We had a wonderful treat last night.\u00a0 We went to a fishing village on the coast of Gozo, rode bumper cars and had fresh pizza and ravioli for supper.\u00a0 We also had sweet, fizzy drinks.<\/p>\n
At first the drinks were distributed one to each of us.\u00a0 We were mostly abstemious with “our” drinks, one of us in fact drank none of his for 10 minutes.\u00a0 Then I said, “By the way the drinks are for us all to share, aren’t they?”.\u00a0 At which point the guzzling started – each one of us attempting to consume more before another of us got our hands on it.<\/p>\n
It was the perfect illustration of human behaviour – the conflict between animal instinct and intelligent control.\u00a0 It was a mirror of the challenge of managing public goods, of sharing the wealth of human creativity.\u00a0 All too often we abuse the public service, whether it be the social security payment, the hospital service, the train\/metro service, the road network, while we protect and conserve the stuff we “own”, our house, car etc.<\/p>\n
Is there an answer to the conundrum?\u00a0 Treat public assets and services as if they are our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had a wonderful treat last night.\u00a0 We went to a fishing village on the coast of Gozo, rode bumper cars and had fresh pizza and ravioli for supper.\u00a0 We also had sweet, fizzy drinks. At first the drinks were distributed one to each of us.\u00a0 We were mostly abstemious with “our” drinks, one of …
Continue reading Personal and shared ownership at the same time.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-perspective","category-living"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-nu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456\/revisions\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}