Who Pays for Public Goods?

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Who Pays for Public Goods?

Event Date

Oct 20, 2021

Web3 is in a remarkable phase where anyone can mint money out of thin air with tokens and get backing from community to support their project. But two questions might give us pause. 

1) How sustainable are these treasuries 5-10 years from now without investment strategies to earn a return? 

2) In what ways are their expenses with tokens serving to seed a broader web3 public and to what degree are DAOs looking towards building insularly in ways that may forfeit or foreclose the commons entirely? 

At the heart of these questions is a simpler one: who funds public goods? how? why? And what do they get in return? The broader questions we'll be looking to approach: what mechanisms can we create that will incentivize DAOs to support each other as composable states? And what mechanisms can we create that incentivize people to give to the commons?

Highly recommend reading Alisha and Andy's pieces on this subject, along with Mazucatto's discussion of the ways taxpayers have funded Silicon Valley without getting a return. How can we devise sustainable states that do?

Who Pays for Public Goods?

💰

Who Pays for Public Goods?

Event Date

Oct 20, 2021

Web3 is in a remarkable phase where anyone can mint money out of thin air with tokens and get backing from community to support their project. But two questions might give us pause. 

1) How sustainable are these treasuries 5-10 years from now without investment strategies to earn a return? 

2) In what ways are their expenses with tokens serving to seed a broader web3 public and to what degree are DAOs looking towards building insularly in ways that may forfeit or foreclose the commons entirely? 

At the heart of these questions is a simpler one: who funds public goods? how? why? And what do they get in return? The broader questions we'll be looking to approach: what mechanisms can we create that will incentivize DAOs to support each other as composable states? And what mechanisms can we create that incentivize people to give to the commons?

Highly recommend reading Alisha and Andy's pieces on this subject, along with Mazucatto's discussion of the ways taxpayers have funded Silicon Valley without getting a return. How can we devise sustainable states that do?