This isn't retroactive funding, but the wonderful Lewis Carroll bit reminded me of a great organization in NYC called the Hebrew Free Loan Society. As the name indicates it makes zero interest loans to New Yorkers in need, Jewish or not. It has one key loan requirement. There must be a guarantor. Repayment rates are 99%. It turns out that if the borrower has asked a friend or neighbor or sibling to be a guarantor, that makes all the difference for repayment. I've done some philanthropic work with HFLS and am a fan of theirs.
This was intriguing, so I visited their website and looked around.
It seems that the loans are capped and the Committee can outright refuse an application, or demand different or additional guarantors. Do you, as a fan, know how often they exercise those options?
Hm, is this recommended practice in development economics? I am skeptical because of the exploitation potential: I personally know someone from a developing country who guaranteed for his boss out of fear about losing his job otherwise. The boss of course defaulted and now the person is stuck with part of the loan.
Read about Grameen bank in Bangladesh, this is literally how it works. Social networks of small (often female) entrepreneurs are very low risk due to these factors.
Not exactly. There is no guarantor. The sanction for default (ineligibility for future loans) is for the entire group though, so some members might choose to cover up for others and in a sense become their guarantors (and perhaps creditors). I agree it shares some elements.
I heard that payday loan places require applicants to specify the contact details of another person. Just any person, not a guarantor, they don’t sign anything. But should the borrower fall behind, the contact center will annoy the hell out of the “guarantor”, obviously hoping they will in turn pressure the applicant.
As best I can tell, SIBs are basically equities except aimed at privatized solutions to public social problems. Why is it ridiculous to get the payback in the later years of the investment? People invest in stuff like this all the time. It actually makes more sense than cryptocurrency or NFTs in that the payoff is based on extrinsic and measurable factors.
Carroll's approach in which the suppliers are also the investors was a basic element of the US automotive business in the 1920s and 1930s. The suppliers would offer a 30-90 day kite on payment, basically putting up most of the money. The buyers would sign for delivered automobiles with a combined bill of lading and check payable on demand. Payrolls, rent and other supplies would be paid out of profits. Other than the time scale, it is right out of Sylvie and Bruno, but it made America an automobile nation.
(Could Carroll have been playing with the common English practice of merchants providing goods to aristocrats and expecting to be repaid by their custom when they inherit their title? 19th century novels are full of this.)
> Carroll's approach in which the suppliers are also the investors was a basic element of the US automotive business in the 1920s and 1930s.
Not just dinosaur businesses like that. _Fire in the Valley_ quotes Steve Jobs as telling a prospective employee "We've got this amazing thing called 30 days net"
30 day net is still standard practice in the machining industry at least. I worked in a machine shop a decade ago, and both the suppliers and customers were on 30 day net 95% of the time.
Do not universities already work this way, however? Do the actual work of original research and discovey in your PhD, post-doc, and early years as a professor, then have your career's work evaluated, and receive the reward in the form of a near risk free stipend for the next 20+ years, i.e. tenure.
Whats missing is the person giving a promising phd student a huge loan based on the promise of their future tenure.
The closest example I can think of are the people approaching promising athletes who give them immediate lump sum payments in exchange for a portion of their future earnings as pro athletes. I am under the impression that the commissions extracted this way are quite large if not predatory, but perhaps appropriate given the risks involved? I'm not sure.
Professors don't earn that much though. I don't have the data but I would guess great PhD students (say, if top x% become tenured then 2x%) get higher incomes if they don't become professors. Well, at least in STEM. So a normal loan solves the same problem. It looks like people are just more into investing than anti-investing.
Why would creating a public good be considered anti-investing if the investors end up with a decent chance to profit? A quick web search did not provide a definition of “anti-investing” that would match this instance of use. Perhaps it means innovative investing?
It sounds like a good idea but methinks it would come with a web of unintended consequences. Just a few: bribery, a lucrative insurance industry charging people for “didn’t pass” insurance, a dystopia of the people who did their best but fell on hard luck, etc. lot of game theory loopholes to close. Doesn’t strike me as a game-theoretically stable system.
The problem with using this idea to finance pure science (as opposed to applied science), is that pure science is *a priori* unpredictable. It's easy to calculate the ROI of investing into the development of a smaller and more efficient vacuum tube; it's harder (if not impossible) to calculate the ROI of messing around with impure pieces of germanium. There's no way to monetize the James Webb telescope, and if you give your money to a guy who studies rainbows, he might invent the vacuum chamber -- or he might just blow it all on rainbows. If you could predict what kind of profitable inventions he'd make, then he'd be doing engineering, not science. Engineering is great, don't get me wrong, but you've got to have someone to push the frontiers of knowledge outward, or else you'll be stuck on vacuum tubes forever.
A very good point but with the current system we by default pick things to study. Those things are also unpredictable. Might as well have a system with better incentives
You're not trying to predict what works out, you're trying to measure it, so I think the problem is more the time scale of the evaluation. It *sounds* good to measure the worth of someone's work after 40 years, but if you really think about it -- no. Surely among the biggest payoffs of Newtonian mechanics and his theory of gravity was the orbital satellite industry that now does so much for us. But to whom should we fork out 0.2% of the annual profits from GPS? Isaac Newton is long, long dead, and even his heirs are a diffuse crowd, with no doubt all kinds of mudblood mixed in, and anyway it's hard to see anyone being willing to throw his lifetime into basic research on the promise that his descendants 400 years later (if any) might inherit fantastic wealth.
Worse, Newton died intestate and without issue. You'd need years of basic legal research to even figure out who the lawful heirs would be. Also GPS relies on relativity, so Einstein's heirs will want a cut too. Kepler no doubt has a senior claim on some of it too...
