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The traditional foundation of science lies on the cornerstones of theory and experiment. Theory is used to explain experiment, which in turn guides the development of theory. Since the advent of computers and the development of computational algorithms, computation has risen as the third cornerstone of science, joining theory and experiment on an equal footing. Computation has become an essential part of modern science, amending experiment by enabling accurate comparison of complicated theories to sophisticated experiments, as well as guiding by triage both the design and targets of experiments and the development of novel theories and computational methods. Like experiment, computation relies on continued investment in infrastructure: it requires both hardware (the physical computer on which the calculation is run) as well as software (the source code of the programs that performs the wanted simulations). In this Perspective, I discuss present-day challenges on the software side in computational chemistry, which arise from the fast-paced development of algorithms, programming models, as well as hardware. I argue that many of these challenges could be solved with reusable open source libraries, which are a public good, enhance the reproducibility of science, and accelerate the development and availability of state-of-the-art methods and improved software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an account of distributive epistemic justice in the production of scientific knowledge. We identify four requirements: (a) science should produce the knowledge citizens need in order to reason about the common good, their individual good, and the pursuit thereof; (b) science should produce the knowledge those serving the public need to pursue justice effectively; (c) science should be organized in such a way that it does not aid the wilful manufacturing of ignorance; and (d) when making decisions about epistemic risks, scientists should make sure that there aren't social groups or weighty interests that are neglected. After discussing these requirements, we examine the relationship between discriminatory and distributive epistemic injustice in science and argue that they often compound each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideology and self-interest are often in tension. If positive political theorists assume broad self-interest as the standard of human behaviour, they can accommodate people's ideological motivation to act for the common good. Yet, their theories may become tautological and empirically untestable. Conversely, if these theorists assume narrow self-interest, they increase testability. But because ideology seems incompatible with narrow self-interest, they often rule ideology out as a motivational driver. Positive political theorists can, however, combine ideology with narrow self-interest by assuming broad egoism. And in so doing, they should assume that ideology motivates political agents until it becomes too costly for these agents' material interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the obsession with innovation crowds out attention to maintenance, that innovation creates future obligations of maintenance that are often not factored into technological promises, and that ordinary maintenance and repair practices are often innovative in their own right. Empirically, we explore a case where maintenance and repair become the explicit target of high-level, high-tech innovation initiatives and how, as a result, innovation logics colonize maintenance practices. Conceptually, we explore how repair and maintenance sensitivities can be applied to innovation practices to reveal the invisible work needed to align innovation instruments with socio-material and institutional configurations. Drawing on an in-depth case study of sewer inspection robots in Barcelona, we find that attempts to innovate maintenance require a symmetric effort to maintain innovation. In our case study, innovation processes as deployed by the European Commission, research consortia, and companies required substantial repair work to function reliably in specific settings. Our study shows how divergent understandings of the public good in innovation and maintenance contexts may lead to significant tensions, and that much can be gained analytically from not treating innovation and maintenance as opposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European agricultural policies increasingly incorporate mechanisms for delivery of public goods. Sustainable public good delivery requires alignment between societal demand and landscape supply. However, the variation of demands or desires regarding future public good delivery among society is hardly known. We inventoried the desires for public goods across Dutch society, and projections of agricultural supply. A multi-method approach was used to find agreement levels between desired and expected change in good delivery. Most stakeholders expressed a desire for biodiversity and climate regulation from agriculture, whilst desire for natural heritage and recreation was less common. The utility of a public good to a stakeholder appears to influence its desire. Scenarios for agriculture focus on extensification, sustainable intensification, regionalization, or meadow bird conservation. Regionalized scenarios showed the highest agreement between public good supply and desire. Maximizing alignment between desire and supply thus requires a challenging transition towards region-specific agricultural sustainability strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building and implementing ethical AI systems that benefit the whole society is cost-intensive and a multi-faceted task fraught with potential problems. While on one hand there are technical solutions to mitigate social problems, on the other hand, citizen perceptions can lead to social and political demands that influence the social implementation of AI systems. In this study, we explore the salience of AI issues in the public with an emphasis on ethical criteria to the likelihood that ethical AI is actively demanded by the public. Based on data from 15 surveys (N = 14,988 respondents), our results show that the majority of the German population was not concerned with AI at all. Thereby, the issue salience is dependent on general interest in AI and a higher educational level. Ethical issues are of concern for only a small subset of citizens. However, the salience of ethical issues affects the behavioral intentions of citizens in the way that they tend to avoid AI technology and engage in public discussions