Common Goods Society: From ROE to ORE — Overall Resource Effectiveness as the Universal Standard for Stakeholder Value

Every company has a profit-and-loss statement. The common good does not. A school, a hospital, a public digital service or a railway corridor can create large value for society and still look like a pure cost, because nothing records what it gives back. This paper proposes the missing statement: the Societal P&L (SP&L). It reads like an ordinary P&L, with the value a public investment creates for people above the line and its full costs below it, including the costs that today stay hidden. Its numbers come from Overall Resource Effectiveness (ORE), a seven-dimension extension of the industrial OEE metric, and from PSCO, a cost ontology for the public sector. A dual hurdle rate then decides whether an investment convinces both its financiers and society.The paper builds the argument as a narrative: from the political goal of a Common Goods Society, through the measurement failure that defeated the Rhineland model, to a statement any citizen, controller or parliament can read Keywords: Sustainable Economics, Common good, Resource taxation, Social capitalism, Accountability, Institutional Design, Public Welfare Economics, Business Ethics, Public Policy Stakeholder, Stakeholder vs. Shareholder principle, Overall Resource Effectiveness (ORE), Multiplicative governance metrics, Macroscopic economics, Cooperative governance, Validation vs. verification.