Richard A. Musgrave (1910–2007)

Richard Musgrave was one of those rare scholars of whom it could be said that he literally “wrote the book” on his field of expertise. Musgrave spent seven decades immersed in the study of taxation, public finance, and the role of the state in economic society, and by all indications he found in that study his true vocation. This chapter reviews his life and work, focusing on the development and implications of his foremost contribution, the so-called three branch model. Through it, Musgrave sought to weave together the many tangled strands of public finance theory in the mid-twentieth century, creating one coherent structure to which modern tools of economic analysis could be applied. Subsequent decades have seen public finance theorists embrace an alternative, welfarist approach, but recent work addressing weaknesses in that approach have reinvigorated, and thus made ever more valuable a clear understanding of, Musgrave’s pluralist views on how taxation and expenditure should be determined.