about AI. We conclude that the low level of ethical implications may pose a serious problem for the actual implementation of ethical AI for the Common Good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a notion of mergeable weighted majority games with the aim of providing the first characterization of the Colomer–Martínez power index (Colomer and Martínez in J Theor Polit 7(1):41–63, 1995). Furthermore, we define and characterize a new power index for the family of weighted majority games that combines ideas of the Public Good (Holler in Polit Stud 30(2):262–271, 1982) and Colomer–Martínez power indices. Finally, we analyze the National Assembly of Ecuador using these and some other well-known power indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sacral historical monuments are primarily places of prayer, but also objects performing numerous other functions. These are public goods, including cultural goods that build national identity. Their preservation in the right condition is important not only for the owner, but also for the public authorities, whose duty is to preserve them for future generations. The study concerns the financing of sacral monuments in Poland. Its aim is to indicate the legitimacy of financing the revalorization of sacral monuments from public funds, the solutions applied in this area in Poland, and the sources and amount of support provided to the owners of these objects in the years 2017–2022. In it, the authors: (1) refer to such concepts as: public good, cultural good and cultural heritage, (2) define—based on Polish regulations—the concept of a sacral monument and indicate the multiplicity of functions that these objects perform, (3) present the number and types of sacral monuments in Poland, taking into account their location, (4) identify available sources of public funds for the revalorization of sacral monuments in Poland. The analyses carried out show that in Poland, every year, public funds play an important role in the revalorization of sacral historical monuments. In real terms, its volume remained at a similar level over the period considered. The methods used in the development are as follows: critical analysis of the literature and legal acts and selected methods of descriptive statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic integralism claims that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so. The state governs in matters temporal, the Catholic Church in matters spiritual. Since the church has the nobler end of salvation, it may direct the state to help enforce church law. The integralist adopts two seemingly conflicting norms of justice: (a) coercion into the faith is always unjust, but (b) coercion to keep the faith is just. But if religious coercion is wrong at the start of the Christian life, why is it permitted after that? The integralist answer is baptism. Baptism serves as a normative transformer : it transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. My thesis is that baptism fails as a normative transformer. I critique Thomas Aquinas' approach to this question and then adapt gratitude, associative, and natural duty theories of political obligation to repair his argument. These strategies fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rear-view mirror approach indicates that citizenship education and adult learning and education (ALE) for lifelong learning have been prominent throughout history, dating back to the League of Nations and continuing through the United Nations and UNESCO. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 after World War I when humanity realized that settling disputes through violence—bombs and guns—was indicative of lack of citizenship education. Central to the League's Covenant was the need to employ "negotiation and arbitration." In addition to the International Adult Education Conferences, UNESCO has used other forums to affirm the imperative of lifelong learning and citizenship education. For instance, in the Faure Report, there is emphasis on "education and society" and on the "complete man" (Faure et al., 1972). The complete man/woman is an "educated" citizen. In The Fifth Global Report on ALE, UNESCO (2022a) connects citizenship education to the task of empowering adults for change. This article uses the Marrakech Framework for Action (MFA) that resulted from CONFINTEA VII as background to analyze and present active citizenship education as a necessary condition for human sustainability and global transformation. I conceptualize education broadly to include indigenous ways of knowing. In addition, although active citizenship education is the focus of this piece, I argue that there is a symmetric relationship between lifelong learning, adult education, and citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue invites reflection on digital forms of resource extractivism, through thinking-with microbes, fish, smart energy, and human bodies. We examine the confluence of infrastructure building, public good enactment, and nature datafication to account for novel forms of resource economies. The articles in this collection empirically investigate the various ways in which nature is turned into resource in laboratory and experimental sites including database retrievals and data mining. Our empirical cases, ranging from biodiversity prospecting, clinical biobanking to the digitalized electric grid and from digital fish to biodigital transformations in yeast technology, offer insights into the nexus of data, economy, nature, and information. Contributing to the literature on datafication of natural resources, these studies re-situate information infrastructures and biodigital extractions as part of emerging info-economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the end of the golden years of the Norwegian oil economy, ocean genetic resources are being advertised in policy environments as holding great potential for the future of the country. Microbes have increased in popularity as promising agents of the Norwegian new bioeconomy, as advances in gene sequencing technologies and genomics have made them more accessible. This paper examines the turn toward digital sequence data in bioprospecting to inquire about its political implications. It draws on a combination of empirical materials to describe the infrastructural work that goes into extracting microbes from their in situ locations in arctic and subarctic waters to in silico collections and databases. I argue that in that infrastructural work, microbes may become both more promising and more elusive public and political matters. As biodiversity is turned into data, bioprospecting