ing grounds, safe streets, defense, law enforcement,
“open source” software like Linux, the Internet, etc. Markets cannot typically provide public
goods, either because they are too expensive, there is no profit attached, or the goods
themselves cannot be commodified. Public goods are classically defined in the economic
literature by two features:
(i) they are non-rivalrous, i.e., meaning that they are not subject to the kind of
scarcity that defines private goods like bungalows or gourmet restaurant meals,
but are in theory renewable and plentiful; (ii) they are non-excludable, i.e., anyone can use them regardless of whether those
people contribute to their conservation or not.
One of the biggest threats to public goods are “free riders.” You’ve undoubtedly experienced
the “free rider” problem in a work or academic setting. It’s where someone benefits from
something without contributing to it, e.g., a team project at work where a team member
doesn’t do his or her part, but gets the glory anyway. Public goods can be depleted when
free riders exploit the resource without helping to conserve it. For example, when people
litter on the street, “flame” others in an Intenet chat room, or avoid paying taxes while
benefiting from the things that taxes pay for. The appropriate use of public goods requires
that individuals curb their private interests and defer to the common welfare of others, even
when they don’t know the people who benef英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】it.
c. the origins of virtue: why we cooperate
Where does our public-mindedness come from? What are the origins of virtue? Rheingold
cites the work of Matt Ridley, an evolutionary psychologist. Ridley argues that the
grasslands of east Africa, believed by most anthropologists to be the original home of the
species, required that our hominid ancestors collaborate to hunt. Since these earliest
beginnings five million years ago, the temptation to act selfishly has always been with us,
the devil on our shoulder whispering in our ear. Classic social theorists like Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed various solutions to balancing private
and public good. Hobbes, for example, argued that a “Leviathan” state was necessary to
impose order from above; Locke and Rousseau, in different ways, argued that a “social
contract” was implicitly honoured by people as they lived together and negotiated their
interests.
Voluntary cooperation is much easier in small groups. Following the work of Mancur Olson
and Elinor Ostrom on “common pool resources” (CPR), Rheingold offers the following
checklist of features that define successful cooperation:
group boundaries are clearly defined the rules governing the use of collective goods are well-matched to local needs and
conditions most individuals affected by these rules are given latitude to change the rules the rights of community members to devise their own rules is r
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