 Even though Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson is usually credited with having introduced the theory of public goods to modern economics (e.g., in Sandmo 1989), the origins of the idea go back to John Stuart Mill, Ugo Mazzola (an Italian writer on public finance), and the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (Blaug 1985: 218–9 and 596–7]). Samuelson defined what he called a “collective consumption good” as: