On corporate and aggregate public goods

In a previous post, I toyed with taxonomies of resources to explore the health impacts of different models of ownership. The category of 'public goods', however, went unanalysed beyond the basic definition of a non-excludable and non-rivalrous resource. It's a category, however, that could bear with a rather more fine-grained analysis. It also invites looking beyond the realm of material resources, to less tangible but equally important forms of 'good' (the kinds of thing economists might label 'social', 'cultural' or 'human' capital).

One important distinction between kinds of public good is that raised by an excellent paper I recently encountered by Heather Widdows and Sean Cordell. Some goods enjoyed by a community are such that the total benefit is simply the sum of the benefits enjoyed by all individual members of that community; if one is inclined to believe that costs and benefits may accrue only to individuals, then such is the only kind of sense that can be made of public goods. However, a more expansive conception of the kinds of thing that might be bearers of value opens the floor to another kind of good - where the benefits attach, not to community members, but to the community itself.

On relevance, and defending the NHS

So I said I'd write something about the NHS 299 march at the Tory conference on Sunday to go on Sheffield Medsin's blog; this is the result.

Sheffield Medsin and Sheffield Save Our NHS joined over 50,000 people in Manchester on Sunday – including a zombie flashmob, a brass band, and a seven-year old girl with disproportionately large lungs who delivered the most rousing rendition of ‘When they say cut back…’ I’ve ever shouted reply to – to defend a universal health care system owned by the public and run for its health, and to stand in solidarity with health workers across the country facing job losses, and deteriorating working conditions. Those behind the compound perimeter of police and private G4S mercenaries could be left in little doubt that, as the thousands of voices raised in song outside reminded them, they were the 1%; and the 99% outside weren’t going to be ignored.

Not that they weren’t going to try their best to maintain such wilful ignorance. The lack of mainstream media coverage of recent changes to the NHS has been so predictable as to become a running joke amongst those aware of the impacts of cuts and privatisation on the nation’s health, so it’s hardly a surprise that Sunday’s demonstration was widely ignored in many venues – all the more so, since the tory-police-G4S triumvirate conspired to do their level best to prevent coverage. Where there was coverage, some worried that the diversity of people and issues on display served to ‘muddy the message’ of a march ostensibly publicised as campaigning to ‘save the NHS’. The idea, so the argument runs, is that campaigning against fracking, punitive welfare policies, or generally voicing opposition to austerity turns an actionable list of discrete demands into an inchoate expression of general discontent to which it is difficult to formulate a concrete response; these ‘non-NHS’-related demands then distract from the main opposition to the alterations to the organisational structure of the health system.