Public expenditure and institutional attention are usually classified by sector: health, infrastructure, security. That classification hides the thing prevention research most needs to see. A health budget that has doubled tells you nothing about whether the system is better prepared or merely better at responding.
Preventive Public Goods reclassifies the same spending along a second axis — anticipatory against reactive. The reclassification is deliberately coarse. Its value is not precision but visibility: it makes a preventive posture legible inside budget documents that were never written to expose one.
The category has a structural funding problem built into it. Anticipatory goods deliver value only if the anticipated event occurs, and their success is invisible when they work. A prevented outbreak produces no headline and no ribbon-cutting, which is why they are chronically underfunded relative to their expected value.