Where's the public gone?

There's a question we don't quite seem to get around to asking in all the coverage around the Millbank riot/student fees and, for that matter, much of the public spending thing.

It's tapped at, delivered a glancing blow now and then but rarely, if ever, tackled head on. It's certainly not a dimension in the mass of coverage.

And that's where is 'the public' in all of this and the notion that common and public goods have a value? Without getting too bogged down in the economic theory, without some sense of the public value of a public or common good, it's a deception to think we can work out whether we're paying the right price in the right way for them.

But that's exactly what we are doing.

Take the student fees debate. It's routinely framed in a way which pits private advantage against state obligation.

On the one side, the argument goes, graduates benefit personally (privately) from their degrees - most earn more in a lifetime than non-graduates - so should pay, in part at least, for that private advantage. Higher education is a private good gained at a private price.

On the other, education is something the state should provide as far as possible for free. Education comes, as a right, from the state.

Now, from time to time, you do hear hear the odd voice point out that universities produce people we, the public need - doctors, lawyers, accountants - and, of course, a few that we don't - journalists, politicians, estate agents. And that it is sensible for the state to invest our money in producing these people.

But lost is the idea of that the people who, in the broadest sense, furnish a common or public good that has a value. Instead, we come very close to More than and different from the sum total of private goods; different from and not necessarily anything to do with 'the state'.

A century and a half ago, it was religious conviction, philanthropy or noblesse oblige that provided public goods. Schools, libraries, social institutions, improved housing. Civic worthies - themselves rich, usually from trade - spent much of their time raising subscriptions for things like public buildings, town planning, sewerage and administering the Poor Law ... which for all its iniquities and brutalities was better than nothing.

From the inter-war years on, religious conviction and philanthropy fell away and the state eventually assumed a near monopoly of what we'd thought of until then as 'public goods'. It had the unquestionable benefit of universalising welfare provision, assuring minimum civilised standards and democratising the disbursement of that proportion of the nations wealth that passed through government coffers.

'Public' became identified with 'state'. So much so that anyone born after 1950 automatically assumes public institutions are state run. One of the reasons the BBC's 'public' funding is so baffling to many who stubbornly and wrongly call the the BBC a 'state broadcaster' and the licence fee a tax.

Tax and spend

Some time in the 1970s, we became fixed on the current framing and terminology of the tax/spend debate.

Tax rates, tax cuts; progressive and regressive taxes; waste; the size of state. At the same time developing the default that 'the state' was something other, something that wasn't 'us' and all to do with 'them'.

And because it was about 'them' - other people, not us - making it cost as little as possible and be as free of waste as possible became virtually the only framing we journalists applied.

What had slipped out was any idea of the value of 'public goods' that our taxes produced, however they were spent. Or indeed that such 'public goods' exist or how we would recognise them when we fell over them.

And that's partly because these are questions we journalists find just too complicated, opaque and undefined to ask. We have the language and mindset that can deal with tax and spend (with a bit of splitology thrown in) but none for 'the public' and the value of 'public goods'.

Cost and value

That's why we know what the NHS costs; what our state schools cost; ditto universities; a clean environment; public transport; road safety and so on and so on. But we haven't the faintest idea about their value.

We do know, though, it's not the same as their cost. When we opt out of a 'public good' buying health insurance, private education, a car, subscription TV were always prepared to pay much more than we pay for its public equivalent. And less prepared to complain about it when its actually worse.

Because weve made a choice and its private to us. And because we have no idea of the value rather than the cost of the public good weve spurned.

Now its not for a BBC journalist to take a view on whether tomorrows undergraduates should pay more or less than todays for their degrees. Impartiality is all and the logic of all sides in the debate is clear and has force.

But there is a question were not asking. By accepting the limited framing should undergraduates pay more, less or nothing to secure a private benefit which a degree undoubtedly is were failing to identify whether or not there is a public good that graduates in a society and economy produce. And if there is, whats its value.