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A public good is not simply a good provided by the public sector, or government.

it is a truism to say democracy relies on a free press. But in a sea of misinformation that is because it's a fact.

Introduction One of the most powerful ideas that legal theory borrows from economics is the idea of a "public good." Sooner or later law students learn that within the framework of contemporary neoclassical economics, the standard line is that public...

New research on how the growth of government may affect public health, even if only indirectly.

In some countries, like Norway, your income tax forms are public information, so any one can look up what anyone else earns. In a US context, income is mostly considered to be private information, unless you are a public employee or an executive at a public company. Would it be a good thing to have … Continue reading Pay Transparency: What’s Good to Know?
The post Pay Transparency: What's Good to Know? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on July 31, 2023.
A recent front in the culture wars is public libraries, such as in Front Royal, Virginia, where
a handful of residents ha[s] begun demanding the removal of certain books in the children's section of Warren County's only public library. Most of the titles involved LGBTQ+ themes.

In Libertarian Land, such conflicts do not arise, since public libraries do not exist.
Despite the word "public," libraries are not a "public good" that private markets might undersupply.
The textbook public good is national defense. If any private group mounts an army that stands ready to defend the country, others will free ride. This makes it hard for the provider to finance its efforts and therefore discourages private provision.
No such issue exists for books; private provision is bountiful. People cannot free ride on book purchases by others.
The crucial benefit of leaving "libraries" to the marketplace is that no one's tax dollars support the provision of particular books. If Amazon sells books that some people do not want their children to read, these people do not buy such books. Thus the polarization that results from public libraries is absent.
Advocates will respond that public libraries provide free access to books and thus benefit low‐​income families. That is mainly false; public libraries typically locate in middle‐​class neighborhoods and serve middle‐​income families.
Fans of public provision might also argue that such libraries provide more than free access to books: story time, community events, author book signings, and the like. Private book stores, however, can do and provide these services if demand exists, perhaps because it brings in paying customers.

Plus: New York refreshes rent control, AOC and Bernie Sanders call for more, greener public housing, and California's "builder's remedy" wins big in court.

The "gigantic" power of the meat and dairy industries in the EU and US is blocking the development of the greener alternatives needed to tackle the climate crisis, a study has found.The analysis of lobbying, subsidies and regulations showed that livestock farmers in the EU received 1,200 times more public funding than plant-based meat or cultivated meat groups. In the US, the animal farmers got 800 times more public funding.Why is this allowed, why is this happening, good questions both. This is partially wrong as an answer:Alex Holst, at the Good Food Institute Europe, said: "While European investment in sustainable proteins has increased in recent years, this study shows the sector is still only picking the crumbs off the EU's table. The sector needs public investment to scale production and reduce prices [or] Europe risks missing out on the enormous benefits."We've noted that both almond and oat milks are available in the local Aldi. As, we believe, are a number of the fake meats. And let's be honest about it, if something's on sale at Aldi then it's already at scale. So, no, we don't see that subsidy is required to get to scale as it's already there.But it's this which is really wrong:"It's not a level playing field at all at the moment," Lambin said. The answer to that which is wrong that is. Level playing field? Sure. Level it by paying off whoever can chat up the minister responsible for subsidy? No. The correct answer is to stop subsidising the alternative. The claim is that dairy and meat gain a £35 billion a year subsidy. We'd not be surprised if that were true. The answer is to stop paying that subsidy.Free market farming is the answer to the demand for a level playing field. So let's have unsubsidized free market farming.

There are plenty of egregious examples of public sector waste (think lavish welcomes and farewells for senior public servants) or lack of discipline combined with questionable – well, really poor – process (think this morning’s post about the sly but huge increase in approved Reserve Bank spending). But my core interests are macro in nature. … Continue reading Fiscals: we used to keep good company

Darrell A. H. Miller (Duke University School of Law) has posted Common Good Gun Rights (Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2024) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Professor Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism aims to invigorate debates in...

Thanks to the clean energy revolution, batteries are no longer in the public eye just in the form of that unstoppable bunny in TV ads. Batteries—like computer chips, electric vehicles, solar panels, and other hardware—are having a moment. Last fall, with funding from 2021's mammoth bipartisan infrastructure law, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded nearly $3…

The American public almost unanimously agrees that the nation's War on Drugs has been a huge failure. Now, South American leaders have a plan to form an alliance with key nations to initiate a new, non-violent approach to drug crime. This is a critical opportunity for the Biden administration to combat organized crime while regaining geopolitical credibility by promoting peace.