Now: institution pays salaries to scientists, some of whom make giant leaps, others not so much
Proposed: at the end of the scientists’ careers, institution pays out the same amount of money, except distributed proportionally to actual achievement. Shares of this reward have long been bought by investors, which is what paid the scientists’ bills. Money is still on offer to those who would like to advance pure science, it’s just the methodology of who gets it that becomes different.
The real issue with this idea has always been political. There's just not a coalition that can either pass or defend this.
Certain people on the left oppose the profit motive qua the profit motive. At the extreme end you have socialists arguing for decommodification, the idea that public goods should be rationed at all (rather than infinitely available) is wrong to them. In the more moderate version you have center leftists who feel that it's more virtuous to have a government bureau or non-profit tackle a problem (even ineffectively) than have the private market solve the problem. These are the same people who rattle off rather dubious interpretations of what fiduciary duty means.
Meanwhile, the right loves market solutions but doesn't want the government solving these problems. They'd love to privatize public services or solutions to social problems. But they'd love to just cut the government programs even more. Some of the more extreme types want to keep private market solutions out because the dysfunction justifies cuts. Or, as some put it, because it competes with private business.
There isn't an interest group that I could see forming a durable coalition either. Who would it be? The companies that take these bonds? That's a tiny group. I'm not even sure you could get them. Would you rather have to perform or get the same amount of money for fulfilling vague Federal standards? Plus this coalition has a high bar. They have to beat the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy.
What you miss - what so many people miss - is that most of the right hates the market just as much as the left does.
Most of the right doesn't like the market, doesn't like competition. They like hierarchy. Just as the left hates the market for messing up equality, the right dislikes it for messing up their preferred hierarchy.
Watch the right's reaction when a long-established sector and major employer hits the wall. Only a tiny fraction of libertarians want all those rich managers and shareholders to lose their shirts.
Name one. Just one. I'll bet they're in no way libertarian.
I don't understand why people want to call themselves libertarians when they are nothing like a libertarian. It's really weird. It's not like we have this cool cachet, or tons of political power, or social envy. We're not the life of parties.
I don't really know how they describe themselves, but the crowd over at Econlib/Econlog seem like an example. Their site is libertarian, but if you look at what they post about, they follow right-wing topics pretty consistently (ambivalent about climate change, anti-woke, anti-public education... until recently they were still posting regularly on the dinosaur side of the tobacco wars!).
I think you mean that right-wing topics can be pretty libertarian. Not all of them, though. Just like left-wing topics can be pretty libertarian. I mean, we were in favor of cannabis legalization before the Democrats could spell "weed". One of our VP candidates was the first women to receive an electoral college vote. We've tolerated gay marriage before gays did!
I believe I gestured in this direction by pointing out that while they love market solutions they'd prefer the government just not do anything. Even if there was some hypothetically superior market public solution.
There are two different meanings to "public good", one is "a non-excludable and non-rivalrous good" and the other is "a good where a substantial part," (some definitions here say 'majority'), "of the benefits accrue to the public at large rather than to the owner/purchaser of the good". This is a bit narrower than "anything with positive externalities" though.
I think that so many arguments over "public good" are caused by people using it one sense arguing with people who are using it in the other.
No, there is only one meaning of "public good" when you are talking about economics. Any other meaning is simply wrong. Why is this not completely obvious?
Because there is no definition of "meaning" that works like that.
Words are (obviously) arbitrary. Their meaning is (equally obviously) socially constructed. Lots of people use the word "public good" to mean things with big positive externalities and lots of other people understand that meaning. That is social construction of meaning.
I mean, it seems like you're proposing that it's okay if voltage sometimes is not current times resistance, and sometimes it is. This is obviously a problem that is easily solved by creating a word, and insisting that people use the correct word if they want to communicate with other people.
Having a word which means two incompatible things is a guarantee of misunderstanding. It's like having the Confederate battle flag mean "I'm a racist" and also "I love country music, fast cars, and hot women". Guaranteed to get your Norwegian flag ripped down.
It appears you are using the economic definition rather than the common one. See, for example, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/public-goods. While I understand your confusion both usages are valid.
If you're going to talk about economics, then you should use the economic meaning of a word. Just like if you're going to talk about electronics, "voltage" has a fixed well-known meaning. If you want to use some other meaning, you should expect to mis-communicate.
Agreed. Likewise, if you randomly insist on economic definitions only in a discussion that's about political viability then you should expect people to find you a poor communicator.
I’m not sure I see the point. It seems to solve a knowledge problem that doesn’t exist. If we know that treatment A works, we can do treatment A and pay for treatment A. If we don’t know whether treatment A works, but we can define a desired endpoint E, then we could do a trial of treatment A. But if we know our endpoint E, don’t know how to get there but believe that the knowledge is “out there” in the market in some inaccessible form, we could put up some retroactive funding… but when endpoint E is reached, how would we know who to give it to? If E is high school graduation, then how would we figure out which of the many ongoing treatments is the one that actually made the difference?
Is that right? I'm not seeing how you can measure things that necessarily involve future outcomes... It seems to me more accurate to say: you can construct fairly well-understood measures of risk, but we don't have well-understood measures of uncertainty. Which is close to, but not quite the same thing as saying "you can measure risk".
No, that's what I'm saying. You can't know that risk. You can know the frequency with which other people have been in car accidents in the past. Based on that you can calculate a risk, with the assumption that other relevant factors haven't changed. But you can't know all of those factors; and you can't exclude the possibility of other changes which which change your risk.
