I feel much the same way about BBC6, the digital-only alternative music channel, which I listen to daily via its Internet stream. Only I’m not British, so I don’t have the option of paying for it, even if I wanted to.

Not sure what my point is either, other than to say to all the Brits out there…uh, thanks, you guys.

So what about funding a local playground (through taxes) that I no longer use but am happy exists because I think that communities should have them. I also think we should have NPR so I send them money. If I change my mind on either of these things I can’t have much effect on their existance, but I feel better about being able to stop those contributions.

My take on BBC7 is that it’s essentially a sunk cost in terms of content, albeit with some residual costs. The stuff in the can has been paid for by licence money, and there’s no excuse in the digital era for it not to be made available.

Anyway, there’s a corollary here: the public funding model making it difficult to exploit private funding because it can’t justify rights negotiation beyond its broadcast purview. In short, I’d like to be able to pay for Test Match Special, but I can’t.

But BBC7 is quite different; not only do I plan around it, but if I’d had the choice between paying for it and not getting it I’d have chosen the former (at an embarrassingly high price).

So if NPR cost you 1$ per year automatically deducted from your paycheck in 12 installments, you’d balk? It sounds like you’re just saying that you don’t value NPR all that much and so don’t feel bad about not contributing to it. But you like BBC7 enough to have pangs of guilt about not contributing to it.

In an ideal world the charge for public goods would be proportional to a person’s valuation of that good with the sum covering the costs of production. Of course this requires that whoever sets these charges knows exactly how much every relevant person values the good, which means that there’s an incentive to misrepresent one’s valuation (NPR? What’s that?). There’s a huge literature on how to get at a efficient/just solution (or second best) in the face of this ignorance. Pivotal consumers, mechanism design, price discrimination etc.
In practice NPR (I don’t know much about how BBC7 does it) funds itself by turning donating to it into a status good. Which is why you get a mug or a t-shirt or whatever so that you can let the world and all your office coworkers know what a decent enlightened intellectual you are. Which means the ones who donate are the ones who really like it, who really care about this particular kind of status and those whose conciencse won’t let them sleep at night.

Are these really the issues that folks like to think about?

They are for those who contribute. In new New England they are upper-middle class with a lot of BBC and nuanced liberal political coverage. Some stations are playing nothing but blues or classical music; and in Berkeley, for example, they play jazz and things like Democracy Now!

To whatever extent it’s paid by the contributions, it truly is a listener’s driven form of radio, unlike the commercial stuff. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t contribute; you’re not supposed to.

If Harry is willing to pay $X for access to BBC7, then it doesn’t matter whether he pays $X for access to BBC7 as a private good or the same amount for access to BBC7 as a public good. In either case he satisfies his preference by getting BBC7, and pays what he would be willing to part with for it. He is better off than he would be if he could not get access to BBC7 for $X.

However, as he is willing to pay $X for something other than access to NPR, he could complain were he made to pay $X for NPR. He does have a preference between private and public provision here. Public provision would prevent him from fulfilling his preference to spend his money on something else, and would make him worse off.

Or am I missing something?