Since the United States' War on Drugs began more than five decades ago, the nation has spent over a trillion dollars enforcing drug policies domestically since 1971.

Meanwhile, the number of drug cartels in the Americas has only increased, as have the casualties.

The U.S. is not alone in these failed efforts. Both drug-related violent crime and drug trafficking itself are at record highs in a number of countries around the hemisphere. According to InSight Crime, cocaine trafficking is at historic highs, and the homicide rate in Andean countries is skyrocketing. Clearly, violent efforts to combat drug use and trafficking are ineffective. Fortunately, some South American politicians are suggesting a new solution.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro recently proposed the creation of an alliance between Latin American and Caribbean states looking for a different way to fight organized crime and drug trafficking. In his speech at the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs on September 9th, Petro argued that "it is time to rebuild hope and not repeat the bloody and ferocious wars, the ill-named 'war on drugs', viewing drugs as a military problem and not as a health problem for society." Petro likened the policy to "genocide" against the Colombian people, with more than 200,000 civilians dying in the country as a direct result of the civil conflict — including drug violence — since 1958.

Presidents Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Luis Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil have already supported this new approach, at least rhetorically. At the conference, representatives from 17 countries signed a statement agreeing to the need to "rethink the global war on drugs" and focus on "life, peace, and development."

Unfortunately, some countries in Latin America have taken the opposite perspective, embracing militarization and "mano dura" (hard hand) policies based on the record of autocrat Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Many U.S. policymakers promote similar tactics, including a ludicrous U.S. invasion of Mexico. Ecuador and Honduras, in response to rising homicide rates, chose to militarize counternarcotics, leading to more death, instability, and democratic backsliding.

But these violent tactics have never worked. Not only did the U.S.-led War on Drugs fail miserably, but the nation also played a large role in inciting violence in Central America by supporting violent groups and governments in the hopes of tackling drug traffickers and left-wing guerrillas in the region. The security infrastructure in most Central American countries is a direct result of U.S. involvement during the Cold War.

By promoting a violent solution to the drug crisis and emboldening anti-drug militias, the U.S. has created more drug cartels. According to records from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Colombian paramilitaries have become the largest domestic drug producers and traffickers in Colombia. They were originally propped up, funded, and armed by the United States.

Under the Reagan administration, Latin American factions and dictators engaging in drug trafficking, including the Contras in Nicaragua, and Manuel Noriega in Panama, were also supported by the U.S. In Mexico, the U.S. and Mexican governments' policy of decapitation — removing top leaders from cartels — led to fractionalization and the creation of more cartels battling over resources and power, making Mexico a narco-state with hundreds of groups.

In light of the negative influence that Washington has had on the War on Drugs throughout the American regions, the Biden administration should extend an olive branch to Petro and support his new alliance. By inviting Petro and other sympathetic Latin American leaders to the White House, or to a Latin American city with a connection to the War on Drugs, Biden could discuss a regional, non-violent approach that would repair international ties with South and Central American countries and renew the nations' vision for reducing drug crime. Involving the U.S. publicly would give weight to the transition and bring international media attention to the drug problem.

The alliance's members and leading in-country experts could then come up with a list of policies to be implemented across the hemisphere in line with the new non-violent approach. Those policies should then pass the legislatures and become law in the respective countries.

The list could include harm-reduction programs to reduce consumption, scholarship programs for youths in high-risk areas, public education programs, housing subsidies, negotiation with drug-trafficking organizations, reintegration programs for former members, funding for public mental health counseling, and large-scale investment in public projects to boost employment in low-income communities.

Examples of the far-reaching success of these policies should be included to support their validity and implementation.
In addition, regimes that continue their hardline policies should be isolated and condemned by alliance members. El Salvador, Honduras, and Ecuador have suspended constitutional rights and liberties to bolster the rights of the security state. In doing so, they have sacrificed civilian life, institutional stability, democracy, and human rights in exchange for temporary security. The United States should put diplomatic pressure on political leaders like Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Xiomara Castro for militarized drug policies that perpetuate this behavior.Unifying the Americas around this approach would help equalize the burden of the drug problem while sharing the benefits of the new approach's success. Leaders of the alliance should publicly call out problematic policies within these regimes. Petro has already done this with El Salvador.
Other countries wanting to adopt the "hard hand" approach to counternarcotics should beware of the political, diplomatic, and economic consequences of adopting illiberal and unsuccessful drug policies. Proposing an invasion of Mexico won't help tackle the drug problem, promote U.S. security interests, or restore U.S. influence around the region. Supporting a new South American alliance would do this and more.