Can you please clarify exactly how this works? What I got from your post was that:
1. An Activist goes to Wall Street with a proposal to save the rainforest
2. Wall Street invests the necessary capital up front
3. The Activist saves the rainforest
4. Wall Street recoups on its investment with interest, which is paid by... who? The Activist isn't going to get rich by saving the rainforest. The rainforest itself isn't paying for itself. I don't think the voting public would be happy about the government paying Wall Street to save a rainforest that in this counterfactual was saved by the Activist and therefore doesn't seem to have ever been in danger.
States and/or philanthropists, I believe is generally the answer to 4. Oversimplified and non-exhaustive examples based on my limited understanding:
i) Some government issues a bond that pays $X in the event that Activist saves the rainforest. Wall Street purchases the bond for $Y < X, most/all(?) of which goes to Activist to fund their rainforest-saving project.
ii) There exists some mechanism for determining when a rainforest has been saved, and for awarding transferrable certificates to the people who do the saving. Some state declares that it will buy these certificates for $X apiece. Activist goes to Wall Street, presents their plan for saving a rainforest, and offers to sell the rights to the certificate from their project for $Y < X in funding.
The counterfactual isn't that the rainforest was saved anyway, it's that it wasn't saved at all (or only at much greater expense) because the entities issuing the bonds or buying the certificates were worse than the private investors at identifying promising ventures.
another counterfactual: couldn't it just as well happen that, on step (i), some wall street firm _shorts_ the bond and hires people to cut down the rain forest (which we know is a profitable activity anyway) or to otherwise prevent others from saving it?
Hiring an assassin is already against the law. Doing things harmful to the rainforest is not (and if it was, the problem wouldn't even exist in the first place, since the people harming it would just get arrested).
There are in fact many illegal mining operations harming rainforests today. Making something illegal isn't sufficient to perfectly prevent it from ever happening.
On the one hand, some degree of bond manipulation already takes place, and "but X is illegal!" generally feels like a very weak answer to "what about X?" On the other hand, sabotaging a flesh-and-blood charity is probably a much bigger risk from a PR perspective than manipulating some obscure financial instrument, and it's not obvious that manipulating some broad social metric like recidivism or graduation rates would be any easier. Maybe it just cancels out whatever manipulation the original bondholder commits in the other direction.
Alternatively, you just make the bonds nontransferable, or at least non-shortable. How much liquidity you can sacrifice before the bond loses its utility is a question I'm not equipped to answer.
Caroll's fellowship works because there are wiley tradespeople who can reasonably accurately predict who will be awarded a fellowship and loan against this possibility. I'm not seeing that for Buterin's projects. Certificates of impact seem to lack the payment; one simply makes a claim after doing something and sells the claim, there's no guarantee of a buyer of that claim.
It seems most similar to openly-offered prizes like the X-prize, only with a higher payoff (the X-prize didn't cover the winners costs) and a longer term.
Interestingly enough, while Carrol might have developed this idea in jest (or at least as a satire of the conventional academic system) he was no stranger to proposing innovative reforms. He proposed under his real name of Charles Dodgson the simplest and most scalable form of pure proportional representation yet devised, Asset Voting (https://rangevoting.org/Asset.html), in a pamphlet entitled The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (https://archive.org/details/ThePrinciplesOfParliamentaryRepresentation).
Charles Dodgson / Lewis Carrol was quite a fascinating person. I read a biography of him, and just now checked his wikipedia page and learned some more impressive things. Worth looking into the Mr. Rogers of his time.
Honestly, I don't think the problem here is inventing the appropriate financial instrument. The string theorists have nothing on the smart fellows on Wall Street in terms of inventing rococo Rube Goldberg contraptions that by a P2C2E create output $Y given input $X, with any desired algebraic relationship between X and Y.
I suggest the essential nature of the problem is in the unexamined nature of the phrase "public good." What *is* a public good, eh? I mean, beyond vague handwavy sloganeering, such as "Peace in our time!" "Justice for all!" "No child left behind!" "Death to all who oppose us!"...well, OK, maybe not that last.
But anyway, let us suppose a Public Goods Convention, to which the 100 wisest philosophers of our times will be invented, who will draw up a complete list of the top 10 Public Goods to be pursued collectively, outlined in sufficiently precise detail that the most antagonistic well-paid contracts lawyer would not be able to dispute a claim for payment. (The Convention would obviously need an auxiliary staff of 10,000 lawyers, in accordance with the usual 100:1 lawyer:useful person ratio of large government projects, to do the actual drafting.)
Can we imagine such a Convention, in real life? Can we imagine it being created by our Congress, signed into law by a plausible occupant of the White House in the next 10 years? Can we imagine it drawing the near universal support it would need to be more than a grand futile gesture? We are a people who cannot agree on how much money should be spent fixing bridges, or a self-consistent, stable, sensible set of precautions in the face of a (historically speaking) rather mild pandemic. I'm not entirely confident we could, as a nation, reach consensus on the direction in which the Sun sets.
The notion that we could readily agree not only on the top-line 140-character summary description of the Public Goods We Ought To Fund *but also* on the many paragraphs of detailed and precise specification necessary to turn over the implementation to financial wizards and entrepreneurs without clogging up the courts for centuries on questions of intrepretation, seems...naive, let us say.
A public good is something which is non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. Classic example is a lighthouse. And yet there are examples of lighthouses produced by private parties.
This is unnecessary; most descriptions of retroactive public goods funding imagine it being done entirely by individuals donating in line with their own ideas of what public goods are, same as charity now.
