Continuing my evolving thoughts
One realization: the traditional analysis as shown at Wikipedia (and which @Salt mentions is from Elinor Ostrom) has a core flaw that is perhaps the issue I’m pushing back on. By use of “excludable”, it is asserting that the economic principles at play are those of exclusivity. That framing fundamentally assumes that anything excludable should or will be made exclusive. Otherwise, why treat anything excludable as a club good? Obviously if there’s no exclusive restrictions on something, then there’s no club and none of the club-goods economics apply. We might note that it’s possible to lock something down, but the economic issues of clubs only come up if and when the restrictions are actually put in place.
We might, perhaps uncharitably, see the original model as presuming that anything excludable might as well be treated as exclusive. It’s like saying, “we only have to worry about the icky, wicked, difficult dilemmas about public goods and commons if we fail to lock things down”, as though the restrictions are the obvious answer. I could imagine (no clue how valid this is) Ostrom basically giving in to the privatization argument and saying “sure, privatization solves things, but I’m here to show you the limits of privatization by pointing out that some cases are impossible to privatize, so we have to grapple with commons and public goods!!”
By contrast, my assertion is that we don’t need to assume privatization-whenever-possible. We can flat out say that there are benefits to retaining FLO public and commons status of things. And as long as that status is retained, then obviously we do face the dilemmas, we are economically dealing with commons and public goods.
If a whole community accepts that some gardening tools are to be left in the community garden and there is no realistic threat of anyone taking them, then these could-be-private-goods are in fact not economically private goods but are common goods. Also, let’s ask: could they be public goods? Clearly only one person can use a tool at any one time. But if it happens that there’s no realistic scenario in which multiple people care to use the same tool at the same time, then it might as well be public goods, there’s no actual rivalry. The core point is that exclusivity and rivalry are economically important factors in understanding how we deal with any situation. It divorces from reality if we try to nail down a universal forever status of each thing or project. We just need the language and framework to say that rivalry and exclusivity are two of the most important aspects of any economic situation.
So, our framing could describes abundance vs rivalry, and FLO vs restricted so that people understand that these are the main issues. I wonder if it could be useful to actually label them that way, as the opposite ends of continuum rather than picking one and asking “yes/no”? So instead of “is it abundant, yes or no?” or even “how abundant is it?” we might consider asking “is it abundant or rivalrous?” and “is it FLO or restricted?”
This is not a proposal as final grid but I’m sharing to prompt further thinking:
html
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th colspan="2" rowspan="2">Types of goods</th>
<th colspan="2" style="text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">Rivalry?</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Scarce</td>
<td>Abundant</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="2" style="text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">Exclusivity?</th>
<td>Restricted</td>
<td>Private goods</td>
<td>Club goods</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>FLO</td>
<td>Commons</td>
<td><strong>Public goods</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
FLO as a choice, rivalry less so?
A key thought: Is rivalrousness more inherent while exclusivity is often a choice?
As a musician, I could choose to focus on rivalrous works or not (concerts and lessons versus recordings and writings), but can I turn one into the other? I know I can choose whether to make things more FLO or not (concert in the park for anyone who comes versus ticketed-show, paywalls or ads on recordings versus FLO publication and legal status).
So, we have four types of goods that face different economic realities. Within that, maybe we can emphasize that FLOness is a choice (and one that will involve less trade-offs the more we figure out how to economically support that choice).
Pulling a bit away from the strict public-goods focus, maybe we could emphasize that FLOness could be a choice for rivalrous goods too. It’s the choice between private goods and common goods.
In this framing, we might emphasize the question of the FLO choice instead of putting the main emphasis on public goods. We can still talk about how the methods for supporting the choice to go FLO are different for commons vs public goods, and that crowdmatching is more aimed at public goods.
What about rivalry as a choice? Can someone take normally rivalrous things and make them less rivalrous? In practice, that could be just a matter of providing enough quantity/capacity that rivalry disappears. Supply-and-demand really. When the supply is high enough, rivalry disappears, even for scarce-in-principle physical goods. Another way to adjust rivalrousness might be in the choice of whether to realize an abstract concept more in hardware vs in software.
What about a club-good that is also made artificially scarce? It seems rare in practice, but software can be released with a limited number of licenses to be sold (could even allow resale of licenses or similar schemes). Economically, that would make software be a private good because it would have both rivalry and exclusivity, though both would be artificially imposed.
It might help to separate the issues of the economic factors (exclusivity and rivalry) from the question of artifice.
Better terms than “public” vs “common”?
I do want to flag that “commons” and “common” are commonly used for things that this framework calls “public goods” and this is widespread enough that it’s probably impossible to completely shift everything. Consider “Creative Commons” (which is only used for non-rivalrous works)!
Can we come up with a better way to talk about the difference between the two FLOish, public, categories, one being rivalrous and the other abundant? If we could find better terms, it would be a boon.
Thanks for reading these long in-progress thoughts. I’m finding some important value in long-form working out of these ideas, and I feel better about this process having space for it and still sharing and getting feedback instead of waiting to share ideas until I have a carefully edited concise proposal nor doing it all in back-and-forth conversation.
