This is an important paper for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the authors are deeply involved in blockchain technologies (Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum) and economics. The principle being advocated is a mechanism whereby members of a society 'vote' for public projects (including, presumably, education) by contributing to that project; the funding ultimately received is a function of that vote designed to maximize efficiency. The problem, of course, in making decisions this way is that people with more money get more votes, and they tend over time to vote for measures that make them richer still, even if they are paying the square of the value of the votes. This paper simply elides over that problem ("we assume that an equitable distribution of basic resources has been achieved in some other manner, such as an equal initial distribution of resources").
There's a nice summary of the paper available from an anonymous author on Medium. It draws the connection between this proposal and that of the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), also an outcome of Ethereum. The difference is "how they intend to achieve near optimal provision of public goods out of this organisation, which is something the DAO didn't cover." The difference is in what the mechanism would fund (and it's not clear everyone would define 'public goods' in this way), and the mechanism for voting - "Quadratic Voting (QV) is a concept Weyl has previously put forth... QV sees a voter purchase the square of the number of votes they wish to buy per issue."
I am not opposed to the idea of people voting for the public policy measures they wish to see supported financially; I have long been a supporter of some form of direct democracy. But pegging these votes to dollars they actually have is something I resolutely oppose. I think a better method would be to allow people to vote with percentages of their tax contributions, so each person receives 100 votes to allocate as they wish, and where people taxed progressively increasing percentages of their income.
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