Um....OK. So if it's all entirely voluntary, works a lot like charity and X Prizes work now, what is there left to invent? A new name for things, sort of spiff them up, give them a fresh coat of linguistic paint?
The idea is that, in theory, it lets the philanthropist with the money delegate the actual screening of causes to other entities with more competence. IIUC, the philanthropist announces a prize for achieving cause X, and then banks (or some other financially savvy investor) choose to lend to activists based on their likelihood of winning the prize
OK, but this doesn't really make real-world sense to me. Unless X has a negative ROI or something. I mean, if Bill Gates offers a $250 million prize for a successful and cheap malaria vaccine -- something that would, if achieved, have enormous value to millions of people, and therefore be highly monetizable and wealth-generating -- then how does the existence of the prize change the bank's estimate of how likely Elizabeth Theranos's new company (Malaria Vaccines R Us, Inc.) is to pay back a seed loan of $500,000 to get started? I don't see that it does, because the mere existence of the prize says zippity zap about her (or anybody's) chances of success.
I guess if we're talking about some very special social goal which is (1) very valuable to a broad range of people but (2) for some reason, has a negative ROI, meaning even if you succeed you will never be able to pay back the cost of achieving success with revenue derived from your successful solution -- so the prize represents the *only* revenue the solution will ever generate. I really can't think of any goal which fits into those categories. If people value it, they are normally willing to pay for it, and conversely if they're not willing to pay for it, I take it as proof that they don't really value it.
This is why I thought we were talking about classic collective action problems, e.g. where the benefit *is* widespread and valuable, but any first mover will never see *his* investment repaid -- everybody has to jump in the pool at once for the thing to succeed. Hence, government.
It was also common at least in the eighteenth or nineteenth century for parliament in Britain to award large sums of money to people who made important inventions, but failed to become rich due to them.
Carroll's original idea is also doomed because a short-sighted administrator at the university can also just decide to... not pay out. Yes, this dooms the university (or at least the scheme) as well, but such things happen.
I've been feeling smug because (on a cursory search, I could be wrong) I seem to be the first one to use the term "Retroactive Public Goods Funding", but I knew others had similar ideas in the past.
I mostly wrote the post so I could have a clean explanation I could point to later. It might be a useful explainer for people who are new to this concept.
Are financialized retroactive futures or even Carroll's whimsicial academic futures more or less vulnerable to fads than other sorts of futures? How would retroactive funding have tracked fusion or AI research over the years, for example?
Can anyone explain to me exactly how retrospective public goods funding would work, in practice, using a small-scale example?
Like, suppose I've got a million bucks a year to spend on improving the town of Farmingville, Maine. How do I do it?
Option 1 (overly specific): I choose something that I want built (a new park, say) and announce that I will pay a million dollars retrospectively to whoever builds a park satisfying a certain set of criteria. Someone will buy the land, build the park, and get the million bucks, but for me it probably winds up less efficient than simply buying the land and hiring a contractor.
Option 2 (a bit vague): I want to increase foot traffic in the downtown area, so I announce that I will pay bounties for initiatives which achieve this. Sure enough, a bunch of initiatives spring up, and foot traffic goes up twenty percent! But how do I decide which initiatives are actually responsible for the effect? How do I dole out the money?
Option 3 (really vague): I simply announce that I'll retrospectively fund things that seem like they were good ideas. Same problems as Option 2, but worse.
I would like to see the welfare system reorganized in a similar way. There should be a market system paying out private entities for most successfully improving people's lives
I thought of this regarding Native bands in Canada. I can guarantee if I grew up on a reserve with few jobs and guaranteed welfare it would not be a positive influence on my life. This is probably a good description of poor inner cities in the US. The system needs to become dynamic and results oriented. The time for welfare X-prizes has come!
You could add Advance Market Commitments to the list. Btw, something else that keeps getting re-invented are income sharing agreements. Milton Friedman called them human capital contracts.
This isn't retroactive funding, but the wonderful Lewis Carroll bit reminded me of a great organization in NYC called the Hebrew Free Loan Society. As the name indicates it makes zero interest loans to New Yorkers in need, Jewish or not. It has one key loan requirement. There must be a guarantor. Repayment rates are 99%. It turns out that if the borrower has asked a friend or neighbor or sibling to be a guarantor, that makes all the difference for repayment. I've done some philanthropic work with HFLS and am a fan of theirs.
HFLS is a 501c3. I believe 501c3s can give money to those in need.
This was intriguing, so I visited their website and looked around.
It seems that the loans are capped and the Committee can outright refuse an application, or demand different or additional guarantors. Do you, as a fan, know how often they exercise those options?
I'm not sure about exact approval rate, although i think it's quite high. I can ask and see if it's a stat they want to give out.
I was a guarantor on one of those loans! And it wasn't even to a New Yorker!
This is the basis of all microfinance schemes, p2p lending relies on social networks for risk appraisal and peer pressure (to pay back).
Hm, is this recommended practice in development economics? I am skeptical because of the exploitation potential: I personally know someone from a developing country who guaranteed for his boss out of fear about losing his job otherwise. The boss of course defaulted and now the person is stuck with part of the loan.
Read about Grameen bank in Bangladesh, this is literally how it works. Social networks of small (often female) entrepreneurs are very low risk due to these factors.
Not exactly. There is no guarantor. The sanction for default (ineligibility for future loans) is for the entire group though, so some members might choose to cover up for others and in a sense become their guarantors (and perhaps creditors). I agree it shares some elements.
I heard that payday loan places require applicants to specify the contact details of another person. Just any person, not a guarantor, they don’t sign anything. But should the borrower fall behind, the contact center will annoy the hell out of the “guarantor”, obviously hoping they will in turn pressure the applicant.