appears as less dependent on material samples, which may ultimately render policy frameworks for biodiversity governance obsolete. The shift toward big sequence data in bioprospecting entails shifts in how promise is attributed to biodiversity, which life forms appear to be more promising, and how such life forms come to appear as public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Why It's OK to Speak Your Mind, Hrishikesh Joshi argues that the open exchange of ideas is essential for the flourishing of individuals and society. He provides two arguments for this claim. First, speaking your mind is essential for the common good: we enhance our collective ability to reach the truth if we share evidence and offer different perspectives. Second, speaking your mind is good for your own sake: it is necessary to develop your rational faculties and exercise intellectual independence, both of which are essential for living a good life. In this paper, I consider the implications of Joshi's argument and raise several objections to his view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the socialist model of higher education that originates from early socialist and Marxist thinkers. We contrast this model with Western and Chinese models by focusing on the socialist model's ideals of education as a public good, as free and equal access to instruction, and as a class-based approach to education. Our study of this model employs historical reconstruction and path-dependence analysis to understand the implementation and transformation of these ideals. We discuss early Soviet experiments, the global influence of the model, and its evolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The model's emphasis on state control, specialized training, and production of a skilled workforce is also highlighted. The essay concludes by acknowledging the model's flaws, reflecting on the implications for contemporary higher education, and recognizing its contributions to ideas of social mobility, fair access, and the role of universities in societal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the key oppositions tearing apart American public life in the early twenty-first century are related to issues explored in the mid-twentieth century political philosophy of Jacques Maritain. Supporters of liberal democracy, then and now, insist it is a political system that privatizes religion and all concepts of a common good. Supporters of an integralist alternative demand official state support for religion as the vision underlying political goals. And, of course, arrayed against both are authoritarian movements that threaten democracy altogether. In this context, Maritain's nuanced political philosophy is far from outdated. He thoughtfully defends liberal democracy's protection of human rights, while also demonstrating that democracy is strengthened by a Catholic vision of the ultimate human good. His political wisdom provides a way through our current impasses and points to a path that will support the survival of this fragile experiment in democracy and the even more fragile hope that democratic processes could be a means to create a more just world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, Jacques Maritain, the influential Catholic philosopher, and Saul Alinsky, the infamous "dean" of community organizing, could scarcely be more different, in temperament or reputation. Nevertheless, for nearly three decades, these two men were close friends and dedicated collaborators, drawn together by a passionate commitment to democracy. By reading them alongside each other, this article offers a new interpretation of both. After historically contextualizing the relationship between Maritain and Alinsky, it advances two major claims about their democratic thought. First, it shows that Maritain and Alinsky shared a commitment to a political project best described as "personalist democracy," insofar as it founded democratic politics upon a specific ethical (and, for Maritain, theological) conception of the human person. Second, the article argues that both thinkers understood personalist democracy to be realizable, in practice, only through a particular kind of democratic organization. They saw the process of organizing as the indispensable means for forming the diffuse persons who comprise society into a coherent "people," capable of acting for the common good and, in so doing, discovering their own dignity. The article concludes by offering reasons why the project of personalist democracy, as Maritain and Alinsky conceived it, may still have much to offer today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 14 December 2021, the extraordinary event called "touching the Sun" has been heralded as a "monumental moment for solar science", in which the Parker Solar Probe opened up a new frontier of research for Space exploration, proposing the challenge of reaching, studying, and even "touching" our Sun at close range. The consequences of this event are scientific but also metaphysical and transcendental, offering the opportunity to reflect on the complex reality and meaning of the "boundaries" as opportunities for relationships and then for ethics. In this paper, I would like to propose an attempt to develop a possible discussion for an extension of Space Sustainability as an ethical guide for humanity which, as it goes out into outer Space, is helped to rediscover new, expanded dimensions of perception along the path of mystery and humility, in order to return back to Earth enriched for new relationships in pursuit of the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses theological assertions concerning the public role of religion in post-secular societies. In the context of religion's renewed emergence in the public sphere, it is being called upon to overcome the beliefs of individual and private realms and actively assume the role of a participant in the common goal of a better society. Religion, in this context, is not confined to the personal sphere but is recognized as a crucial participant in shaping a more desirable societal landscape. Religion holds the potential to renew the spirituality of citizens, foster a sense of belonging, and contribute to the formation of social ethics. In response to these circumstances, Christianity is engaging with a new theological methodology known as public theology, proposing a public role for the church and advocating for the public participation of Christians. This study aims to propose public roles for the church and theology in post-secular societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect of power asymmetry