What are Public Goods?

In this video, Professor Jonathan Anomaly (Duke and UNC – Chapel Hill) discusses public goods, which are goods that are jointly consumed, so that they are available to everyone if they are available to anyone. Public goods often lead to unexploited gains from trade, and are frequently invoked to justify why we have a state to perform basic functions like defense, property adjudication, and the regulation of pollution.

Jonathan Anomaly

Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Universidad de Las Américas

I work mostly on issues at the intersection of ethics, economics, and biology. These include what we should do about antibiotic resistance, and how we should respond to the emerging market for genetic engineering. More generally, I’m interested in the relative role of social norms and legal institutions in solving different kinds of collective action problems. I recently co-authored Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (Routledge, 2020).

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