Wow, this is such a great idea. Congrats to all the inventors!
As best I can tell, SIBs are basically equities except aimed at privatized solutions to public social problems. Why is it ridiculous to get the payback in the later years of the investment? People invest in stuff like this all the time. It actually makes more sense than cryptocurrency or NFTs in that the payoff is based on extrinsic and measurable factors.
Carroll's approach in which the suppliers are also the investors was a basic element of the US automotive business in the 1920s and 1930s. The suppliers would offer a 30-90 day kite on payment, basically putting up most of the money. The buyers would sign for delivered automobiles with a combined bill of lading and check payable on demand. Payrolls, rent and other supplies would be paid out of profits. Other than the time scale, it is right out of Sylvie and Bruno, but it made America an automobile nation.
(Could Carroll have been playing with the common English practice of merchants providing goods to aristocrats and expecting to be repaid by their custom when they inherit their title? 19th century novels are full of this.)
> Carroll's approach in which the suppliers are also the investors was a basic element of the US automotive business in the 1920s and 1930s.
Not just dinosaur businesses like that. _Fire in the Valley_ quotes Steve Jobs as telling a prospective employee "We've got this amazing thing called 30 days net"
30 day net is still standard practice in the machining industry at least. I worked in a machine shop a decade ago, and both the suppliers and customers were on 30 day net 95% of the time.
Do not universities already work this way, however? Do the actual work of original research and discovey in your PhD, post-doc, and early years as a professor, then have your career's work evaluated, and receive the reward in the form of a near risk free stipend for the next 20+ years, i.e. tenure.
Whats missing is the person giving a promising phd student a huge loan based on the promise of their future tenure.
The closest example I can think of are the people approaching promising athletes who give them immediate lump sum payments in exchange for a portion of their future earnings as pro athletes. I am under the impression that the commissions extracted this way are quite large if not predatory, but perhaps appropriate given the risks involved? I'm not sure.
Professors don't earn that much though. I don't have the data but I would guess great PhD students (say, if top x% become tenured then 2x%) get higher incomes if they don't become professors. Well, at least in STEM. So a normal loan solves the same problem. It looks like people are just more into investing than anti-investing.
Why would creating a public good be considered anti-investing if the investors end up with a decent chance to profit? A quick web search did not provide a definition of “anti-investing” that would match this instance of use. Perhaps it means innovative investing?
Borrowing is "anti-investing".
It sounds like a good idea but methinks it would come with a web of unintended consequences. Just a few: bribery, a lucrative insurance industry charging people for “didn’t pass” insurance, a dystopia of the people who did their best but fell on hard luck, etc. lot of game theory loopholes to close. Doesn’t strike me as a game-theoretically stable system.
The problem with using this idea to finance pure science (as opposed to applied science), is that pure science is *a priori* unpredictable. It's easy to calculate the ROI of investing into the development of a smaller and more efficient vacuum tube; it's harder (if not impossible) to calculate the ROI of messing around with impure pieces of germanium. There's no way to monetize the James Webb telescope, and if you give your money to a guy who studies rainbows, he might invent the vacuum chamber -- or he might just blow it all on rainbows. If you could predict what kind of profitable inventions he'd make, then he'd be doing engineering, not science. Engineering is great, don't get me wrong, but you've got to have someone to push the frontiers of knowledge outward, or else you'll be stuck on vacuum tubes forever.
A very good point but with the current system we by default pick things to study. Those things are also unpredictable. Might as well have a system with better incentives
You're not trying to predict what works out, you're trying to measure it, so I think the problem is more the time scale of the evaluation. It *sounds* good to measure the worth of someone's work after 40 years, but if you really think about it -- no. Surely among the biggest payoffs of Newtonian mechanics and his theory of gravity was the orbital satellite industry that now does so much for us. But to whom should we fork out 0.2% of the annual profits from GPS? Isaac Newton is long, long dead, and even his heirs are a diffuse crowd, with no doubt all kinds of mudblood mixed in, and anyway it's hard to see anyone being willing to throw his lifetime into basic research on the promise that his descendants 400 years later (if any) might inherit fantastic wealth.
Worse, Newton died intestate and without issue. You'd need years of basic legal research to even figure out who the lawful heirs would be. Also GPS relies on relativity, so Einstein's heirs will want a cut too. Kepler no doubt has a senior claim on some of it too...
Risk, Uncertainty and Profit by Frank Knight. Makes the point that risk and uncertainty are different. Same point you just made.
Maybe this prioritizes cheap early investigations over expensive tools - is that really all that different than the current grant application process?
Therefore, awarding grants won't work?
Now: institution pays salaries to scientists, some of whom make giant leaps, others not so much
Proposed: at the end of the scientists’ careers, institution pays out the same amount of money, except distributed proportionally to actual achievement. Shares of this reward have long been bought by investors, which is what paid the scientists’ bills. Money is still on offer to those who would like to advance pure science, it’s just the methodology of who gets it that becomes different.
Who decides what constitutes an achievement, and how is it valued?
Exactly the same people who fund science now, and by pretty much the same criteria, except they have more data to work with?
The real issue with this idea has always been political. There's just not a coalition that can either pass or defend this.
Certain people on the left oppose the profit motive qua the profit motive. At the extreme end you have socialists arguing for decommodification, the idea that public goods should be rationed at all (rather than infinitely available) is wrong to them. In the more moderate version you have center leftists who feel that it's more virtuous to have a government bureau or non-profit tackle a problem (even ineffectively) than have the private market solve the problem. These are the same people who rattle off rather dubious interpretations of what fiduciary duty means.