on resolution of social dilemmas in repeated play of linear public good games. The experiment uses a 2 × 2 design that crosses power symmetry or asymmetry in payoff-equivalent provision and appropriation games with positive (provision) or negative (appropriation) externalities. Power asymmetry combines privileged access to information with extended opportunity sets that allow for taking a public good provided or not-appropriated by others. Our data suggest that power asymmetry has a detrimental effect on efficiency, with the effect being more pronounced in the asymmetric-power appropriation game. Individual allocations to the public good increase in others' allocations, suggesting that individual allocations are not strategic substitutes. With power asymmetry, first movers earn less than the second mover in the appropriation game but not in the provision game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the course of scholarly history, some concepts have been notoriously hard to define. The 'common good' is one such concept. While the common good has a long and contested scholarly history, social psychology research on folk theories – lay beliefs that represent an individual's informal and subjective understanding of the world – may provide a key for unlocking this nebulous concept. In the current paper, we analysed lay definitions of the common good using the linguistic inquiry and word count's meaning extraction method. From a nationally representative Australian sample of open‐ended text responses (n = 14,303), we uncovered a consistent conceptual structure, with nine themes corresponding to three core aspects: (i) outcomes and objects, (ii) principles and processes and (iii) stakeholders and beneficiaries. From this, we developed a working definition of the folk concept of the common good: 'achieving the best possible outcome for the largest number of people, which is underpinned by decision‐making that is ethically and morally sound and varies by the context in which the decisions are made'. A working definition benefits the academic community and society more broadly, particularly when diverse stakeholders come together to act for the common good to address shared challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the thesis that communication and its associated technologies, as a cultural mediation system, can be understood as a common good. To do this, the concept of the common good is reviewed and popular and scientific knowledge is woven together. Some of the conditions are identified to theorize communication from this new framework: cooperation, decolonization and deliberation. The risk of common goods is their administration in the search for private or proprietary benefits. Development as an economic drift that implies overexploitation, unlimited growth and private benefits, constitutes a tool of colonial inheritance that promotes social changes that do not affect the common good, benefiting an international elite that increasingly monopolizes resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implications of the dilemma attributed to Mair between the responsiveness of political actors and their responsibility is considered from the perspective of citizens. The article analyses citizens' understandings of political actors' responsiveness and responsibility in their discourses on the SEGEU. We provide an in-depth abductive secondary analysis of three qualitative datasets collected in Belgium and France between 2005 and 2019. Most participants frame responsibility and responsiveness in terms that are close to Mair's definitions. However, some challenge the principle of responsibility and elaborate an alternative understanding directed towards achieving the common good. Nevertheless, as participants agree that political actors are not responsive to them, but rather to market actors, there is no evident dilemma. Our analysis shows that political actors' capacity for agency and choice, frames participants' understandings of responsiveness and responsibility. This result becomes the basis for a reconceptualisation of the notion of responsiveness and representation from a citizen perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the teaching of Leviathan 's doctrine in the universities is meant to contribute to a language of politics within which the sovereign will be pressured to operate by procedural considerations. The sovereign's reach over citizens is attenuated by the apparatus of government, as Hobbes's first description of the Leviathan makes clear, and Hobbes expected the sovereign's ministers, suitably trained in his doctrine, to have a mediating effect on the sovereign's power. The sovereign's laws are to be enacted and enforced by ministers who have been educated in Hobbesian civil science and therefore expect that the sovereign will rule in accordance with that science. Even ordinary citizens will be familiar with the broad outlines of Hobbesian civil science and will notice when laws and policies fail to perform the business of the state. When Leviathan 's doctrines are publicly taught, sovereignty is strengthened by a teaching so favorable to sovereign power, but it is also constrained insofar as those doctrines set expectations for how the ruler will exercise their power. It is not in acts of individual or collective resistance that the sovereign's commands are to be moderated in the direction of the common good, but through the expectations of subjects, and especially of those subjects who serve as ministers, set by sovereigns themselves through the public promulgation of Leviathan 's doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Engineers are professionally obligated to protect the safety and well‐being of the public impacted by the technologies they design and maintain. In an increasingly complex sociotechnical world, engineering educators and professional institutions have a duty to train engineers in these responsibilities. Purpose/Hypothesis: This article asks, where are engineers trained in their public welfare responsibilities, and how effective is this training? We argue that engineers trained in public welfare responsibilities, especially within engineering education, will demonstrate greater understanding of their duty to recognize and respond to public welfare concerns. We expect training in formal engineering classes to be more broadly impactful than training in contexts like work or professional societies. Data/Methods: We analyze unique survey data from a representative sample of US practicing engineers using descriptive and regression techniques. Results: Consistent with expectations, engineers who