Public Goods

Definition

Public goods are goods that are both non-enclosable and non-rivalrous: no one can be excluded from benefiting from them, and one person’s use does not diminish their availability to others. In the framing Benjamin and Ale Borda use, these two properties are essential design criteria for building new systems capable of overcoming the self-terminating trajectories of our current win-lose civilization.

Two Essential Criteria

Non-enclosability means a good cannot be fenced off, privatized, or captured for the exclusive benefit of some at the expense of others. Non-rivalry means abundance rather than scarcity governs its use — like an idea, an open protocol, or a healthy atmosphere, it can be shared without depletion. Together, these criteria define a class of goods that markets systematically underproduce, because their value cannot be captured by any single owner.

A Core Design Criterion

Treating public goods as a design criterion — rather than an afterthought or a charitable add-on — reorients how systems are built. Where extractive systems are engineered to enclose value and externalize harm, post-zero-sum systems are engineered to produce non-rivalrous, non-enclosable value and to internalize benefit for all. This is the design discipline underlying regenerative-finance and the commons-based approach to social impact.

Funding the Underfunded

Because public goods resist enclosure, the classic problem is funding them without a market to price them. Mechanisms like quadratic-funding weight contributions by the number of contributors rather than their size, so broadly supported initiatives receive more resources — democratic preference revelation without centralized decision-making. impactdaos extend this into a repeatable, composable infrastructure for funding public goods at civilizational scale.

In Benjamin’s Work

Benjamin discusses public goods as the foundation of a regenerative, positive-sum economy in impactdaos-and-the-purpose-economy with Ale Borda. The concept anchors his broader critique of extractive systems and his vision for the purpose economy explored in post-capitalist-venture-capital-thesis.