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A "public good" is something like clean air, national defense, or street lighting which is freely available to everyone and where one person's usage doesn't red
by BurningFrog 2y ago
A "public good" is something like clean air, national defense, or street lighting which is freely available to everyone and where one person's usage doesn't reduce availability for others.
It's unfortunately mutated from the Economics definition to a more loose "good for the public" in public discourse, confusing everyone.
Street space in Manhattan is not a public good, because with enough cars using it, it becomes more and more useless. To fix that you have to make fewer people want to drive there some way. There are other methods than pricing, but they have problems of their own.
- jampekka 2y agoYes, I meant the more general concept of goods that can be used without fees, for which there doesn't seem to be a great term. Very widely used methods are e.g. reducing lanes, reducing speed limits, banning (private) cars on some roads and decreasing parking space. These are used a lot more widely, and probably a lot more succesfully, than pricing systems. Notably these all are about as discouraging regadless of how much money you have.