American militarism has many authors. From lawmakers on Capitol Hill and policy makers in the executive branch to the defense industry and its army of lobbyists, many in Washington and beyond have an interest, whether political or financial (or both), in keeping the Pentagon's coffers overstuffed and the global U.S. military machine humming. Unfortunately America's fourth estate doesn't do a very good job of keeping an overly militaristic U.S. foreign policy in check. On the contrary, it too is a key pillar that buttresses America's dependence on aggression abroad. Looking back at much of the mainstream media's national security coverage this past year — from Ukraine and Gaza to China and the military industrial complex — 2023, with few exceptions, was no different.The War in UkraineMainstream media failures in covering the war in Ukraine this year ranged from seeming to downplay questions about who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and ignoring key flashpoints that could have expanded the conflict into a direct U.S. war with Russia.But back in June, the New York Times' Paul Krugman provided a window into how many top journalists and pundits view U.S. foreign policy more broadly, and the war in Ukraine specifically: through the lens of American exceptionalism. Krugman used the D-Day anniversary this year to lament that Americans and other Western democracies weren't sufficiently supportive of Ukraine's war against Russia, saying then that if the country's counteroffensive fails (which by now it has), "it will be a disaster not just for Ukraine but for the world."As RS noted at the time, Krugman's argument "follows a problematic pattern among many in the media whose historical reference point will always be World War II and in turn believe the United States can apply that experience to any other world problem no matter how dissimilar or unrelated it is, or whether even a military solution is required." Of course there were many calling for a more diplomatic approach to ending the war then and the evidence six months later suggests they were right.A month before Krugman's article, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum published a lengthy article running along the same themes. The piece was based largely on an uncritical relay of an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that crescendos to a call for taking back Crimea — a maximalist military objective that most sober observers believe to be unachievable — and overthrowing Putin, all in the name of a global struggle between good and evil. Except, as QI's Anatol Lieven pointed out then, most of the rest of the world doesn't see it that way."It is not that people in these countries approve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine," Lieven wrote in RS. "It is that they do not perceive such a huge difference between the regional hegemonic ambitions and criminal actions of Russia and the global ones of the United States; and they are thoroughly sick of having their opinions and interests ignored by Washington in the name of an American moral superiority that actual U.S. policies in their parts of the world have repeatedly belied."The China boogeymanThis year kicked off with a turn-it-up-to-11 media hyperventilation about the infamous Chinese spy balloon that, according to the Pentagon at least, turned out to never have spied. But the incident was indicative of how Washington and the mainstream media generally deal with U.S. policy toward China: freak out first and maybe — just maybe — ask questions later.CBS's flagship news magazine 60 Minutes is a primary offender of this approach. Back in March, 60 Minutes ran a lengthy piece seemingly aimed at scaring Americans about the size of China's navy and about the U.S. is lagging behind — classic China threat inflation that is common in Washington. Except the navy officers 60 Minutes interviewed didn't see it that way, and neither did experts RS interviewed about the segment."The U.S. Navy appears to believe it's ready to take on China," RS reported then, adding, "[b]ut lawmakers who stand to benefit from hyping the China threat don't. And that in a nutshell is the military-industrial-complex, or in this case, the military-industrial-congressional-media-complex."Back in August, an NBC Nightly News segment perfectly illustrated how the mainstream media, perhaps inadvertently, builds public support for confrontation with China. The segment hyped a fairly routine, if even U.S. prompted, Russian and Chinese military exercise in international waters off the coast of Alaska. NBC News presented the event as a five-alarm fire. However, experts, and even the U.S. military, didn't think it was that big of a deal.The war in GazaIf anything can represent how mainstream U.S. media has, for the most part, covered the tragic Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's response, it's this headline from CNN on December 6:

The "man in military fatigues" was of course an Israeli soldier, which CNN later acknowledged. But the episode is emblematic of a general problem of mainstream media leaning in on the Israeli narrative of the conflict, which prevents Americans more generally from getting a full understanding of the conflict, including not just legitimate Israeli claims but also Palestinian concerns about the occupation and the prospects of a future state. That in turn leads to the promotion of misguided notions like support for Palestinian rights equaling support for Hamas.Roots of the problemWe also saw many instances this year of why, in part, an American exceptionalist view of U.S. foreign policy tends to guide mainstream U.S. media coverage. First, news outlets often publish essays and opinion pieces arguing for a more militaristic American posture by writers who are funded by foreign governments or the defense industry. Most often — as was the case this year with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Bloomberg, for example — those potential conflicts are not disclosed. Second, there are other media outlets that are openly underwritten by titans of the defense industry. And once again this year, we saw the potential impacts of those investments. For example, one particular November article in Politico — whose foreign policy coverage is sponsored in part by Lockheed Martin — uncritically relayed baseless concerns from the Pentagon that it was running out of money, a notion that one military spending expert told RS "doesn't hold water."***The examples above from this year are part of just a small sample of how mainstream media outlets generally cover U.S. foreign policy. There are exceptions of course but the incentives to feed the stream of militarism are far greater than the forces against it. Will 2024 be any different?

