Last week, I finished reading Challenging Malaria by @TCarsonIII. Its a great book that navigates the fuzzy boundaries between markets, civil society and states in the provision of public health. The common reflex of economists is to think of goods/services as boxes. Either something is a public good or it isnt. But the reality is that no good is purely private or purely public. Contexts and institutions determine what type it is -- in weak property rights environments, more services and goods behave like public goods (and the opposite in strong property rights environments). The malaria example -- with huge emphasis on not-frequently told stories of malaria control in the USA before the 1940s -- illustrates this. The other common reflex is to think of solutions as being clearly delineated between states, markets and civil society. This isnt the case. The frontier is hard to situation. Carson's work points that out and indicates that the solutions in America to malaria control had localized effective private responses and other localized insufficient private responses (or even impossible ones). Just in navigating the messy world of fuzzy frontiers between types of goods and types of solutions, Carson's work is mostly a call to intellectual humility for everyone who talks about public health.