Meanwhile, the right loves market solutions but doesn't want the government solving these problems. They'd love to privatize public services or solutions to social problems. But they'd love to just cut the government programs even more. Some of the more extreme types want to keep private market solutions out because the dysfunction justifies cuts. Or, as some put it, because it competes with private business.
There isn't an interest group that I could see forming a durable coalition either. Who would it be? The companies that take these bonds? That's a tiny group. I'm not even sure you could get them. Would you rather have to perform or get the same amount of money for fulfilling vague Federal standards? Plus this coalition has a high bar. They have to beat the entrenched interests of the bureaucracy.
So much progress waits upon the launch of Golgafrincham Ark B
Alas, formite transmission of covid has been shown to be insignificant so I can't make a joke about sanitising telephones.
This can be done by private individuals – no co-ordination needed. Alfred Nobel would be the most famous example.
Sure. But that's not going to have the society wide impact of, say, all the universities adopting that system.
What you miss - what so many people miss - is that most of the right hates the market just as much as the left does.
Most of the right doesn't like the market, doesn't like competition. They like hierarchy. Just as the left hates the market for messing up equality, the right dislikes it for messing up their preferred hierarchy.
Watch the right's reaction when a long-established sector and major employer hits the wall. Only a tiny fraction of libertarians want all those rich managers and shareholders to lose their shirts.
Thinking libertarians are on the right is as wrong as thinking that libertarians are on the left.
Lots of libertarians say they are on the right, though; few describe themselves as being on the left.
Name one. Just one. I'll bet they're in no way libertarian.
I don't understand why people want to call themselves libertarians when they are nothing like a libertarian. It's really weird. It's not like we have this cool cachet, or tons of political power, or social envy. We're not the life of parties.
I don't really know how they describe themselves, but the crowd over at Econlib/Econlog seem like an example. Their site is libertarian, but if you look at what they post about, they follow right-wing topics pretty consistently (ambivalent about climate change, anti-woke, anti-public education... until recently they were still posting regularly on the dinosaur side of the tobacco wars!).
I think you mean that right-wing topics can be pretty libertarian. Not all of them, though. Just like left-wing topics can be pretty libertarian. I mean, we were in favor of cannabis legalization before the Democrats could spell "weed". One of our VP candidates was the first women to receive an electoral college vote. We've tolerated gay marriage before gays did!
I believe I gestured in this direction by pointing out that while they love market solutions they'd prefer the government just not do anything. Even if there was some hypothetically superior market public solution.
If it's a public good, you cannot ration it. If you have to ration it, it's not a public good.
There are two different meanings to "public good", one is "a non-excludable and non-rivalrous good" and the other is "a good where a substantial part," (some definitions here say 'majority'), "of the benefits accrue to the public at large rather than to the owner/purchaser of the good". This is a bit narrower than "anything with positive externalities" though.
I think that so many arguments over "public good" are caused by people using it one sense arguing with people who are using it in the other.
No, there is only one meaning of "public good" when you are talking about economics. Any other meaning is simply wrong. Why is this not completely obvious?
Because there is no definition of "meaning" that works like that.
Words are (obviously) arbitrary. Their meaning is (equally obviously) socially constructed. Lots of people use the word "public good" to mean things with big positive externalities and lots of other people understand that meaning. That is social construction of meaning.
That is, literally, how words work.
Well, then, as you point out, people who use the "social gain not captured" meaning is spewing misunderstanding.
I mean, it seems like you're proposing that it's okay if voltage sometimes is not current times resistance, and sometimes it is. This is obviously a problem that is easily solved by creating a word, and insisting that people use the correct word if they want to communicate with other people.
Having a word which means two incompatible things is a guarantee of misunderstanding. It's like having the Confederate battle flag mean "I'm a racist" and also "I love country music, fast cars, and hot women". Guaranteed to get your Norwegian flag ripped down.
"it seems like you're proposing that it's okay if voltage sometimes is not current times resistance, and sometimes it is"
Yes, that's how words work. I'm sorry that your folk theory of linguistics is wrong, but it is.
"Having a word which means two incompatible things is a guarantee of misunderstanding"
Correct. You seem to think that there is a way of preventing misunderstandings.
"...insisting that people use the correct word if they want to communicate with other people."
How well is that working for you?
It appears you are using the economic definition rather than the common one. See, for example, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/public-goods. While I understand your confusion both usages are valid.
If you're going to talk about economics, then you should use the economic meaning of a word. Just like if you're going to talk about electronics, "voltage" has a fixed well-known meaning. If you want to use some other meaning, you should expect to mis-communicate.
Agreed. Likewise, if you randomly insist on economic definitions only in a discussion that's about political viability then you should expect people to find you a poor communicator.
Nice try, but no.
The right doesn't love market solutions either, alas.
The right just dislikes the left.
I’m not sure I see the point. It seems to solve a knowledge problem that doesn’t exist. If we know that treatment A works, we can do treatment A and pay for treatment A. If we don’t know whether treatment A works, but we can define a desired endpoint E, then we could do a trial of treatment A. But if we know our endpoint E, don’t know how to get there but believe that the knowledge is “out there” in the market in some inaccessible form, we could put up some retroactive funding… but when endpoint E is reached, how would we know who to give it to? If E is high school graduation, then how would we figure out which of the many ongoing treatments is the one that actually made the difference?
The problem is that risk can be measured, but uncertainty .... well, it's uncertain.
Is that right? I'm not seeing how you can measure things that necessarily involve future outcomes... It seems to me more accurate to say: you can construct fairly well-understood measures of risk, but we don't have well-understood measures of uncertainty. Which is close to, but not quite the same thing as saying "you can measure risk".