received public welfare responsibility training in engineering classes are more likely than other engineers to understand their responsibilities to protect public health and safety and problem‐solve collectively, to recognize the importance of social consequences and ethical responsibilities in their own jobs, to have noticed ethical issues in their workplace, and to have taken action about an issue that concerned them. Training through other parts of college, workplaces, or professional societies has comparatively little impact. Concerningly, nearly a third of engineers reported never being trained in public welfare responsibilities. Conclusion: These results suggest that training in engineering education can shape engineers' long‐term understanding of their public welfare responsibilities. They underscore the need for these responsibilities to be taught as a core, non‐negotiable part of engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Quorum sensing (QS) is the ability of microorganisms to assess local clonal density by measuring the extracellular concentration of signal molecules that they produce and excrete. QS is also the only known way of bacterial communication that supports the coordination of within-clone cooperative actions requiring a certain threshold density of cooperating cells. Cooperation aided by QS communication is sensitive to cheating in two different ways: laggards may benefit from not investing in cooperation but enjoying the benefit provided by their cooperating neighbors, whereas Liars explicitly promise cooperation but fail to do so, thereby convincing potential cooperating neighbors to help them, for almost free. Given this double vulnerability to cheats, it is not trivial why QS-supported cooperation is so widespread among prokaryotes. Results: We investigated the evolutionary dynamics of QS in populations of cooperators for whom the QS signal is an inevitable side effect of producing the public good itself (cue-based QS). Using spatially explicit agent-based lattice simulations of QS-aided threshold cooperation (whereby cooperation is effective only above a critical cumulative level of contributions) and three different (analytical and numerical) approximations of the lattice model, we explored the dynamics of QS-aided threshold cooperation under a feasible range of parameter values. We demonstrate three major advantages of cue-driven cooperation. First, laggards cannot wipe out cooperation under a wide range of reasonable environmental conditions, in spite of an unconstrained possibility to mutate to cheating; in fact, cooperators may even exclude laggards at high cooperation thresholds. Second, lying almost never pays off, if the signal is an inevitable byproduct (i.e., the cue) of cooperation; even very cheap fake signals are selected against. And thirdly, QS is most useful if local cooperator densities are the least predictable, i.e., if their lattice-wise mean is close to the cooperation threshold with a substantial variance. Conclusions: Comparing the results of the four different modeling approaches indicates that cue-driven threshold cooperation may be a viable evolutionary strategy for microbes that cannot keep track of past behavior of their potential cooperating partners, in spatially viscous and in well-mixed environments alike. Our model can be seen as a version of the famous greenbeard effect, where greenbeards coexist with defectors in a evolutionarily stable polymorphism. Such polymorphism is maintained by the condition-dependent trade-offs of signal production which are characteristic of cue-based QS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historic diaspora diplomacy literature has generally characterized politically active diaspora as foreign agents leveraged by their ancestral homeland to shape the foreign policy of their host nation. As such, diaspora groups have generally been assessed as net negatives on the foreign policy of their host nations, or as working against the common good of the host nation. This work seeks to challenge this narrow conceptualization and demonstrate that, when considered within a broader historical timeline, granted agency, and contextualized within a networked society, emergent mechanisms for state mobilization of diaspora groups to achieve foreign policy objectives become apparent. This work is focused exclusively on political diaspora groups within the United States and investigates select case studies to demonstrate the evolving nature of U.S.-diaspora relations and the opportunities presented as a result. The work concludes with several policy recommendations, derived from lessons learned within the case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the effects of group size on private provision of public goods, focusing on the influence of public good aggregator technologies through which individual contributions determine overall public good provision. We propose a general aggregator that encompasses existing aggregators, accommodates rivalrous public goods, and includes several interesting novel sub-aggregators. Our study of a wide range of aggregators indicates that the effects of group size on public good supply hinges on aggregator structures, thereby highlighting aggregators' importance for the prognosis of policy intervention. The analysis here between aggregators and group size goes well beyond that of the extant literature. In the presence of income heterogeneity, the paper explores how an entrant affects public good provision for alternative aggregator technologies, which has important implications for income transfer policy of achieving Pareto-improving outcomes. An aggregative game approach greatly facilitates the depiction of group-size changes in equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for cooperation in social dilemmas. The very logic of reciprocity, however, seems to require that individuals are symmetric, and that everyone has the same means to influence each others' payoffs. Yet in many applications, individuals are asymmetric. Herein, we study the effect of asymmetry in linear public good games. Individuals may differ in their endowments (their ability to contribute to a public good) and in their productivities (how effective their contributions are). Given the individuals' productivities, we ask which allocation of endowments is optimal for cooperation. To this end, we consider two notions of optimality. The first notion focuses on the resilience of cooperation. The respective endowment distribution ensures that full cooperation is feasible even under the most adverse conditions. The second notion focuses on efficiency. The