One of the most memorable passages from Susan Allen Toth’s memoir Blooming: A small-town girlhood is about the ongoings at their local pools. This public place became a refuge that she sought out.
Once in the pool, doing my laps, I felt a kind of anesthetic set in. Cold water slithered over me, a numb caress, promising relief. It seemed to wash off some of the unhappiness that clung to me all over like mosquito repellent. Even the chlorine helped: as I mechanically stroked, back and forth, I hoped it would disinfect my brain. Clinging to the pool edge between laps, breathing hard, I could look up at the empty sky and see blue peace mirroring back to the pool. Everything seemed far away, except the water, the cold tile I grasped, the blue of sky and water. No one knew who I was, and I didn’t have to remember. When I climbed out, tired, after an hour, I had the same feeling I used to have after an afternoon at Blaine’s: exhausted, satisfied, with the hope of perhaps yet another hot afternoon before the summer ended. I was glad to be tired. I could tell I was still alive. Tomorrow I could go back to the swimming pool.
Indeed, our local pools are also well attended. From the early bird atheletic types who show up at 7am for lap swim to the tired parents in the late afternoon looking the other way when their child pushes another off the diving board.
But how do these public artifacts come into being? What would James Buchanan, the father of public choice, say about starting here and looking retrospective for answers?
James Buchanan would have been highly sympathetic to analyzing the swimming pool as an artifact of human choice under specific rules and institutions. This fits squarely within his constitutional political economy and club goods framework.
Buchanan repeatedly emphasized that social arrangements—including shared goods, rules, and institutions—are not natural phenomena but artifacts created by individuals through choice, agreement, and rules (the “decision-making space”). In works like The Calculus of Consent and his club theory paper, he argued for studying how people generate cooperative outcomes via voluntary exchange or near-unanimous consent rather than imposing top-down solutions based on a social welfare function.
And this.
He would view retrospective analysis of such an artifact as valuable precisely because it reveals the constitutional and institutional conditions under which decentralized or club-like provision can succeed—information useful for designing better rules going forward. He would contrast this favorably with purely centralized or coercive models and might note that private swimming clubs or suburban sorting illustrated market-like or club-based alternatives that many residents chose when public options changed.
In short, Buchanan would endorse studying the artifact to understand the rules that generated a positive outcome, while remaining skeptical of government provision unless it closely mimicked voluntary club principles.
This backward-looking lens complements the forward-looking cost/benefit analysis. Both are useful; the retrospective view illuminates why some artifacts endure as high-impact community goods while others do not.
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