You can know the risk of being in a car accident, but you cannot be certain of whether you will ever be in one.
No, that's what I'm saying. You can't know that risk. You can know the frequency with which other people have been in car accidents in the past. Based on that you can calculate a risk, with the assumption that other relevant factors haven't changed. But you can't know all of those factors; and you can't exclude the possibility of other changes which which change your risk.
You are arguing against the existence of insurance companies. I'll thus bow out of this discussion.
Can you please clarify exactly how this works? What I got from your post was that:
1. An Activist goes to Wall Street with a proposal to save the rainforest
2. Wall Street invests the necessary capital up front
3. The Activist saves the rainforest
4. Wall Street recoups on its investment with interest, which is paid by... who? The Activist isn't going to get rich by saving the rainforest. The rainforest itself isn't paying for itself. I don't think the voting public would be happy about the government paying Wall Street to save a rainforest that in this counterfactual was saved by the Activist and therefore doesn't seem to have ever been in danger.
What am I missing here?
States and/or philanthropists, I believe is generally the answer to 4. Oversimplified and non-exhaustive examples based on my limited understanding:
i) Some government issues a bond that pays $X in the event that Activist saves the rainforest. Wall Street purchases the bond for $Y < X, most/all(?) of which goes to Activist to fund their rainforest-saving project.
ii) There exists some mechanism for determining when a rainforest has been saved, and for awarding transferrable certificates to the people who do the saving. Some state declares that it will buy these certificates for $X apiece. Activist goes to Wall Street, presents their plan for saving a rainforest, and offers to sell the rights to the certificate from their project for $Y < X in funding.
The counterfactual isn't that the rainforest was saved anyway, it's that it wasn't saved at all (or only at much greater expense) because the entities issuing the bonds or buying the certificates were worse than the private investors at identifying promising ventures.
another counterfactual: couldn't it just as well happen that, on step (i), some wall street firm _shorts_ the bond and hires people to cut down the rain forest (which we know is a profitable activity anyway) or to otherwise prevent others from saving it?
Isn't it possible that some wall street firm shorts Tesla and then hires an assassin to murder Elon Musk?
Hiring an assassin is already against the law. Doing things harmful to the rainforest is not (and if it was, the problem wouldn't even exist in the first place, since the people harming it would just get arrested).
There are in fact many illegal mining operations harming rainforests today. Making something illegal isn't sufficient to perfectly prevent it from ever happening.
Bond manipulation is also against the law.
On the one hand, some degree of bond manipulation already takes place, and "but X is illegal!" generally feels like a very weak answer to "what about X?" On the other hand, sabotaging a flesh-and-blood charity is probably a much bigger risk from a PR perspective than manipulating some obscure financial instrument, and it's not obvious that manipulating some broad social metric like recidivism or graduation rates would be any easier. Maybe it just cancels out whatever manipulation the original bondholder commits in the other direction.
Alternatively, you just make the bonds nontransferable, or at least non-shortable. How much liquidity you can sacrifice before the bond loses its utility is a question I'm not equipped to answer.
How is that different from giving the Activist a loan, with a clause to forgive the debt if he saves X acres of rainforest ?
The evaluation of Activist is handled by a different entity.
Caroll's fellowship works because there are wiley tradespeople who can reasonably accurately predict who will be awarded a fellowship and loan against this possibility. I'm not seeing that for Buterin's projects. Certificates of impact seem to lack the payment; one simply makes a claim after doing something and sells the claim, there's no guarantee of a buyer of that claim.
It seems most similar to openly-offered prizes like the X-prize, only with a higher payoff (the X-prize didn't cover the winners costs) and a longer term.
Interestingly enough, while Carrol might have developed this idea in jest (or at least as a satire of the conventional academic system) he was no stranger to proposing innovative reforms. He proposed under his real name of Charles Dodgson the simplest and most scalable form of pure proportional representation yet devised, Asset Voting (https://rangevoting.org/Asset.html), in a pamphlet entitled The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (https://archive.org/details/ThePrinciplesOfParliamentaryRepresentation).
Charles Dodgson / Lewis Carrol was quite a fascinating person. I read a biography of him, and just now checked his wikipedia page and learned some more impressive things. Worth looking into the Mr. Rogers of his time.
See also: Nobel prizes, which are surely retroactive rewards for impressive scientific public goods.
Honestly, I don't think the problem here is inventing the appropriate financial instrument. The string theorists have nothing on the smart fellows on Wall Street in terms of inventing rococo Rube Goldberg contraptions that by a P2C2E create output $Y given input $X, with any desired algebraic relationship between X and Y.
I suggest the essential nature of the problem is in the unexamined nature of the phrase "public good." What *is* a public good, eh? I mean, beyond vague handwavy sloganeering, such as "Peace in our time!" "Justice for all!" "No child left behind!" "Death to all who oppose us!"...well, OK, maybe not that last.
But anyway, let us suppose a Public Goods Convention, to which the 100 wisest philosophers of our times will be invented, who will draw up a complete list of the top 10 Public Goods to be pursued collectively, outlined in sufficiently precise detail that the most antagonistic well-paid contracts lawyer would not be able to dispute a claim for payment. (The Convention would obviously need an auxiliary staff of 10,000 lawyers, in accordance with the usual 100:1 lawyer:useful person ratio of large government projects, to do the actual drafting.)
