Club Troppo

Several readers have sent money to Burma’s monks, via Avaaz.

This is a progress report on Club Troppo’s joint campain with John Quiggin to inspire reader donations to organisations assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma. As John announced in an update yesterday, ‘donations so far totalling $1390 here and $2050 at Club Troppo.’ The Troppo tally has in fact risen by $200 since then. Ninety percent of the undertakings have already been backed up with receipts. I’ll list the contributors when I announce the final sum on Friday, unless they asked to stay anonymous. (If your receipt is in a different name from your blogging identity, I’ll use the former, except where I have instructions to the contrary.)

A huge thanks to all of you who have made donations. The results have surpassed expectations.

It seems as though, despite difficulties in getting visas for additional staff to enter Burma, the aid organisations are making good use of the personnel and resources they already had in the country. Their websites, which I linked in the original post, all have updates. Here’s a sample from World Vision: (Continued)

You may not know it but around 20% of the home loan market has just collapsed - the securitisation market. The banks are moving into the space and and, as a result, rationing credit elsewhere. Below the fold is an op ed in the Age about it.  It introduces a theme you’ll probably be seeing a little more of from me.

In a paper I published in 1997 - pdf - (I think it was) I argued that while competitive neutrality was a good thing, it was possible to have too much of it - at least where it stopped us making the best possible use of the specific qualities of the public sector.  But an alternative and in many cases ultimately more compelling principle is the desirability of making gains through trade. There are some things the public sector does better than the private sector, and it should be able to do them - prudently and within appropriate institutional frameworks.  This column outlines one.  I will outline some others if and when I get the time.

(Continued)

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

From Jeff at Rigorous Intuition.

Like a fat kid eyeing off a doughnut, the inevitable is becoming a reality; the National and Liberal Parties of Queensland are slouching towards Bethlehem and merger. Graham Young notes the gerrymandering in the party structure to maintain dominance of the Nationals long after the electorates are sick of them and the Liberal Party ignoring the wishes of the rank and file. Andrew Elder believes that if it happens in Queensland than it might as well happen in the other states where the Nationals are vestigial.

International

Daniel Davies examines new developments in Sudan: peacekeepers in Darfur may just shift the action elsewhere:

It’s a bit of a cliché, but sometimes, as when a Darfurian rebel group estimated at less than 3,000 fighters decides to take the battle to the enemy by driving 250 miles outside Darfur in a small convoy of technicals to fight a battle for Khartoum “what the fuck” is pretty much the only thing you can say.

Juan Cole reports on his interview with the editor-in-chief of Aljazeera.

Noel Pearson continues to disappoint Kim at LP with his latest op-ed piece on Obama:

Pearson has the answer for Obama - emphasise “Black responsibility” and end all that liberal rights claimin’… How boringly predictable.

Economics

Peter Martin describes the dumb snobbery of most Australian shoppers. ¹1. gilmae: On the other hand, I remember Sunshine Biscuits and they are *not* indistinguishable from Arnotts. [↩]

Law

Peter Timmins looks at FOI highjinks in Tasmania concerning apparent government plans to fund a 65 million dollar water pipeline to Gunns’ new pulpmill.  Quoting FOI guru Michael McKinnon:

“Where you get this sort of government secrecy (in relation to FOI requests), you can almost always guarantee that there is a sweetheart deal going on,” McKinnon said bluntly this week.”

Kodjo on the land of the free, home of the surveilled:

9,254 national security letters issued in 2005; 12,583 in 2006 (data for 2007 is not yet available). Such letters request information like your bank account details and telephone usage, but do not rely on a court order and are issued without informing the person spied upon.

Meanwhile, prosecutions for terror related matters brought to court have continued to decline.

Diane Marie Amann posts on public comments by US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, an honourable dissenter on the Court’s continued upholding of the constitutionality of capital punishment:

[T]he imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”

(Continued)

TroppoSphere

TroppoSphere is a project I’ve been working on for quite a long while on and off.  It’s intended as a feed reader for people who don’t want to use a feed reader! A gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feedreader phobia.

