XClose

UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Menu

Collective Production -- the Way Governments Produce

30 October 2024, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm

Collective Production -- the Way Governments Produce: How the collective Production Process Can Create Public Value

Join us at UCL IIPP for a talk by June Sekera

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

IIPP Comms

This event is open to IIPP's students and faculty only

Hosted online by UCL IIPP on Wednesday 30th October 2024 from 14:00 - 15:30 (GMT) for a talk by June Sekera.

More than a century ago, economists understood government as a producer whose work yielded economic value. That view was erased during the 20th century with the rise of an economics that demoted “the state” to a status of burdensome “intervenor” in markets. From the perspective of today’s dominant market-centric economics, building codes impose an unwarranted burden on the market, unemployment insurance taxes distort the market, and security standards for financial instruments are an obstacle to efficient markets – until a major earthquake strikes, or countries suffer from widespread unemployment, or capital markets crumble. Empirically, government is a producer. Through collective production, it furnishes things societies need and want. In this session, the lecture offers a pragmatic analysis of how this system works, and in a structured discussion session students will apply the ideas to real-world problems and needs, drawing on their own experience and work.

Read more about IIPP 2024-25 Enrichment Lectures

 

About the Speaker

June Sekera

Senior Research Associate at Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

June Sekera
June Sekera is a Senior Research Associate at IIPP and a public policy practitioner and researcher whose work and publications are focussed on the public economy and public goods production. For over twenty years June held programmatic, leadership and management positions at federal, state and local levels of government in the United States. Her economics training was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, from which she holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration. In recent years, her attention has focused on the role of government in climate change mitigation , and on public policy regarding distributed vs centralized renewable energy generation. June also directs the Public Economy Project at The New School for Social Research, where she is a Visiting Scholar. She has published a wide range of papers on the public economy and public goods. Her most recent publications address what may be the ultimate public good: decarbonization. Her 2020 paper on this topic analyzed the effectiveness of various carbon removal methods from the perspective of public purpose. The paper was cited in the most recent (2022) report on climate change mitigation by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (I PCC). She is author of The Public Economy in Crisis: A Call for a New Public Economics, 2016. More about June Sekera