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Jul 31, 2022Liked by James Broughel

The problem with a sovereign wealth / impact investor fund is that you still need to invest in projects that are profitable, but may not actually maximise public good, because public goods lack a business model due to inability to leverage IP or private property rights to make a ROI because they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

It would be incredibly powerful to combine this concept with a Social Impact Bond (SIB) or Advance Market Commitment (AMC) (also referred to as Pay-For-Success (PFS) contracts or Retroactive Public Goods Funding) to incentivise impact investors to fund public goods directly. If the public good saves the government money or exceeds the value of what they would be willing to pay, then this would be scalable as a business model (e.g. $10k per QALY generated by repurposing an off-patent drug, which is cheaper than $30k per QALY paid for patented drugs / homeless person housed for a year / x tonnes of carbon removed).

We are interested in pursuing this SIB / AMC to incentivise the development of public good medicines which are unmonopolisable using traditional IP (e.g. generic ketamine to treat depression or fluvoxamine + inhaled budesonide to treat Covid, nutraceuticals, plant medicines, psychedelics, diets, lifestyle interventions etc).

If interested, please reach out at crowdfundedcures.org

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James, I think your thinking here is more or less along the lines of our thinking at The Lianeon Project. Since patents are the creation of the state, we envision partially publically owned patents, with recurring taxes placed on that ownership share, probably around 5 percent annually. The funds raised by this tax are used to buy out IP that would better society immediately, and some diverted to a DARPA-like organization that complements, but does not compete with, private sector R&D.

Read it here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/turbocharging-technology

Would love you to join us at The Lianeon Project

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