Can we imagine such a Convention, in real life? Can we imagine it being created by our Congress, signed into law by a plausible occupant of the White House in the next 10 years? Can we imagine it drawing the near universal support it would need to be more than a grand futile gesture? We are a people who cannot agree on how much money should be spent fixing bridges, or a self-consistent, stable, sensible set of precautions in the face of a (historically speaking) rather mild pandemic. I'm not entirely confident we could, as a nation, reach consensus on the direction in which the Sun sets.
The notion that we could readily agree not only on the top-line 140-character summary description of the Public Goods We Ought To Fund *but also* on the many paragraphs of detailed and precise specification necessary to turn over the implementation to financial wizards and entrepreneurs without clogging up the courts for centuries on questions of intrepretation, seems...naive, let us say.
A public good is something which is non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. Classic example is a lighthouse. And yet there are examples of lighthouses produced by private parties.
This is unnecessary; most descriptions of retroactive public goods funding imagine it being done entirely by individuals donating in line with their own ideas of what public goods are, same as charity now.
Um....OK. So if it's all entirely voluntary, works a lot like charity and X Prizes work now, what is there left to invent? A new name for things, sort of spiff them up, give them a fresh coat of linguistic paint?
The idea is that, in theory, it lets the philanthropist with the money delegate the actual screening of causes to other entities with more competence. IIUC, the philanthropist announces a prize for achieving cause X, and then banks (or some other financially savvy investor) choose to lend to activists based on their likelihood of winning the prize
OK, but this doesn't really make real-world sense to me. Unless X has a negative ROI or something. I mean, if Bill Gates offers a $250 million prize for a successful and cheap malaria vaccine -- something that would, if achieved, have enormous value to millions of people, and therefore be highly monetizable and wealth-generating -- then how does the existence of the prize change the bank's estimate of how likely Elizabeth Theranos's new company (Malaria Vaccines R Us, Inc.) is to pay back a seed loan of $500,000 to get started? I don't see that it does, because the mere existence of the prize says zippity zap about her (or anybody's) chances of success.
I guess if we're talking about some very special social goal which is (1) very valuable to a broad range of people but (2) for some reason, has a negative ROI, meaning even if you succeed you will never be able to pay back the cost of achieving success with revenue derived from your successful solution -- so the prize represents the *only* revenue the solution will ever generate. I really can't think of any goal which fits into those categories. If people value it, they are normally willing to pay for it, and conversely if they're not willing to pay for it, I take it as proof that they don't really value it.
This is why I thought we were talking about classic collective action problems, e.g. where the benefit *is* widespread and valuable, but any first mover will never see *his* investment repaid -- everybody has to jump in the pool at once for the thing to succeed. Hence, government.
What am I missing?
It was also common at least in the eighteenth or nineteenth century for parliament in Britain to award large sums of money to people who made important inventions, but failed to become rich due to them.
Well, yes, the difficulty for some inventions is that you can't capture (enough of) the social profits.
Carroll's original idea is also doomed because a short-sighted administrator at the university can also just decide to... not pay out. Yes, this dooms the university (or at least the scheme) as well, but such things happen.
The UK government actually does a form of them, though I'm not sure at what scale. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/social-impact-bonds
Nice! I invented it too, good to know I'm in good company:
https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2021/07/02/retroactive-public-goods-funding/
I've been feeling smug because (on a cursory search, I could be wrong) I seem to be the first one to use the term "Retroactive Public Goods Funding", but I knew others had similar ideas in the past.
I mostly wrote the post so I could have a clean explanation I could point to later. It might be a useful explainer for people who are new to this concept.
I'll add you to my list, although it seems like maybe Vitalik might have been inspired by you so I can't say it was independently invented 6 times :(
That is very generous of you, but I doubt that Vitalik reads my stuff.
More likely the idea was "in the water supply" and we were both thinking about it around the same time, a "multiple discovery" perhaps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries)
Are financialized retroactive futures or even Carroll's whimsicial academic futures more or less vulnerable to fads than other sorts of futures? How would retroactive funding have tracked fusion or AI research over the years, for example?
If investors invest in something that turns out to be a fad, they'll lose money, but that's a known problem and investors are used to it.
Can anyone explain to me exactly how retrospective public goods funding would work, in practice, using a small-scale example?
Like, suppose I've got a million bucks a year to spend on improving the town of Farmingville, Maine. How do I do it?
Option 1 (overly specific): I choose something that I want built (a new park, say) and announce that I will pay a million dollars retrospectively to whoever builds a park satisfying a certain set of criteria. Someone will buy the land, build the park, and get the million bucks, but for me it probably winds up less efficient than simply buying the land and hiring a contractor.
Option 2 (a bit vague): I want to increase foot traffic in the downtown area, so I announce that I will pay bounties for initiatives which achieve this. Sure enough, a bunch of initiatives spring up, and foot traffic goes up twenty percent! But how do I decide which initiatives are actually responsible for the effect? How do I dole out the money?
Option 3 (really vague): I simply announce that I'll retrospectively fund things that seem like they were good ideas. Same problems as Option 2, but worse.
Someone may already have a list, sorry if I missed it.
Possible Failure mode 1: it turns into a popularity contest, rewarding looks and charisma as much as achievement.
PFM2: promising researcher dies young, leaving family and creditors to deal with huge debt.
I would like to see the welfare system reorganized in a similar way. There should be a market system paying out private entities for most successfully improving people's lives
I thought of this regarding Native bands in Canada. I can guarantee if I grew up on a reserve with few jobs and guaranteed welfare it would not be a positive influence on my life. This is probably a good description of poor inner cities in the US. The system needs to become dynamic and results oriented. The time for welfare X-prizes has come!
You could add Advance Market Commitments to the list. Btw, something else that keeps getting re-invented are income sharing agreements. Milton Friedman called them human capital contracts.