A note from me

Hi Folks,

As I write this, we are coming to the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025. For many, this season can be both festive and also a time for reflection. There is so much I could write about personally – joys and sadnesses – but I’ll restrict myself to a brief review of 2024 and the topic for the next few Newsletters.

I’m at a stage at the latter end of my life when people still encourage me to share experiences and insights that may be helpful to others – hence these Newsletters. I also post quite often on LinkedIn, including a recent LinkedIn Reflection on 2024 where I highlight one professional and one personal development for the past year.

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that has really come to the fore in 2024 and, no doubt, we’ll cover this subject more in future Newsletters. Interestingly, an organisation (https://coauthor.studio/) is promoting its AI capabilities through offering to summarise your LinkedIn presence for the year. I actually ran their service twice and got two interestingly different, but similar overviews! I copy one of these outputs below as a synopsis of the Jeremy year.  

That actually seems quite a reasonable assessment of my LinkedIn contributions in 2024! In general, I would say that my overarching focus for 2025 remains promoting a better life for people with a healthy planet which, in other words, is advancing common or collective goods. Hence, I thought that we could explore this topic of ‘The Common Good’ further in the next few Newsletters.

I hope you find these materials enjoyable and that they help you enrich your own personal or organisational perspectives on building ‘The Common Good’!

My Bi-Weekly Guide

The Common Good (Part 1)

This is a big subject that you can approach from many angles, but I’ll try and at least crystallise and summarise my own practical lessons as a starting point. At the heart of this is a recognition that there is more to this world than just you as an individual, and that your thriving as an individual depends on your relationships with at least some parts of the larger world and how well those are thriving. So, of course, you have natural self-interests but it is also wise to develop your appreciation of these in a broad context that includes and promotes the interests of others.  

What most of us recognise as decent societies are built on the provision of public, collective or common goods, and interactions that are more than “zero-sum”. Building ‘The Common Good’ can ultimately benefit everyone although, at times, you may be investing while others are benefitting, which brings social and political tensions. However, a willingness to sacrifice and a belief in a bigger, longer-term picture form an important backdrop for developing common goods.

This brings me to my layman’s journey into the world of art history. When visiting Florence, I climbed a dark staircase in the San Marco Convent to be greeted by the sight of the magnificent fresco of The Annunciation by Fra Angelico. With its placement at the top of the stairs to the dormitories, the artist brought the scene into the daily lives of the monks at his own friary, along with the individual frescos he painted for reflection in each monk’s cell. 

This is an early Renaissance painting and was noteworthy for its outdoor setting with realistic modelling of figures and perspectives as departures from the centuries-long medieval style of such paintings. It is also simply gorgeous.

The fresco was fashioned by Fra Angelico and funded by Cosimo de Medici well over 500 years ago, but its beauty and ideas have benefitted multiple generations of residents and visitors to San Marco, including tourists from all around the world, since its creation. It has become a collective good that portrays an intimate moment when the angel Gabriel informs Mary that she has been chosen to give birth to the son of God. She reflects on the personal sacrifices ahead through this use of her body and risk to her social standing for the benefit of all mankind, which resonates ultimately with the sacrifice of Jesus himself. So both the physical painting and the ideas it embodies are relevant to our topic.

Economists like Paul Samuelson have helped our understanding of the nature of different types of collective goods, and the challenges and benefits of generating these, through identifying key dimensions and classifications. These are summarised in the 5 points below, and will be explored further in future Newsletters.

1. Two Key Dimensions: 

   In thinking about different types of goods, it is valuable to think about the extent to which they are rivalrous or non-rivalrous and whether they are relatively excludable or non-excludable. Some goods, like loaves of bread, are subject to consumption rivalry. If I eat a loaf, it is no longer available to anybody else. But, other goods are not as subject to consumption rivalry. Many people can tune in to the same radio signals at once without degrading them. Similarly, it is relatively straightforward to exclude non-paying customers for loaves of bread, but it is very difficult to exclude free riders on public radio signals. These two dimensions form a useful matrix for classifying 4 different types of goods.  

2. Private Goods – Excludable and Rival:
   This is the everyday world of private property and transactions, which is the focus of much micro-economic thinking and law. The specific things we buy and consume – whether large like houses or cars, or small like loaves of bread – are exclusively for our use as we choose even though they may be desirable to others who can not use them as they are “ours”.
   

3. Club Goods - Excludable and Non-Rival:
   These are goods like cable television or golfing facilities where membership could be charged along with provisions instituted to exclude non-members, but your use of them doesn’t prevent other members from using them. They remain non-rivalrous, at least while congestion is low. 
   

4. Common Goods – Non-Excludable and Rival:
   These are goods like fishing in the open sea or the capacity of the atmosphere to accommodate greenhouse gas emissions. Basically anyone can go fishing or use fuel and it is very difficult to prevent this happening. However, there is a limit to the number of fish that can be caught before stocks collapse or to the amount of GHGs that can be absorbed before climate change becomes catastrophic. So, these goods are relatively non-excludable and yet remain rivalrous with strong incentives for over-use. The challenges of generating and dealing with Common Goods will be considered more deeply in following Newsletters. 
   

5. Public Goods – Non-Excludable and Non-Rival: 
   These are goods like street lighting, or knowledge, or the law, or lighthouses that can be beneficial to everyone and, in principle, used by everyone without exclusion and without compromising their use by others. Their provision shares many of the challenges associated with common goods and at times I may well use the terms common good, public good and collective good indiscriminately. 

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

Have you found the identification of these two dimensions and four classifications of goods a useful stepping stone so far to deeper consideration of The Common Good?

An opportunity for you do some more learning:

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A series of follow-up courses that treat the main topics in increasing detail will be provided if there is sufficient interest.

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