corresponding endowment distribution maximizes group welfare. Using analytical methods, we fully characterize these two endowment distributions. This analysis reveals that both optimality notions favor some endowment inequality: More productive players ought to get higher endowments. Yet the two notions disagree on how unequal endowments are supposed to be. A focus on resilience results in less inequality. With additional simulations, we show that the optimal endowment allocation needs to account for both the resilience and the efficiency of cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy, traditionally understood as a right applicable only to individuals, often loses in policymaking to "social" interests, such as national security, medical progress, or the freedom of the press. Recent work in the philosophy of privacy has therefore begun to emphasize the societal value of privacy, its contribution to the common good. However, to be secure privacy should be anchored in both the right and the good. Properly delimited, privacy is an absolute right of the individual. It also benefits society in several ways. While not a "public good" in the economists' sense, privacy is in several precise respects constitutive of the common good. As such, it is compatible not just with liberalism but with social democracy and democratic socialism. Moreover, the arrival of the "global information society," with its facilitation of openness and connectedness, offers a new avenue for congruence between privacy and community. The argument draws on the ideas of Green, Rawls, and Regan, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet today's grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of "capture", economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions, the article provides a renewed conception of the common good, going beyond the classic public good and commons approach, as a way of steering and shaping (rather than just fixing) the economy towards collective goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the question of how to align corporate behavior with the public good. It presents two opposing camps in the debate: the economic liberal camp, which argues that market competition automatically aligns corporate activities with the public good, and the social protectionist camp, which advocates for regulation to address the negative impacts of corporate behavior. The authors propose a corporate social assessment (CSA) that would grade corporations based on their contributions to the public good, with the top-ranked corporations earning rewards and the bottom-ranked corporations contributing to a fund. The article raises concerns about the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing a CSA and suggests that a democratization of corporations may be a more suitable approach to aligning corporate activities with the public good. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the essential role of community colleges in promoting access to education and fostering a sense of belonging among diverse student populations. Topics include the challenges faced by community college students, the importance of removing barriers to education, and the potential for community colleges to contribute to the public good through strategic community-building initiatives.

The article focuses on College Unbound's exploration of education for the public good through integrated curricular structures and commitment to social justice. Topics include College Unbound's three core educational components, its role as a model for institutional adaptation, and the challenges and aspirations of higher education in serving the public good amidst national attacks on diversity and equity.

The article focuses on the crucial role of higher education governing boards in promoting equitable student success, emphasizing the need for intentional support and guidance to navigate complex challenges. Topics include the reorientation of governing boards to understand their role in advancing the public good, fiduciary duty of boards to ensure equitable student success, and demarcating specific responsibilities of boards in advancing equity in decision-making processes within institutions.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, the American Medical Association Enterprise Communications team was operating in the white space. Organisational development gurus define "white space" as places where "rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are nonexistent, and strategy is unclear-and where, as a consequence, entrepreneurial activity that helps reinvent and renew an organisation takes place," according to the Harvard Business Review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernard Mandeville's theory of morality – 'private vices, public benefits' – provides a frame for comparing Adam Smith and David Hume on utility. Mandeville held that vice, not virtue, is useful for society. For him, the private and public good do not align. What is bad for individuals is often beneficial for society and vice versa. To counter Mandeville's rhetoric and show the attractiveness of virtue, Hume places the principle of utility at the center of his An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). This placement directs the reader's attention away from the lack of alignment between private and public advantage and enables Hume to 'dress' moral virtue in utility and pleasure. Smith, by contrast, places the principle of propriety at the center of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This is because he is closer in spirit to Mandeville than is Hume in acknowledging a gap between the private and public good. By directing the reader's attention to this gap in Part IV, Smith tries to show, contra Hume, that the principle of propriety, not utility, better explains and defends praiseworthy action and choice in an imperfect world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inequity aversion model is fundamental to explaining the motivation of voluntary contribution behavior. Yet, the empirical studies limit the research on the inequity-aversion to small groups due to the difficulty of accounting for each individual's payoff in the decision-making process for large group sizes. To overcome the technical barrier of estimating expected payoffs with large group sizes and various marginal returns, we adopt the Quantal Response Equilibrium estimation method that allows for an individual's contribution to be impacted by their social preferences, i.e., inequality aversion, altruism, and bounded rationality. Our theoretical model identifies the equilibrium strategy