I suspect there are quite a lot of casual blog readers who would like to check out a wider range of blogs, but can’t be bothered learning how to install or use a feed reader (or don’t even know what one is).

Essentially I’ve created a “hard-wired” online feed reader here at Club Troppo, featuring carefully selected news feeds along with feeds from the best or most popular Australian and some international blogs in a wide range of categories.  The blogs whose feeds I’ve included here are those most commonly featured in Missing Link editions. In my judgment they fairly consistently publish interesting posts, at least as judged by the Missing Link editorial team.

Feedback is welcome.  I’m happy to add additional feeds to those already featured here, but there are limits imposed by the need to ensure that the pages load in a reasonable time.  Accordingly at this stage I have limited the selections to 5-7 blogs or news sources in each category, with each subscription displaying extracts from the most recent 5 stories in the case of blogs and 10 in the case of news outlets.

News

• Asia & Middle East
• Australia
• World
• Citizen journalism
• Business
• Legal
• Science & IT
• Sport

Opinion

• Australia - centrist blogs
• Australia - left-leaning blogs
• Australia - left-leaning blogs (2)
• Australia - right-leaning blogs
• Australia - polling
• International - political blogs

Specialist

• Arts blogs
• Economics blogs
• Law blogs (Australia)
• Law blogs (US)

Alternative media

• Australian online opinion/analysis
• International online opinion/analysis

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

From Terry Sedgwick.  It’s a bit like the armadillo book that gave rise to the original name of this blog.

Joshua Gans speculates that the Medicare levy change, doubling the threshold before the levy kicks in, might just be a test to determine the cost of further health care reforms, and doesn’t think the increase in luxury car tax will have much effect on prices.

Peter Martin takes the deep breath before the plunge into what will no doubt be a week filled with Budget-related work.

Harry Clarke is watching with interest the recent news on gambling contracts in Victoria.  Howard government barracker Harry also thinks the Rudd government is “heartless” on refugees and migration, despite noting that their policies are essentially indistinguishable from Howard’s (just as Howard’s were essentially indistinguishable from Hawke/Keating’s, leaving aside the Pacific Solution, despite all the sound and fury - KP). 

Ted Bailieu is still leader of the Victorian Opposition, despite the efforts of two supportive bloggers. Andrew Landeryou presents some of their greatest hits.
John Surname wonders if the Liberal Party will ever get anything right.

clarencegirl looks at the costs of World Youth Day and possible plans for all welfare payments to be “sequestered”.

The NSW branch of the  RSPCA isn’t exactly wowing them with their latest ad campaign.

Kim wonders if the Liberals can sink any lower, as Possum Comitatus analyses their gloomy poll trajectory under Brendan Nelson’s leadership.

International

The Analyst summarises the madness that is the Burmese military dictators refusing foreign aid. Ken Parish searches for mechanisms for foreign intervention in humanitarian disasters like Zimbabwe and Burma in spite of the local tyrants. Saint and Currency Lad believes the West should just intervene anyway and dare the tyrants to do anything. ¹1. gilmae: The cocks-out school of foreign policy is the technical term, I believe. Although as CL points out, it worked in Berlin in 1948. [↩] Club Troppo and John Quiggin are running an appeal to donate money to appropriate charities.

Clarrie Rivers looks at US bans on clotheslines. Ken Lovell looks at the Pentagon’s astroturfing of analysis of the Iraq war.

Clavos highlights some pretty unsavoury links between the Chavez regime in Venezuela and terrorists. 

Juan Cole reports on an apparent agreement between the al Maliki government in Iraq and the Mahdi Army which, though promising, seems to have ceded much to the latter.

Turcopolier discusses the Bush administration’s role in the current chaos in Lebanon, while Lee Smith (at Michael Totten’s place) is unimpressed with Obama’s utterances on Lebanon. (Continued)

"If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others", says Harry Frankfurt. Skepticlawyer agrees. In a recent post on ‘progressive fusionism’ she suggests combining Frankfurt’s ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. But what does ‘enough’ mean?

