Club Running: A Public Good?

The Running Club at UVA is up there as one of the most disliked clubs around grounds. We are the weirdos who live for the pain, jogging mile after mile in tank tops and short shorts. But, as a Club Running Economist, I was wondering: can the club be considered a public good? To be considered a pure public good, it must be both non-rival and non-excludable. For the purposes of this discussion, I will consider Club Running to be non-excludable, as it is in our Constitution that anyone can join us. By technicality, we could prevent someone from running with us, but to me that would be like forcing someone out of a public park.

The real question comes with non-rivalry. When more people run with us, does the utility of my run increase or decrease? Certainly, there are many social benefits involved with running as a group, such as group motivation and improved performance through competition. However, when the group size gets too large, I start to worry about tripping over someone else's legs, and it can be overwhelming to run with so many people you don't know. Thus, as n = 1 runners in the group begins to increase, initially my utility also increases (non-rivalry), however, as n continues to rise, my utility starts to decrease as I worry about falling. This ultimately means that with large groups, I enjoy my runs less. Because of this, it seems although at some points there is non-rivalry, I cannot consider Club Running to be a pure public good.

The Public Good of Success

            As a member of the baseball team at UVA over the past two years, I’ve been fortunate to be a part of two very successful seasons. While not very easily quantified, the success of our team in its most basic sense can be viewed as a public good— each individual member adds different production to the team, amounting in some level of success throughout the season which everyone can benefit from. Although it is not quite pure since members can receive more or less benefit depending on how they contribute, everyone receives some level of benefit at the end of the season.

My two years as a member of this team provide a good example of how the team’s success is a public good. Our team reached the College World Series in each of the last two years, which provides a nice control for the public good (our overall team success). In my first year I contributed greatly on the field, but last year I missed around ¾ of the season with an injury. Even though my contributions varied greatly, in both years I got to benefit from being a member of a championship team.

While technically Gruberch would consider me a free rider last year by circumstance, our team can generally mitigate the deliberate free rider problem. Gruberch mentions in chapter 7 how in more trusting communities, the free rider problem occurs less. Immense trust in each other is one of the core foundations instilled in our team culture, which is likely a large reason why free riders are uncommon within our community.

Sign posted around the baseball stadium,
shows commitment and trust in our team community

Above the Clouds, Beneath the Trash: Everest's Waste Problem

After visiting a climbing gym with friends this summer, I briefly entertained the idea that I might someday summit Everest. Although my initial optimism has since waned, I afterward went down a rabbit hole of Moutain Everest documentaries. Each documentary posed an almost insurmountable problem: the accumulating waste on Everest. 

Beyond Camps Three and Four, climbers face steeper terrain, increased physical exertion, and the need to rely on oxygen tanks. Unfortunately, many climbers shed their used gear once it's no longer needed, leaving thousands of empty oxygen canisters, tents, and waste on the once-pristine slopes. For individual climbers, it’s beneficial to discard used gear to lighten their descent. However, this practice diminishes the experience for others by contributing to the significant litter problem on Everest. The complexity of cleanup is further compounded by the fact that only experienced climbers can perform such tasks, and each climber is limited to carrying an additional 25–30 pounds.

What's the solution? The Nepalese government plans to impose an additional $4,000 fee per climber, raising the cost of a foreign permit to nearly $15,000, and limiting the number of climbers each season. In a sense, Nepal is creating a market for climbers (litterers) and placing an extra tax on them to combat the peak's desecration. While this policy may aid future cleanup efforts, the current solution still relies heavily on the goodwill of climbers to protect the mountain from becoming an even larger landfill.

Cops and Donuts

 During the Gruber reading he talks about externalities focusing on the polluted streams example though he makes reference to others. One in particular that I found interesting was the example of the donut shop and the neighborhood. In this example the  cost of police protection wasn’t factored in donut cost. I found it interesting because I’ve heard that reference before but didn’t know the origin so I decided to look further into it. 

The cops and donuts stereotype began in the 40s. Donut shops were the only stores open all night so policemen would often eat there. Since donut shops were the only ones open late this made them susceptible to theft and other crimes. This made for a symbiotic relationship as security was expensive and policemen were able to enjoy a quick snack. However this is also an example of a positive consumer externality because the policemen provided protection without receiving any added benefits.

The Battle of the Courts

While walking, a friend and avid pickleball player shared she had “used tennis courts when pickleball courts were full but felt bad about it. They hate that.”