As the movement of people across the Mediterranean has become securitised, Frontex has come to the fore—not to good effect.

It's important for us all to get the details of economic language correct. For encapsulated in certain phrases are a number of concepts and then also guides to action. Take, for example, the idea of public goods. Here's one current public intellectual trying to do so: No one is realistically suggesting that there is an alternative to either of these things. In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case. People want more of the NHS, better education, functioning justice and social care that works, for example, and they want the government to supply them, not because these things are then free, but because they know that the government is the only agency that is capable of delivering these things universally for the public benefit.These things are what are called 'public goods', which are a supply of goods (sometimes) and services (more commonly) that are provided without the intention of profit being made to all members of society, usually by a government, but possibly by a private sector organisation.In more detail, a public good is defined as:Public goods are a supply of goods (sometimes) and services (more commonly) that are provided without the intention of profit being made to all members of society, usually by a government, but possibly by a private sector organisation.This is incorrect. Yes, this does matter. Here is Wikipedia on public goods which is a good enough definition: In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Use by one person neither prevents access by other people, nor does it reduce availability to others.There's a difference in those definitions. It's an important one too. The Wikipedia - and correct - definition tells us what the problem is. If it's not possible to stop someone from enjoying the item (excludability) and also the enjoyment by one does not affect the enjoyment by another (rivalry) then it's near impossible to make a profit from provision. Therefore a purely private producer will - likely enough - underprovide such public goods as against utility maximization supply levels. We've thus a problem and so also one that could - maybe - usefully be solved by judicious government intervention. In health care, for example, my hip replacement is rivalrous with your - we cannot both be in the operating theatre at the same time and having the same piece of titanium implanted. Clearly, a hip replacement is also excludable as the NHS manages to exclude so many from gaining one for 18 months.Within health care there are indeed public goods - herd immunity produced by widespread vaccination for example. But it's the herd immunity which is the public good, not the vaccination. And there are different ways of achieving that - the US largely insists that children must be vaccinated before starting school (or kindergarten etc) and the UK by the NHS doing the vaccinations for free. It might even be that one of those is better than the other as the method - but it's not the vaccination, something clearly rivalrous and excludable, which is the public good it's the herd immunity. The definition is also not that profit is not attempted - it's that profit is not possible. Vaccine manufacturing companies clearly do profit, it's the vaccination campaigns where the benefit cannot be monetised nor profitable. Another one of those judicious interventions is concerning invention and novelty. Once the new thing is created then anyone can do it - copy the invention, copy the book or song. Thus we think that there will be less than optimal levels of invention, book or song. So, we institute patents and copyrights. Entirely artificial ownership rights which provide excludability and so create the possibility of profit. Maybe this is the right way to do it, maybe not, but that is the story as to why we do.Where the public goods problem exists then yes, there is a good argument for that judicious intervention. Which may even, horrors though it be, mean direct government provision of the item. Like, say, defence of the realm. Even though we can all see the problems with that we did try competing private providers and we don't look back on the Wars of the Roses as being a national good time.But public goods are not goods supplied to the public, goods good for the public nor even publicly provided goods. They're goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.As we say this distinction is important. For if we forget about this initial and original definition of public goods then we end up going down the rathole of Mazzonomics. Which, we think we've understood this correctly, insists upon the following. Invention is a public good, therefore government does and should subsidise it. On the grounds that not enough people will do it because of the difficulty of profiting from having done it. OK so far. The conclusion then becomes that government should own all - or some part of - the inventions which it subsidised into existence so as to be able to share in the profit of having done so. Which does seem to us to be remarkably confused. The evidence given being that Darpa works just great over in the US. Which indeed it does but one of the defining features of Darpa is that it never does try to take ownership.Ho Hum.Public goods are a useful - even true - concept and where identified there is indeed a whole library full of usefully true arguments for, and of effective plans to, judicious government action. But those all actually apply only when we have in fact identified a public good. Not when someone just wants to argue in favour of more government.Details matter, pedantry is valid.