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Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
A social body is united not only by the things it makes use of, but by a multitude of shared traits, including geography, ethnicity, religion, taste, culture, history, and values. This is why, no matter their claim to universality, instantiations of public goods are always local . Locality is created and felt through shared space, time, or experien
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Without a specific idea of the good to build towards, the financial interests of large tokenholders have become over-represented in protocol governance. In our view, this constitutes a centralization risk.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
More recently, Vitalik Buterin and others in the cryptocurrency community have taken up the rhetoric of blockchain mechanisms as public goods. To be sure, crypto protocols are among the most compelling novel institutional forms. Their unique capabilities derive from their "public" qualities: unrestricted membership and participation, open APIs, tra... See more
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Each of these examples is based on a different idea of what makes life meaningful—on an idea of what is "good" (Taylor, 1977). Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but more importantly, they are objects that satisfy values that are shared.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
to create a majestic and egalitarian society requires a more expansive vision of public goods than what can be imagined with economics alone.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Every one of us is a beneficiary of the public goods of societies past. These grand projects humble us. Cathedrals, great canals, sanitation, the expansion of mass literacy—they tell us that the "goodness" of a public good is also measured in terms of its longevity. To match these great works, we must extend our time horizon. We want to e
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When we think of the public, we should think expansively. This is not to say that we must consider everyone in the world as a part of our public. As we emphasized in our essay on squads, we also celebrate small, self-selective communities and trust-based groups. But by considering the effects (positive and negative) that we might have on groups at
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Public goods are enacted by social institutions that reproduce patterns of behavior in the public interest.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
A value system is fostered through storytelling and negotiation in forums of public discourse.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
As builders of a new digital society, we must be equipped with an even more inclusive and visionary concept of what "public" and "good" can mean.