Libertarians have long struggled against the crudest form of egalitarianism — the demand that everyone’s income should be the same. This was the egalitarian ideal that animated Edward Bellamy’s 19th century utopian novel Looking Backwards. Bellamy dreamed of a society which was both meritocratic and egalitarian — a society where all workers were motivated to do their best and all were paid the same (with no rewards for inherited ability).

Hayek spotted a fatal flaw in Bellamy’s vision — without a price mechanism there would be no way to coordinate economic activity. And with a price mechanism there would be no way to maintain equality of income (or reward in proportion to talent and effort ).

While number-crunching sociologists and economists still focus on gini coefficients, egalitarian philosophers who follow John Rawls embrace positions which are immune to Hayek’s criticism. Rawls’ influential version of egalitarianism allows inequality as long as the social arrangements that produce it improve the prospects of the least advantaged. This is why some libertarians think that it might be possible to combine Rawls’ philosophy with Hayek’s economics. This is the ‘progressive fusionism’ skepticlawyer refers to in her post.

(Continued)

The Australian reports breathlessly that Lindsay Tanner can’t guarantee that no working families will be worse off, nor that interest rates won’t rise in the future. Nor can Malcolm Turnbull, or Kevin Rudd or anyone else. Or to put it more fully, they can’t but if they did they’d be lying or stupid. So where’s the story?

I guess in raising the luxury car tax no one can guarantee that there will be fewer accidents on the road, or more accidents on the road.

Can we do any better than this?

If you’ll allow me my fancy, it occured to me that, mutatis mutandis, Edmund Burke might have been contrasting the slow cumulative progress of TQM or the Toyota Production System nicely written up by James Suroweki here, with more ‘dynamic’ (and often less successful) methods of American super CEOs.

But you may object — “[I]t seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator. Far different an my ideas of that high office. The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fair himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance ; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you, that in my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men ; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inférieur in understanding to the person who took the load in the business. By a slow but well-sustained progress, the effect of eacli step is watched ; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second ; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series. We see that the
parts or the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided tor as they arise. One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.

If you’ve been round bureaucracy for any length of time (and yes, folks, this includes anyone in the private, public or ‘third’ sector working for an organisation of any size) you’ll know how hard it is to get good ideas up from the bottom to the top. Toyota built its dominance on its capacity to harness ideas from the bottom. And policy competitions have been held in the Victorian public service to good effect in recent years, turning up some very good ideas I’m told. The reward? A couple of weeks off-line to further research the idea.

So I’m pleased to read about Shell’s Gamechanger program. From a blog I’ve just found when googling “public sector innovation” - It seems to be written from the Netherlands at a quick glance but it’s nice to see Australia featuring in quite a few posts - but I digress:

How about Shell and its Gamechanger-program? Big companies are not that different from government organisations in the sense that they have many management layers, a lot of formal rules and are dominated by the daily routine. Within big organisations it’s very hard to get good ideas from the bottom to the top, not to mention getting it from the top down to the bottom again. An inspired idea of a new possibility at the bottom of the organisation loses most of its originality and edge on the way up. Shell’s management knows that if it can’t tap into the knowledge and ideas of its people in its daily operations, the company has a serious problem. So it set up a program to get radical ideas from everybody inside (and even outside) the organisation and created a high speed track for those ideas.

Let’s say that you have a radical idea for Shell. You can submit that to the Gamechanger-program via a website. A small team that reports directly to the CEO Jeroen van der Veer assesses the potential. If they like your idea you have a meeting with them within two weeks after your submission. If they like you they will give you budget to further develop your idea into a “proof of concept”.

Depending on how promising and big the idea is, the Gamechanger-people will bring you to the right executive people directly and you get a chance to pitch. Shell puts around 45 million euros into the Gamechanger program every year, about 10 per cent of its total R&D budget. One of the strongest indications that it’s working: middle management hates it.