of contribution. Using Bayesian inference via Markov Chain Monte Carlo, the experimental results show people are significantly worse off when they contribute more or less than others, meaning social equality promotes public good provisions. We find that marginal per capita return and group size play important roles in people's contribution decisions, and the effect of marginal per capita return on contributions is stronger than that of group size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since at least the 1970s, the countryside of Western Europe has been the site of a myriad of "new" communal initiatives. Rural areas that were abandoned during the last century have witnessed the arrival of new inhabitants. These newcomers often flock to the mountains escaping urban lifestyles characterized by individualism, mass-oriented livelihoods, and isolation. Many of these individuals move to areas like the Catalan Pyrenees, where common property and communal institutions have had a strong historical presence. In embracing rural life, these new inhabitants are looking for a more integrated social life in which the commons are, on the one hand, a form of collective private property, and, on the other, represent a more egalitarian way of life in which contributing to the collective effort is not only an efficient way of dealing with particularly harsh ecological conditions, but also an ideological statement that defines the community as something different: an alternative to urban capitalism. Two definitions of the commons are colliding in these mountains; two longstanding lines of political thought are converging and establishing a dialogue that is not always easy: (1) traditional ideologies of land ownership that defined common property over the centuries, not based on economic equality, but on private property and locally shared responsibility on the economic base of the community; and (2) utopian anti-capitalism that views the commons as an alternative mode of social organization and ownership based on egalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how people provide public goods in a network formation game. In this game, players form a network through bilateral linking, with or without a link cost; the players then contribute to a public good, which can benefit both themselves and their direct neighbors. Theoretically, two equilibrium goods provision strategies exist: splitting and alternation. Efficient networks are conditioned on a goods provision strategy and are less dense when the link cost increases. Our laboratory experiment indicates that subjects predominantly converge to splitting instead of alternation and can often form efficient networks. Subjects form fewer links under a higher link cost and tend to form too many links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Seamus Mulryan contends that dialogue about questions that matter to a body politic require the ethical virtue of courage, which is distinct from the virtue of intellectual humility, and this is of central importance in the education of members of a pluralist society. Mulryan begins with Robert Kunzman's theory of Ethical Dialogue and departs from it through Hans‐Georg Gadamer's theory of hermeneutic experience and Charles Taylor's claims about the inextricable relationship between self‐intelligibility and moral spaces. Finally, Mulryan illustrates the promises and perils of courageous dialogue as an educative activity by way of Plato's Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation usually becomes harder to sustain as groups become larger because incentives to shirk increase with the number of potential contributors to collective action. But is this always the case? Here we study a binary-action cooperative dilemma where a public good is provided as long as not more than a given number of players shirk from a costly cooperative task. We find that at the stable polymorphic equilibrium, which exists when the cost of cooperation is low enough, the probability of cooperating increases with group size and reaches a limit of one when the group size tends to infinity. Nevertheless, increasing the group size may increase or decrease the probability that the public good is provided at such an equilibrium, depending on the cost value. We also prove that the expected payoff to individuals at the stable polymorphic equilibrium (i.e., their fitness) decreases with group size. For low enough costs of cooperation, both the probability of provision of the public good and the expected payoff converge to positive values in the limit of large group sizes. However, we also find that the basin of attraction of the stable polymorphic equilibrium is a decreasing function of group size and shrinks to zero in the limit of very large groups. Overall, we demonstrate non-trivial comparative statics with respect to group size in an otherwise simple collective action problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agrobiodiversity is associated with a range of important but poorly quantified public good ecosystem services, the conservation of which requires public support. With a view to determining the general public's willingness to pay (WTP) for such conservation, we organised interviews with 491 adult Peruvian residents in three regions a stated preference choice experiment (CE) to elicit the value they place on crop genetic resources conservation, using quinoa cultivation as a case study. Responses revealed strong support for the conservation of quinoa diversity particularly when conservation was framed in terms of conserving national cultural identity or food security. Respondents were willing to make a one-off donation of US$31.79 to an in situ on-farm quinoa crop diversity conservation programme, placing the highest values on programme attributes related to securing bequest/existence and option values, followed closely by stable landscape conservation. WTP was higher when the public was reminded that conservation also contributed to national cultural identify or food security. A conservative aggregation of the WTP estimates to the population of the three regions results in an estimated total WTP for quinoa conservation of US$24.18 m and a benefit-cost ratio of 1.22. Findings demonstrate the significant and frequently ignored social welfare benefits associated with non-market agrobiodiversity-related public good ecosystem services, in this case equivalent to just over a quarter of market production values. Such information can be used to design and prioritise quinoa genetic diversity conservation programmes with an emphasis on such attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to an understanding of the backlash against liberalism by reconstructing the emergence and development of an increasingly influential strand of Anglo-American thought that challenges liberalism, known as postliberalism. The central diagnostic claim of postliberalism is that the two dominant forms of post-WW2 liberalism, market liberalism and social liberalism, instead of being somehow opposed, have coalesced around an all-encompassing sociopolitical project that above all else seeks to maximize individual autonomy. As a result, postliberals hold, the liberal order has become increasingly unable to cultivate the communal resources on which human sociability depends and erodes the values liberalism purportedly defends. The article argues that a central, albeit not necessarily insurmountable, challenge for postliberalism lies in moving from a critique of liberalism to proposed remedies for its perceived deficiencies, without slipping into a political project with clear illiberal rather than merely non-liberal implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a Duboisian defense of democracy's expressive and experimental values. It argues that the expressive value of democracy supports an ideal of inclusion, whereas the experimental value of democracy supports that of innovation. One appeals to the ideal of inclusion to extend to excluded groups codified constitutional protections and to condemn white hypocrisy. The ideal of innovation, in contrast, helps one reimagine what constitutional protections should be in the first place. Drawing on Du Bois's writings, this essay argues that the civic activities of black American counter-publics exhibited both experimental and expressive democratic values. In particular, it highlights the innovations of black women civic leaders who reimagined care work under a public conception of the common good. It concludes that counter-publics shape the asymmetric moral insight of its participants, namely, the oppressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of a monotonic transferable utility (TU) game is shown to be the set of prices that incentivize each individual to demand the grand coalition in a market demand problem in which the goods being demanded are coalitions viewed as excluable public goods. It is also shown that the core is the intersection of superdifferentials evaluated at the grand coalition of the covers of person-specific TU games derived from the original game. These characterizations of the core demonstrate how a market demand approach to coalition formation in the spirit of Baldwin and Klemperer (Tropical geometry to analyze demand, University of Oxford, 2014; Econometrica, 87: 867–932, 2019) is related to the approach to the core using the cover of a TU game and it superdifferential at the grand coalition developed by Shapley and Shubik (J Econ Theory, 1: 9–25, 1969), Aubin (Math Oper Res, 6:1–13, 1981), and Danilov and Koshevoy (J Math Anal Appl, 247: 1–14, 2000). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alex John London's new book, For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics highlights the fact that establishing just social arrangements is not only a matter of incentivizing popular will to act for the common good; it also requires filling in informational gaps about which policies, arrangements, and interventions will advance the basic interests of members in an equitable, effective and efficient manner. Promoting justice requires, in part, acquiring the knowledge for how to do so. In developing this point, London carefully traces these missteps in the main philosophical debates and then resuscitates the importance of questions of justice at the heart of research ethics. In doing so, it provides a transformative corrective for the field. This review critically examines one of the central pillars of London's egalitarian research imperative approach: the way in which the social value of research is closely linked with minimizing uncertainty among reasonable experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of 'the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of 'the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: 'a public'. By exploring the 'publics of policing' we gain important insights into the constitutive role policing plays in producing socio–political communities. We suggest that this represents an important addition to the nodal governance framework, which currently overlooks the importance of what corporate, state and civic actors create when they engage in policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Emotions play an important role in shaping behaviors within public goods games with and without punishment opportunities. • In standard public goods games, the emotion of anger and having contributed more than others are correlated, and agents adjust their contribution downward overtime to possibly avoid negative emotions. • In public goods games with monetary punishment, saction fosters future cooperation without relying on emotional impact. • In public goods games with non-monetary punishment, sanctioning improves sanctioner's emotion and deteriorates receivers' emotions. • Disgust, rather than angry as conventionally thought explains the sanctioning decision. We consider the emotional correlates of activity in the Public Good game when monetary and non-monetary punishments are available, and when no punishment is possible. In our experiment, emotions are measured using Face Reading software that tracks the emotional content of facial expressions in real time. When no punishment is possible, greater anger and more negative emotional valence correlate with learning that one has contributed more than others. Lower valence and happiness, in turn, are associated with reducing one's cooperation in the next period. When non-monetary punishment in the form of expressed disapproval is possible, positive emotional valence is associated with cooperation, punishment of free-riders, and an increase in cooperation from one period to the next. Negative valence, on the other hand, is associated with the receipt of punishment, suggesting that the expression of disapproval inherent in the non-monetary punishment was well understood and had an effect on the emotions of the recipient. The data support the conjecture that the reinforcement that positive emotion provides is what allows non-monetary punishment to increase cooperation. In contrast, when monetary punishment is available, emotional correlates are less consistent, suggesting that monetary punishment is less reliant on emotions to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]