This didn’t sit well with my inner economist. Tennis courts are accessible to all UVA students; why can’t they be used in whatever way maximizes students' utility? If pickleball courts are overpopulated and tennis ones are not, the market is demanding more pickleball than tennis. Why is moral wrongdoing placed on pickleball players?

To approach this situation from a Coasian perspective, I considered property rights. According to social norms, pickleball courts belong to pickleball players and tennis courts belong to tennis players. UVA’s online court booking system helps assume low transaction costs.

The irreciprocal nature of court usage–tennis courts can be used for pickleball but pickleball courts are too short for tennis–means pickleball players always impose on tennis players’ property rights. In order to most efficiently use university resources, pickleball players could pay damages to tennis players for their repurposed court time slots. From a practical perspective, however, delineating people who were genuinely planning on playing tennis from those booking online slots just to resell them would be challenging.

Government Monopoly On Grounds

In the reading Role of Government in a Free Society, Milton Friedman argues that natural monopolies are a threat to strictly voluntary exchange. One of the possible, although not preferred by Friedman, solutions is a public monopoly: the government itself takes over the private firm and manages its business activities. 

In our class discussion about examples of public monopolies, I was reminded of a global sustainability class where I learned that the city of Charlottesville owns the gas utility that services the area. Charlottesville Gas is a municipality-owned natural gas utility and a prime example of a public monopoly. The high entry costs of laying down additional natural gas pipes to both new and existing infrastructure constitute some of the barriers that discouraged other competing firms from entering the market and thus created the conditions of a natural monopoly that the city decided was best addressed through government ownership. The city controls manages pipe construction and gas prices while residents pay their gas bill directly to the city. Fun fact: if you are constructing a new building in Charlottesville, the city will build natural gas piping that connects to the new building for FREE.

Border Burden in Texas

The influx of immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border raises significant economic concerns, particularly related to the free-rider problem. Public goods such as healthcare and education are generally funded by taxpayer dollars. Public goods are characterized by their non-excludability, meaning that regardless of how much one group contributes to their funding, the goods are available to everyone. This trait in particular can lead to the free-rider problem, especially for border states like Texas. According to Debusmann, thousands of immigrants pour into the US daily, and they are crossing and staying without paying taxes. 

Under the Biden administration, Texas has been ordered to provide accommodation for the immigrants regardless of their immigration status as Biden strives to hold to the United State’s original anthem of being a harbor for refugees. However, this has been a point of contention in the political sphere even resulting in legal battles between the state of Texas and the federal government. This free-rider scenario has resulted in a negative ripple effect on much of the nation lining the border. As of August 9th, Texas Governor Greg Abbott mandated that hospitals collect the immigration status of patients starting November 1, 2024 to “hold the Biden administration ‘accountable’ for its ‘costly and dangerous’ border policies”. In this mandate, Governor Abbott explains that, “Texans should not have to shoulder the burden of financially supporting medical care for illegal immigrants.” This mandate attempts to address the free-rider problem at the southern border: Texans are paying taxes to fund public goods, yet these immigrants are using these goods without paying taxes themselves. This increasing number of immigrants is inadvertently putting strain on the quality and availability of these public resources for everyone else in Texas as a result.

No love: Lead is in the air

I grew up in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Each morning on my way to school, my skyline consisted not of the Foshay Tower and U.S. Bank Stadium (highlights of Minneapolis), but rather the billowing smokestacks of Eagan’s Gopher Resource recycling plant. My elementary and middle school was less than a mile from the plant, and I often wondered what exactly was spewing out of those chimneys. 

(This is the plant's good side)

While caught in a doom scroll on Instagram last week, I came across an ad for a class-action lawsuit against Gopher Resource in Eagan. The settlement payout includes those who “lived within, attended a school within or worked within one mile of the stack of the Eagan Facility from January 1, 2000 to July 24, 2024”. I went 3/3. The settlement claims that the facility exposed me and my neighbors to “lead, cadmium, arsenic, sulfur dioxide” and other chemicals that I would rather not inhale. My exposure to these chemicals is a negative production externality; because this plant polluted the environment, I suffer the consequences. 

A father whose child attended school near a different Gopher Resource plant in Florida originally filed suit. In making this decision, he opted against a Coasian resolution to this problem, settling instead for collective action and state intervention. While Coase would say this is outside of the government’s intended role, I’ll certainly enjoy the extra cash in my wallet.