Why can’t big companies be as productive as startups?
Why doesn't Google split up into mini startups, with more equity upside in doing well? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)
How to fight decline in ownership?
Why don't any US consumer social apps have money built in?
Aka Why no mega-apps like WeChat in US?
How can capitalism account for the welfare of nonhumans?
Animals? AI? Institutions/corporations/nations? Future beings?
See https://aiimpacts.org/we-dont-trade-with-ants/, https://www.thinkingcomplete.com/2022/07/moral-strategies-at-different.html
Why don't bounties or prizes work?
To a first order approximation, almost no work in the world is accomplished via a bounty or prize. Serious work tends to be done by fulltime professionals.
- Returns to focus are extremely high?
What is the gap between retroactive bounty payments and other forms of trade (payments, taxes)?
Problem: how much to value of a thing after already receiving the thing -- proactive payments reveal true preferences; retroactive payments encourage lying
Maybe: representative democracy seems to do a pretty good job; corporations are kind of representative democracy (except votes are mostly dollars)
How do you decide how much to pay under a QF situation?
Is Quadratic Funding any good?
Vitalik seems to like it, but outside of a few test cases like Gitcoin it hasn’t gotten wider traction. One might expect actually good decisionmaking criteria to be adopted by curious orgs.
How would you design an information feed, based on economic principles?
Paying to promote information to specific individuals? Or to widely broadcast? An HFT algorithm could replace the regular ML one to decide which pieces of content are valuable to you (or to the person showing it to you). (is this what neural networks kinda are?)
Why isn’t Bitclout (stocks for people) more popular?
Is it just because it’s crypto? High onramp costs? Because it’s hard to understand what you’re paying for?
Would people buy shares of their own friends? Some minor examples, but mostly for novelty.
Problem of introducing money into social dynamics, extrinsic motivation killing intrinisic?
See also Patrick Collison