Looking at Shell’s Gamechanger webpage, it looks like Gamechanger is open to all, not just those in Shell’s workforce.  In any event, as the post observes:

It wouldn’t be hard to set up a Gamechanger-equivalent in the public sector. If you’re a politician or public manager, create a way for the really smart civil servants to escape from the formal hierarchy that you are responsible for. Find a way to select the best ideas, invite the people directly to your table, give them a budget to test those ideas and support them during the testing. There are a lot of entrepreneurial minds working in the public sector, but we hardly have ways to tap into them.

To which I say - both “hear hear”, and “here here”.

I haven’t paid much attention to Telstra’s participation in the public policy debate. It usually manages to get itself seen in a fairly poor light at least if one is not paying much attention as I haven’t been. Even so, I’ve just read this speech by Phil Burgess (pdf), and I’m impressed. I’m impressed with it because its argument is interesting, and quite persuasive - except for one thing. He outlines some differences between Australian and American political culture. He does so in a very informed and perceptive way (at least for someone who’s only been here a while - and I presume he had some decent research assistance, and indeed wonder whether, as such leaders often do he’s passing off research assistance as his own wide reading. But I may be being ungenerous.)

In any event, Phil thinks that Australian debate is not vigorous enough. That people defer too much to what the government and senior government figures think. He points to the greater engagement with leading business people’s views in the US. And to its greater separation of powers, it’s greater corralling of political power with umpteen checks and balances. I think all this is very interesting, enlightening. I think he’s right, though at least to some extent - for instance in his criticism of our think tanks - he neglects to mention that a lot of their shortcomings here are a function of a much smaller population and as a result a much shallower market.

But I have a problem - one might call it a problem of tone. It’s not just bad manners and bad politics to turn up somewhere in a powerful position and tell the locals that they don’t quite measure up to standards back home. It’s bad in another sense. I think Phil makes his case about our shortcomings well. But it’s also unbalanced and simple minded. Because these are the downsides of a way in which Australia is different to the U.S., not an illustration that it’s worse. It is a bit amazing that he couldn’t have popped a few lines into his speech about the sorry state of US political culture. Try catching a taxi in the U.S. and you find out about all those marvellous checks and balances when you pay double once you cross the county line. When you have a free trade agreement with a country but if you want to export ships to the US, they’re banned by the Jones Act. When the checks and balances are such that the voting system is in such disarray that a national election in 2000 was held hostage by the political connections of one of the contestants and some dodgy state officials and we landed one of the biggest turkeys in the history of modern Western democracy.

I’m not saying these things out of wounded pride for Australia. His criticism is welcome and valuable, but it would have been more impressive if it had been a musing on differences rather than a naive assertion of one being worse than another even in the respect he is speaking of. Checks and balances are a good thing, but we’ve got them too. And our politics doesn’t seem as feverish as U.S. politics. McCarthyism wasn’t as bad here. And Australia’s reaction to Bali was dignified, sombre and sane in contrast to the hysteria of the US’s reaction to 9/11.

It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall in which Woody’s mother finishes an argument with his father by saying “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”.

With tens of thousands dead (possibly a hundred thousand) and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, the disaster in Myanmar is approaching the scale of the December 2004 tsunami. The difference is that it’s confined to one extremely poor country with particularly poor infrastructure. [Update: Ken Parish would rather call the country Burma, and recommends this discussion of the name issue.]

Aid agencies are working frantically to supply food, water, medication, tarpaulins and so on, to a million or so survivors of Cyclone Nargis who remain in desperate straits. Their initial efforts have been hampered by the paranoid Myanmar government and bureaucracy (see Ken’s post below) as much as by the blocked roads and unusable airports, but it seems progress is being made.

Some blogosphere veterans might remember that John Quiggin raised nearly $5000 in donations for aid organisations involved in the tsunami relief effort three years ago. John undertook to match every dollar pledged by a reader, with a dollar of his own.

