Researching Technology & Organization ✪ Web3, DAOs ✪ Book 'The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism' ✪ Prof @UCL
London
Joined June 2012
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JP Vergne retweeted
I beg you, United Kingdom of England and Wales, to celebrate properly this amazing achievement, result of bipartisan efforts, and to celebrate the achievements of this incredible young generation, against all odds, against covid, smartphones, and ambient doomerism
JP Vergne retweeted
#OTD in 1989, #BalticWay 🇱🇹🇱🇻🇪🇪
2 million people, 3 nations, 672 km, one unbreakable chain for #freedom.
No internet. No mobile phones. Just courage, solidarity and an unbreakable belief.
From my personal archive.
JP Vergne retweeted
Monopoly is usually seen as a company controlling a market.
But property rights also create exclusive control.
@PirateOrg connects this idea to public blockchains, where the line between private property and public good is harder to define.
JP Vergne retweeted
Do you know one marginal change that would probably improve the education of future economists?
Instead of jumping straight into “externalities” in introductory courses, professors should begin by talking about the difficulties of resolving conflicts of interest over scarce resources when transaction costs are high.
(This would require defining transaction costs carefully, and the best article for that purpose might be Douglas W. Allen’s “What Are Transaction Costs?” [1991].)
The professor could then introduce historical cases in which private solutions emerged over time. They could discuss how property rights themselves often develop precisely because they help reduce transaction costs.
Or they could turn to Cheung’s (1973) article on beekeeping, which shows how beekeepers sometimes pay farmers for the right to place hives in their orchards, while in other cases farmers pay beekeepers for pollination services.
The class could also examine cases in which no fully satisfactory private solution has yet emerged, along with the different alternatives that have been proposed and the tradeoffs each entails.
Why is this approach better than immediately framing the issue in terms of externalities?
First, externalities are ultimately conflicts of interest over scarce resources that remain unresolved because the affected parties have not found a workable mechanism for compensation or coordination. Starting from that underlying problem makes the economics much clearer.
Second, beginning immediately with “externalities” makes it too easy to leap from identifying a problem to prescribing government intervention without first thinking carefully about the nature of the problem itself. The analysis quickly turns into a cookbook of taxes and subsidies.
Whenever an economist wants the government to do something, it is tempting to invoke a positive or negative externality and treat that as sufficient justification for almost any public policy proposal. But identifying an externality is only the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it. Treating it otherwise is bad economics, and we should teach future economists to do better.
JP Vergne retweeted
Astonishing rise in borrowing costs in some of the world's largest, and most fiscally irresponsible, economies. 30Y yields:
US: 5.29% (highest since 2007, with deficit at 6% of GDP in spite of growth)
UK: 5.83% (highest since 1998)
Japan: 4.14% (record high since 30Y was introduced in 1999)
France: 4.90% (highest since 2008, with debt at ~118% of GDP)
No chance any of them voluntarily implements a fiscal adjustment. How long until we start to see serious debt crises?
JP Vergne retweeted
After 9/11, the Patriot Act massively expanded government surveillance.
From 2000 → 2004, FBI NSL requests rose 6.6x.
Phone / bank records could be demanded in secret, and gag orders kept you from ever knowing.
Enter The Surveillance State Exhibition: logos.co/past-present-future…
JP Vergne retweeted
Elizabeth Warren comes out strongly against happy hour
JP Vergne retweeted
Announcing Montana ETRB
Montana opens up for biotech acceleration.
Infinita has formed the first-ever ETRB (experimental treatment review board) under Montana law.
The review board’s role is oversight for access to treatments before FDA approval.
For a $12.5k fee, you can submit a post-phase-1 therapy to our review board (submission link below).
What is a Montana ETRB?
Montana’s model is a major regulatory innovation. National regulators typically review treatments one by one, which causes years-long bottlenecks.
In Montana, registered ETRBs do treatment reviews, licensed specialized clinics (ETCs) provide treatments. The state receives reporting and can take away licenses.
That’s smart regulation. Competitive, efficient, with oversight. That’s what American biotech needs.
First Montana ETRB Members
We are honored to welcome highly esteemed scientists, physicians and bioethicists on the first Montana ETRB:
- Matt Kaeberlein, PhD (@mkaeberlein) - a biologist internationally recognized for research on the basic mechanisms of aging and translational interventions to extend healthspan
- Felipe Sierra, PhD - a biochemist that served as Director of the Division of Aging Biology, NIA/NIH, where he developed the concept of Geroscience.
- Jessica Flanigan, PhD - a bioethicist who is is the Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond, where she teaches leadership and healthcare ethics
- Jamie Justice, PhD (@j_n_justice) - is Executive Vice President of the Health Domain at XPRIZE and Executive Director of the XPRIZE Healthspan Prize
- James M. Burke, MD - is a hematologist and oncologist with more than three decades of experience in cancer drug development and patient care
Each review submitted will have to pass their judgement on adequate safety characterization.
What will the ETRB look for?
An ETRB’s legal mandate is safety-only.
Risks need to be disclosed to patients for informed consent properly, and treatments need to have a safety profile equivalent to a successful phase-1 trial.
After that it’s up to the doctor and patient to decide.
ETRB will compete for reputation.
They are free to approve or not approve according to their assessment. If they wanted, they could even ask for efficacy data as a basis for approval.
Our Montana ETRB has a set of governance principles that guide its decisions beyond the legally required minimum floor, as a guide for its decisionsmaking.
