Podcasts Technology Astral Codex Ten Podcast Lewis Carroll Invented Retroactive Public Goods Funding In 1894

Lewis Carroll Invented Retroactive Public Goods Funding In 1894

Published: Jan. 4, 2022, 11:10 a.m.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lewis-carroll-invented-retroactive

Retroactive public goods funding is one of those ideas that\u2019s so great people can\u2019t stop reinventing it.

I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: \u201csocial impact bonds\u201d by a New Zealand economist in 1988, \u201ccertificates of impact\u201d by Paul Christiano in 2014, \u201cretroactive public goods funding\u201d by Vitalik Buterin a few years ago, \u201cEA loans\u201d by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, and \u201cventure grants\u201d by Mako Yass. These aren\u2019t all exactly the same idea. Some are slightly better framed than others and probably I\u2019m being terribly disrespectful to the better ones by saying they\u2019re the same as the worse ones. But I think they all share a basic core: some structure that lets profit-seeking venture capitalist types invest in altruistic causes, in the hopes that altruists will pay them back later once they\u2019ve been shown to work.

Upon re-reading some old SSC comments, I found a gem I\u2019d missed the first time around: Julie K says that the actual first person to invent this idea was Lewis Carroll (aka author of Alice in Wonderland) back in 1894. She quotes from his book Sylvie and Bruno: