Public Good

In economics, a public good, also called a social good or collective good, is a good or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning use by one person does not stop others from using it and does not reduce how much remains available to them, and it is typically provided by government and paid for through taxation. This differs from a common good such as an ocean fish stock, which is non-excludable but still rivalrous, since overharvesting can deplete it for everyone else; a genuine public good must be valuable to more than one user, since availability to just one person would make the non-rivalry point moot. Examples commonly cited include knowledge, official statistics, national defense, common languages, law enforcement, broadcast radio, flood control and aids to navigation; goods of this kind that are useful worldwide are sometimes called global public goods. Public goods are commonly discussed alongside the free rider problem, since people who do not pay for a public good can often still use it, which can lead the good to be under-produced, overused or allowed to degrade; when access to a public good can in fact be restricted, through mechanisms such as toll roads, congestion pricing or encrypted pay television, it is instead described as a club good. Economists continue to debate exactly how to define public goods, how large the public goods problem actually is in a given economy, and what the best remedies are. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/