Liberal Radicalism

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Discussion

How Liberal Radicalism can be applied to urban funding decisions

Julien Carbonnell:

"In associating the pursuit of his reflection with Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine, and Zoe Hitzig, PhD student in Economics at Harvard, Glen Weyl take the relay on the Radical Market theory with Liberal Radicalism: Formal rules for a society neutral among communities. Here they propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal pro-vision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods and extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. More widely, they offer a resolution to the classic liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy by providing neutral and non-authoritarian rules that nonetheless support collective organization. Because near-optimal collective decision-making, under the theory of quadratic voting, may be feasible in practice, but relies on an assumption of a fixed set of communities and public goods, this extension paper propose a way to achieve this setting. From the observation that a simple private contributory system famously leads to the under-provision of public goods that benefit many people because of the free-rider problem, and a system purely based on membership will tend to suppress smaller organizations of great values, their solution is to apply the quadratic logic to the founding of a market. Replacing the traditional sum of the contributions made by funders as founding received by a provider, by the square of the sum of the square roots of the contributions made by the funders. Doing so amplifies small contributions, encourage more contributions and greater diversity in potential contributors, and confers a greater degree of influence on individuals in determining ultimate founding allocations. This system would lead to the optimal provision of founding of self-organizing ecosystem of public goods.

Suggesting modifications to all scales of political elections these proposals range from simple tweaks of existing laws to extensive re-envisioning of electoral systems. The Liberal Radicalism solves the key problem of funding under Capitalism by boosting the contribution of small donors, thereby effectively diluting the influence of the larger ones, responding at the same time to the question: How can regulatory bodies strike a balance between freedom of expression through contributions to campaigns for elected office, while restricting the undue influence of special interests ? Open Source communities, for example, are increasingly trying to address these limitations and provide founding for public goods provision through open source developments such as cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding. While such approaches have had some success, they ultimately push the problem of charitable founding in Capitalism. And the problem for decision taking and regulation under investors or other founders remains the same. The fit is even clearer with blockchain communities, where a large percentage of which is held by foundations or wealthy individuals. However, such a hierarchical structure seems both poorly attuned to the needs of the communities and, furthermore, antithetical to the principles of decentralized authority on which they were founded.

The founding of municipal projects and public works, make the city a fertile site for application of Liberal Radicalism, too, and these applications are among the most promising in terms of feasibility of self-funding. Even though they are democratic systems intented to represent the will of a constituency, the needs of very small groups cannot be heard. Some public goods are intensely important to a select few and the systems in place for communicating those needs and receiving the adequate funding are highly inefficient. Liberal Radicalism, as applied to urban public funding decisions, could allow communities at all scales to fund projects that would struggle to get funding under centralized systems. Community-level decision-making in urban planning only will confer economic development on the city the kind of diversity it needs." (https://medium.com/@julien.carbonnell/civil-society-futures-of-citizenship-and-democracy-through-digital-era-24e28c27276)


More information