meaning and interpretation.