There is a lot of information in your post to digest, but I’ll focus on what seems to me your biggest point: “public goods are treated like consumables and not investments”
The way I see it, people can consume private and public goods, just like they can invest in providers of private or public goods. If you want to invest in providers whose main purpose is to provide public goods, there are already a number of possibilities:
Buying government bonds
Buying shares of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations / cryptocurrencies
Perhaps you can blur the legal lines and find ways in which non-profits can reward shareholders, but I feel that is no different from:
Buying shares of impactful/responsible companies which plausibly make some public goods, namely (quadratic funding) crowdfunding platforms, as their main aim is to let groups/communities coordinate to fund (public) goods.
As for whether the main mechanism you introduce holds up in practice:
> If thoughtful altruists are involved in the market and either own a lot of certificates or want to buy a lot of certificates, other traders will want to predict what these “impact whales” think is impactful.
Government bonds, of course! Yes, I should mention those as a precedent. :-)
DAOs with a promising mission: Yeah, but those don’t seem so different from social enterprises or even most companies that provide an important product.
Raphaël Mazet: Interesting, thanks! It’d be great to get input on that question.
There is a lot of information in your post to digest, but I’ll focus on what seems to me your biggest point: “public goods are treated like consumables and not investments”
The way I see it, people can consume private and public goods, just like they can invest in providers of private or public goods. If you want to invest in providers whose main purpose is to provide public goods, there are already a number of possibilities:
Buying government bonds
Buying shares of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations / cryptocurrencies
Perhaps you can blur the legal lines and find ways in which non-profits can reward shareholders, but I feel that is no different from:
Buying shares of impactful/responsible companies which plausibly make some public goods, namely (quadratic funding) crowdfunding platforms, as their main aim is to let groups/communities coordinate to fund (public) goods.
As for whether the main mechanism you introduce holds up in practice:
> If thoughtful altruists are involved in the market and either own a lot of certificates or want to buy a lot of certificates, other traders will want to predict what these “impact whales” think is impactful.
I recommend chatting with https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-mazet/ !
Government bonds, of course! Yes, I should mention those as a precedent. :-)
DAOs with a promising mission: Yeah, but those don’t seem so different from social enterprises or even most companies that provide an important product.
Raphaël Mazet: Interesting, thanks! It’d be great to get input on that question.