Notre-Dame: Private Financing of a “Public Good”

Visiting a 13th-century cathedral, climbing a bell tower stairway with stone steps bowed by centuries of human footsteps, and meeting the chimeras and gargoyles that look over Paris roofs provide a unique esthetic if not religious experience. But in the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris ravaged by fire five years ago, an economist may see something else.

The magazine The Economist illustrates its story on the reopening of the cathedral with pictures of the fabulous stained-glass windows and the majestic nave (“Emmanuel Macron Shows Off the Gloriously Restored Notre Dame,” The Economist, November 29, 2024):

Perhaps the most breathtaking feature is the cathedral’s newly luminous quality. After being darkened by centuries of grime, the blanched stonework of the pillars and vaults now appears as it would have done in medieval times. The pristine aspect of the stone—cleaned, consolidated, recut and replaced—will doubtless take by surprise visitors expecting to find the pillars rising “majestically into the gloom”, as Victor Hugo wrote of them in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”.

The Economist also reminds us of a remarkable fact: a large part of the work, which cost about $1 billion, was privately financed. I couldn’t find up-to-date official figures but it appears that about one-half of the money came from a small number of French billionaires and large corporations, which confirms that it is useful to have rich people and large corporations around. Most of the rest of the money seems attributable to small private donors in France and elsewhere in the world.

The magazine could have gone further by observing that the reconstruction of Notre-Dame illustrates how some public goods can realistically be financed privately by consumers who prefer paying a steep price to being deprived of a public good they dearly want for whatever subjective reason. “Consumers” includes anybody who will benefit from the availability of the public good. Anthony de Jasay developed this argument with much force, notably in his Social Contract, Free Ride. (My linked review explains in some detail what are “public goods” in mainstream economics and how their special character is often exaggerated. In brief, a public good is whatever many people want but from which it is too costly to exclude the free riders who would not pay their share of the cost.) Perhaps a public good that cannot be voluntarily financed is not “public” at all. As de Jasay would say, let the people who want it enough pay for it, and let free riders ride.

It is true that the public subscription for the restoration of Notre-Dame was launched by the French government and that generous tax deductions were available, but a partial tax deduction of course does not mean that a donation costs nothing to the donor. And if there were no compulsory taxes, many people would have more money to contribute to their preferred public goods. The lesson remains that it is not unrealistic to think that the public goods worth a lot to some part of the public could be financed voluntarily.

Note also that a public good is rarely (if ever) a public good for every member of a territorial society. No doubt that many individuals in France or in the world (even in the civilized world) don’t view Notre-Dame as a good, that is, as something that brings utility. We can certainly find some atheists or Muslims or Baptists who hate it or, at least, would genuinely not be willing to pay a single cent to benefit from its availability. The largely private, non-coercitive financing of the restoration of Notre-Dame shows how to solve conflicts in society: pay for what you want and don’t force anybody to pay for it.

These considerations do not provide a panacea but they show how to set the problem.

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