TED talk on quadratic funding, a non-market mechanism that a postcapitalist society could use to support a decentralized ecosystem of public goods available to each according to need
“How Quadratic Funding Could Finance Your Dreams | Kevin Owocki | TED”
This mechanism could be used to solve funding issues in public goods such as journalism and FOSS.
Please ignore the reference to crypto. This could be incorporated into today’s voting process
Great idea - the idea is to favor funding to project that a lot of people contribute a little money to over those that few people contribute a lot of money to, thereby removing rich people’s money’s power.
The way I see it, it’s a sort of hybrid form of public funding: there’s public money going to certain projects, but they go to projects that people privately put their own money into, so they have a real personal stake in it, with a bias towards funneling more public money to projects that more people want.
But I can immediately see a problem: rich people bribing enough poor people in the community to fund the stuff they want done. E.g. telling 500 people “Here’s $1200: put $1000 in the golf course extension and keep $200” to get their $500,000 private golf extension funded.
The other problem I see is that for this kind of scheme to become mainstream, banks and governments will have to get onboard, and those are controlled by the rich, who obviously don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot.
The third potential problem is, crypto bros are pushing this. We’d better look really REALLY closely at the proposal, because there’s a really good chance there’s something scammy going on in it.
Still, intriguing concept: it seems reasonable and I can see myself participating in such fundings.
Thanks, that was a good analysis.
