Fire protection as a private good, rather than a club good or public good

Two years ago, I wrote a post entitled "Why fire protection is (or was) a club good":

Some goods or services that are categorised as club goods may be contentious. For instance, according to the table fire protection is a club good - it is non-rival and excludable. Provided there aren't large numbers of fires, if the fire service attends one fire, that doesn't reduce the fire protection available to everyone else... So, fire protection is non-rival. Is fire protection excludable? In theory, yes. People can be prevented from benefiting from fire protection. Say there was some sort of fire service levy, and the fire service decided to only respond to fires at homes or businesses that were fully paid up.

Although my earlier post made the case that firefighting could be a club good, public firefighting is usually a public good - a good that is non-rival (one person’s use of the good doesn't diminish the amount of the good that is available for other peoples' use) and non-excludable (a person can't be prevented from using or benefiting from the service). However, now it turns out that some fire protection may be a private good - a good that is rival and excludable. According to this article from the AFP:

Kris Brandini and his crew had just returned from four intense, non-stop days battling fires in western Los Angeles.

They dashed to the neighborhood where wealthy residents like Arnold Schwarzenegger were fleeing their homes, then to the inferno that threatened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, then back again.

But unlike state firefighters, Brandini was not concerned with protecting most of the exclusive residences lining these valleys.

He and his team are private firefighters.

"I only protect the houses that are on my list," he told AFP. "I don't just go there randomly -- that's the difference between me and the state firefighters.

"They go out and protect every house. I protect the houses that are actually enrolled in the program."

If private firefighters will only protect houses that "are actually enrolled in the program", then that makes private fire protection an excludable good. Of course, private firefighting is excludable on the basis of price - not everyone can afford to pay for their own private firefighters. It's not time to do away with public firefighters just yet, because I don't think we would be willing as a society to price some people out of the market for receiving fire protection.

Unlike public firefighting, private firefighting is also a rival good, since there are only a limited number of houses that a private firefighter can protect (so, if they are protection House A, they may not have enough time or resources to also protect House B). However, in the case of large wildfires like those in the AFP article, even public firefighting becomes a rival good, since public firefighters also can't be in more than one place at a time. A good that is non-excludable but rival is a common resource.

That makes firefighting an interesting case study for my ECONS102 class - it is a good that can be characterised as all four classes of good - private good, public good, common resource, or club good - depending on the circumstances.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]