beneficiaries of the system – seems critical when a society addresses the important question of how the level and distribution of consumption of some things that might colloquially be called “social” or “public” goods and services should be shaped by public policy. One can easily argue that education can and should be seen as a public as well as a private good – not because educational services are non-excludable and non rival (which is certainly not true of education), nor just because education has some important positive externalities for other individuals (which education certainly does have), but also because the public value of education registers in the parts of individual and social life that are not strictly economic – in the quality of our individual cultural lives, and in the quality of our civic and political life as well. Finally, education can be seen as a public good in that it is one of the key instruments that societies use to promote equity – particularly across social groups, and inter-generationally which is viewed as both a good in itself, and something that contributes to wider social well-being and justice. (Stiglitz and Rosengard, 2015) If education is an important public good (in the sense that it produces aggregate as well as individual results, and is valued by an aggregate group rather than just the individuals who receive or do not receive the good), it should be clear that the performance of the system as a whole should be judged “from a social point of view” – from the point of view of a social or public arbiter of value who has defined a social utility function that should provide guidance in evaluating the performance of the social system and that could include, but is not limited to the satisfaction that individual consumers of educational services derive from that experience. (Moore, 2014)

######## Government as the Embodiment or the Agent of a Proper Social Point of View?

Often, the government, acting more or less reliably as the agent of the citizens of a polity, is seen as the appropriate arbiter of the public value – particularly if that value is being produced under the guidance of government regulatory authority, and with the help of government money. But, since we often have to worry about the responsiveness of government to its citizens – its ability to call into existence a public that understand and act on its own interests – we worry that the “revealed” social utility function that actually guides government policy will not be the right one. (Moore and Fung, 2012) To escape both the messy world of real politics, and to establish a “proper” utility function that we can use to measure the real value of a given national educational system, we often invoke the idea of a “benign dictator;” or as a close substitute, a democratic government that is being advised by knowledgeable, conscientious, and well-meaning experts. In a world in which we are bound to one another through our practical ability to help or hurt one another, through some degree of fellow-feeling and shared norms that define our rights and responsibilities to one another and motivate us to live in accord with those rules, and by the fact that we share a government that acts simultaneously as a guarantor of our rights, the enforcer of our social duties, and an important creator of the economic, social, and political conditions in which we live, it is essential that we have some collective capacity to decide what we would like to guarantee to one another, and accomplish together as well as to know what each of us likes, think we deserve, and are willing to contribute.

######## Functional Design Criteria for the Government Supported Centralized R and D System