He is doing the same thing again, this time in collaboration with Club Troppo. We are hoping to persuade readers to give generously in the knowledge that every dollar of disposable income sacrificed translates to nearly four dollars of aid. John will donate fifty cents for every dollar pledged in the comments threads for this post, the comments thread for the twin post at his own site, or by email to John or me. Club Troppo contributors will put in another fifty cents.

The deadline for pledges is midnight Thursday 15 May, and we’ll announce the total collected this time next week. If you donate electronically, forward John or me the acknowledgment in due course, although it doesn’t have to be by the deadline. (The acknowledgments don’t usually specify the amount, but we’ll take your word on that.) Unless you ask to remain anonymous, we’ll list the contributors.

Donate to which ever reputable aid organisation you prefer. Some obvious candidates, who are operating in Myanmar now and also accept on-line donations, are Red Cross, CARE, World Vision, and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Oxfam is collecting funds, though they do not appear to be conducting their own operations in Myanmar. Readers are encouraged to add to this list of suggestions.

My email address is j DOT farrell AT uws DOT edu DOT au.

I’ve been puzzling about international humanitarian interventions lately, in part because my daughter Bec is in the middle of a uni assignment on the subject, but mostly because as I write this Robert Mugabe continues to terrorise and impoverish his own people in Zimbabwe while the equally odious military junta in Burma sits on its collective hands while its people starve and die of rampant but readily preventable diseases in the wake of Cyclone Nargis.  

Why can’t someone intervene and prevent these appalling tragedies happening before our eyes on TV?  The answer is fairly clear: the modern international law embodiment in UN treaties of the pragmatic notion of national sovereignty enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia 1648 together with a lack of any sufficient immediate self-interest in intervening on the part of any capable nation or group of nations.

The Just War doctrine might already provide international legalistic cover for a humanitarian intervention in Burma, and might well do so in Zimbabwe too in due course.  Once the Presidential election run-off occurs and Mugabe intimdates his way back into the Presidency the situation there will demonstrably be one of last resort (one of the necessary elements for Just War that certainly wasn’t present in the case of Bush’s Iraq intervention, even if we generously assume that it could properly be labelled “humanitarian” in the first place).  However, the Just War doctrine contains a Catch 22 at its core.  A war or humanitarian intervention imposed by coercion can only satisfy the Just War doctrine if it flows from a “right intention”:

Force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose—correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain or maintaining economies is not.

However, given the range of costs involved in any such intervention it’s highly unlikely that any nation would ever intervene to mitigate even the worst humanitarian tragedies (like those occurring in Zimbabwe and Burma at present) unless the action coincided at least to some extent with its own national self-interest.  But that would instantly negate reliance on the Just War doctrine.  The only humanitarian intervention I can think of in modern times (other than a UN-approved one) that could arguably be said to conform to the Just War doctrine was that of the NATO countries in Bosnia and then Kosovo in the 1990s, in the face of intractable and disgraceful UN inertia.

Of course, humanitarian intervention approved by the UN would successfully sidestep any such conundrum about international legality.  However, UN approval for intervention in the absence of at least grudging consent by the incumbent regime in the target country (e.g. Sudan in relation to Darfur) is highly unlikely, almost however odious and democratically illegitimate that regime may happen to be.  Tribal autocracies and mafia-like kleptocracies are a significant UN voting bloc, and when you add the votes of less toxic regimes of smaller countries which understandably suspect the motives of the West given its past record of cynical and self-interested behaviour towards weaker nations, and veto-wielding emergent superpowers Russia and China who resent the bullying imperialist pretensions of the US and its close allies, the prospects of ever achieving a Security Council resolution authorising any humanitarian intervention to which the incumbent regime doesn’t agree are very remote. 

For a while it looked like NATO might develop into something resembling a legitimising multi-national grouping that might have had both the will and military and economic strength to undertake humanitarian interventions.  However its unity was spectacularly fractured by the events leading up to Bush’s Iraq invasion.  Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight it was always inevitable that the diverse interests of its member nations would eventually cause a rift once the unifying impetus of the Communist threat was removed.

