I think startups are usually doing an activity which scales if it’s good and stops if it’s bad. People can sue if it’s causing harm to them. Overall this kind of feedback mechanism does a fine job.
In the impact markets case I’m most worried about activities which have long-lasting impacts even without continuing/scaling them. I’m more into the possibility of markets for scalable/repeatable activities (seems less fraught).
In general the story for concern here is something like:
At the moment a lot of particularly high-leverage areas are have disproportionate attention from people who are earnestly trying to do good things
Impact markets could shift this to “attention from people earnestly trying to do high-variance things”
In cases where the resolution on what was successful or not takes a long time, and people potentially do a lot of the activity before we know whether it was eventually valued, this seems pretty bad
I think startups are usually doing an activity which scales if it’s good and stops if it’s bad. People can sue if it’s causing harm to them. Overall this kind of feedback mechanism does a fine job.
In the impact markets case I’m most worried about activities which have long-lasting impacts even without continuing/scaling them. I’m more into the possibility of markets for scalable/repeatable activities (seems less fraught).
In general the story for concern here is something like:
At the moment a lot of particularly high-leverage areas are have disproportionate attention from people who are earnestly trying to do good things
Impact markets could shift this to “attention from people earnestly trying to do high-variance things”
In cases where the resolution on what was successful or not takes a long time, and people potentially do a lot of the activity before we know whether it was eventually valued, this seems pretty bad