**2. The concept of public goods**

The role of government in the formation and maintenance of civil society organizations highlights the importance of a "public goods." Economists define Public Goods as goods that cannot be delivered through traditional marketplace mechanisms [7, 11].

Historically, successful definitions of something as a public good has involved considerable debate in the public arena. In the U. S., for example, fire protection through publicly funded fire departments was not achieved until the 19 Century [12]. Similarly, the idea that public education would benefit everyone was only achieved when voters were convinced that it was necessary to support a national economy from which everyone would benefit [13].

#### **2.1 Defining public goods to support civil society**

The most compelling argument to provide public resources to support the enhancement of civil society is that in the long run it saves money for taxpayers. There is evidence that disorganized local communities and neighborhoods become a spawning ground for high levels of personal despair, which is reflected in high rates of suicide and opiate addiction that increases costs for public health agencies and criminal justice administration [14–18]. Earlier studies by William Julius Wilson [19] described how neighborhood disorganization was as important as family dysfunction in generating persons who become tax burdens. The panel experiment analyzed by Chetty et al. [20] found that children under the age of 13 in the experimental group

#### *Public Goods, Civil Society and Sustainability DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108654*

who moved to a more affluent neighborhoods performed much better than their peers in the control group who remained in the poor neighborhood.

More affluent neighborhoods typically contain families that are involved in various kinds of civil organizations and churches that provide various kinds of individual and family support.

Most important, taking the "public goods" approach avoids the oftentimes contentious arguments for building up poor neighborhoods that are based on a desire for "equity" [21]. Equity undoubtedly is appealing to many of us, but as we have seen in the recent adoption of criminal justice reform by conservatives, appealing to selfinterest, in that case the money saved by reducing prison populations, can be more persuasive. Trautman [22] describes how Texas conservatives abandoned their "lock 'em up" policy and passed criminal justice reforming, resulting in the closing of many prisons and saving Texas taxpayers billions of dollars.

The success of criminal justice reform is, in Tocqueville's words, a recognition of "self-interest rightly understood" ([23], pp. 610–613). One immediate implication, suggested by the "Moving to Opportunity Experiment" [20] is to fund projects that disperse poorer populations into more affluent neighborhoods where their children would have the benefit of the higher civil society development within them.