Similarly, both the willpower and any perceived international legitimacy that the “anglosphere” might once have possessed as a vehicle for humanitarian interventions was smashed by the duplicity and cavalier recklessness of the Bush/Blair/Howard Iraq intervention.

Is there any answer that could feasibly facilitate urgent humanitarian interventions in situations like the current crises in Zimbabwe and Burma?  In the short term I can’t think of one, except perhaps the possibility of a NATO rapprochement between Europe and the US if Obama is elected President.  However an old post I wrote way back in 2004 while reflecting on the aftermath of the Iraq intervention at least contains some relevant thoughts.  I’ve recycled an extract over the fold:

(Continued)

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

Apathetic Sarah takes Julie Bishop’s latest pronouncement to its logical conclusion

Apparantly, out of the blue everyone has come to the conclusion - via the Petrol Kommisionar - that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Niall Cook and Joshua Gans have their say.

Pommygranate criticises the critics of the most recent marijuana decriminalisation scheme.

 
International

Avi Shlaim makes some tough calls about Israel on the 60th anniversay of its foundation:

In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, published an article entitled On the Iron Wall. He argued that Arab nationalists were bound to oppose the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Consequently, a voluntary agreement between the two sides was unattainable. The only way to realise the Zionist project was behind an “iron wall” of Jewish military strength. In other words, the Zionist project could only be implemented unilaterally and by military force.

Norman Geras keeps the focus on ever worsening Mugabe thuggery in Zimbabwe.

Aung Zaw argues that post-cyclone events in Burma show that the junta is incapable of running the country, let alone helping the victims. (Trouble is, like Mugabe they’re entirely capable of brutally suppressing opponents which is all that counts from their own viewpoints and in the short term renders all other observations marginally relevant at best).

Turcopolier is deeply suspicious about what Dick Cheney is up to in the Middle East at the moment.

Mark Edward Manning is ecstatic about the election of Boris Johnson as London Mayor (well, more about the demise of Red Ken really), while Brian Micklethwait ponders why Boris’s blog was such a non-event. ¹1. KP: rather like all the oz politicans’ blogs except Andrew Bartlett, and look what happened to him [↩]

(Continued)

I was going on about the renewed importance of public goods to the Review Panel on the Innovation System and so they asked me and another economists on the panel to do a bit of a write up for them. For various logistical reasons, the ultimate document was run up by me the night before the next meeting. I’ve reproduced it below the fold with a few nips and tucks mainly to remove typos etc. It’s not rocket science, and readers of my stuff on this blog won’t find anything much that’s terribly new, but nevertheless, for the record, it’s below.

The following notes have been made rather hurriedly to flesh out some comments made in the last meeting. They are intended as an introduction to discussion, rather than as anything definitive.

What is a public good?

The technical definition of a public good is something that is ‘non-rival’ in production and ‘non-excludable’ in consumption.

Non-rivalry in production means that supply to one enables supply to all. Examples include clean air, defence of the realm and a TV broadcast. The first of these two things are non-excludable also – meaning that if you provide them for one, you can’t prevent others accessing them and this makes them pure public goods. TV broadcasts are different because you can encrypt them and then get people to pay for the decryption.

The general theory of public goods says that they are under-produced unless provided collectively. That’s because non-excludability prevents the producer from capturing the full benefits of what they produce. This is true of defence – which is often regarded as the classic public good. But there is actually a class of public goods that are generally provided privately, though they might be better referred to as social assets rather than public goods.

This is the web of social understandings comprising social mores and most particularly language. Language is a public good, but it is not produced by governments or by collectives acting as collectives. It is produced by individuals who are already part of a community (the community that speaks the language).

Economists have typically concerned themselves much less with the former kind of public good than the latter, (the exceptions include Adam Smith who wrote a treatise on the formation of language and a bestseller on culture, socialisation and social mores – The Theory of Moral Sentiments – which incidentally sold much better than the Wealth of Nations during Smith’s lifetime. And Friedrich Hayek who was also concerned with the way in which such public goods emerged spontaneously from the private actions of many people seeking mainly to advantage themselves.) (Continued)