Economic Policy and the Common Good Rowena A Pecchenino* Department of Economics, Finance & Accounting Maynooth University National University of Ireland, Maynooth County Kildare Ireland Email:
[email protected] Phone: 353 1 708-3751 February 2018 Abstract All conceptions of the common good agree: for the individual to flourish, society must flourish, and for society to flourish the individual must flourish. But what is this common good that is essential for flourishing and how does the pursuit of this good shape the individual and society? This paper presents various conceptions of the common good, asks what a society must provide to enable its citizens individually and collectively to flourish, examines an actual society from this perspective, finds it wanting and critiques economic policy from a common good perspective to establish where and why it falls short. The paper concludes with a discussion of how economic policy can be designed to support individual and societal flourishing, that is, the common good. Keywords: common good, flourishing, economic policy, society, individual JEL Code: B40, B41 Word Count: 8539 * I would like to thank the participants of the 2017 WIT/UCC Economy and Society Summer School, Mark Boyle, Fabio Mendez and Kenneth Stikkers for their comments on a longer version of this paper. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are mine alone. Economic Policy and the Common Good 1. Introduction Philosophers for millennia have suggested that for the individual to flourish, society must flourish, and for society to flourish, the individual must flourish. In the past century or so economic analysis has concentrated instead on the individual.