Congratulations to Montana
Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Kenneth Bogner (@KennethBogner), Montana now has the most forward looking medical access law in the country in SB 535.
Montana’s department of health and human services (DPHHS) provided a tight and comprehensive set of rules for clinic licenses and review boards.
Montana is becoming a biotech frontier.
Towards Clinical Trial Abundance
The FDA has led the world for decades, gating the largest and most innovative biopharma market in the world. But the US’ competitive advantage is evaporating. Regulators in Australia and China have made clinical trials far more cost- and time-competitive. Patients are going to offshore clinics in Mexico and the Caribbean. High-agency patients like Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses) take matters into their own hands, and use multiple available jurisdictions.
The FDA needs to modernize, and lots of federal efforts to this end are underway. We support federal reforms, however these efforts often fall short or are slow.
Let US states innovate. The states can be as a source of regulatory innovation. In states important learnings can take place, and inform better federal policy.
Montana is leading the charge in biotech. New Hampshire is following suit. Utah, Texas and Florida have opened up to stem cells and many states are improving conditions for individualized treatments.
FDA / HHS should give explicit safe harbor to such responsible state medical access programs, to encourage a regulated market forming vs. gray markets.
How to Get Involved
We’re looking for state and federal policymakers to advance this regulatory innovation, clinicians to be the patient-facing stewards for responsible access, scientific reviewers to partake in ETRB oversight, biotechs to provide their novel treatments to these programs to collect valuable data, and ultimately for patients to benefit from potentially life-saving access.
Get in touch! Mine and @righttotryguys DMs are open
JP Vergne retweeted
Twelve months of the Logos London circle went into one question: what actually stands in the way of British civil society?
The answer is now live at 👉 gapmap.uk
204 ranked gaps.
115 resources.
11 outcomes.
Build the parallel.
@logos_network
JP Vergne retweeted
A proposed pledge for Elon Musk.
An opportunity to put your money where your mouth is. If money won’t matter in 2036, why don’t you pledge to donate your current wealth of approximately $1 trillion to charity no later than 2036. This would establish with great credibility your belief in the powers of AI and technology. It would also assuage many people around the world who are worried about the political and social influence of billionaires and trillionaires.
PS. The charities chosen for this should be approved as effective and non-ideological by an impartial body.
Money Won't Matter in 2036 - Elon Musk. youtube.com/shorts/WTXv1It3l… via @YouTube
JP Vergne retweeted
This FT article explores how the concentration of talent in King’s Cross, sparked in large part by DeepMind's decision to stay in London, has made the area the UK's equivalent of Boston's Kendall Square, where world-class research, entrepreneurship and investment collide.
JP Vergne retweeted
I've a piece in the Observer today on the case for a right to truth, a right not to be lied to:
observer.co.uk/news/politics… When I started making this argument a few years ago no politicians or media would engage. But the Overton window is slowly moving, and more and more people recognise that if we don't shore up the laws and institutions underpinning truth, democracy is bound to suffer.
JP Vergne retweeted
The pirate is not the enemy of the free market. The pirate is the only reason a semblance of one still exists.
Four hundred years of robes and charters were built to keep you from seeing it.
The crown gave the East India Company its monopoly and sent the navy to drown anyone who traded against it. Nobody out-traded a soul. A king drew a line across the ocean, called everything inside it his, and hanged the free men who crossed it as smugglers.
The same hand has drawn the same line ever since. Across the sea. Then the airwaves. Then the wires. Then the code inside your own blood.
Each time the powerful fence off a new world before you can reach it, deed it to their favorites, and pass a law making it a crime to climb the wall. And each time, out of the dark at the edge of the map, someone climbs it and breaks it open.
Every freedom you were ever handed in trade was taken first by a man the law of his day called a criminal.
The monopolist fears a free market, the one thing his charter was drawn to spare him, and a free market is exactly what the pirate is. Competition he was promised he would never have to face, come to his wall with the wind behind it.
Every law they wrote, every toll they set, every fence across the open water was only ever machinery to keep you paying and keep you grateful.
So raise the black flag.
JP Vergne retweeted
This is the math which millennial and younger generations have intuited in their adulthoods.
In Asia, the last generation built wealth through real estate. But the gains are gone, and there are no scale accessible assets with scale and upside available to this generation. ie Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai.
In the West, taxes are up only while markets stay private for ever longer, so wealth creation becomes elite only. Capital formation exists only for those who already have capital.
When the current generation has little skin in the game, they go populist. There’s no downside to “tearing down” the existing system.
JP Vergne retweeted
The answer is simle: Marc Zeller.
AAVE stands out as one of the rare DAOs that resembles executive-led organizations.
Many DeFi protocols faced challenges when founder-led projects transitioned to the DAO model while their founders semi-retired. AAVE successfully navigated this transition because it had a leader capable of steering the ship.
DAOs are destined for failure unless people stop ignoring the accumulated corporate governance experience and best practices. DAOs can only survive if they resemble corporate organization schemes and prioritize the advantages of on-chain governance, such as adaptability and transparency, rather than ‘decentralization of governance,’ which can lead to anarchy and political infighting for resources, ultimately draining the system of its vitality.
JP Vergne retweeted
Do you want to take your startup to the next level?
Apply to our Hatchery incubator programme!
The Hatchery is a 2-year incubator programme for UCL students and graduates, located at BaseKX, UCL’s dedicated entrepreneurship hub in King’s Cross: bit.ly/3CvkVa6
ALT Hatchery incubator programme: open for applications apply by 7 september