Modern Markets for All

Unspectacular at academic studies, my background is journalism on television. 

I was producer and anchor of a late-night TV show about “What Britain gets up to on the internet” when I converted to social action. In the mid 1990’s I realized fledgling online technologies could do so much more than excite my over-sexed interviewees.

I wrote books about possible new kinds of markets to bring people in from the economic fringes, one published internationally. The concept of “Modern Markets for All” was born. 

The idea that governments could initiate much better markets across the base of the economic pyramid has always been contrarian. But once you grasp how different capitalism would be with comprehensive, equitable, state-of-the-art, markets; you can’t shake it off.

I have worked with public agencies in Europe and America, to make those markets real. Corporates, non-profits, and ountless stakeholder groups have committed resources and capital.

Problem: Inadequate markets underpin inequality. The low-skilled now sell their time in "gig work" platforms like Uber, or scheduling tools like Kronos. Thousands of services like these allow negligible; control, pay, progression, protections, or data for work-seekers while extracting 20-30% of earnings. 

Meanwhile, Wall Street has used new technologies to build low-overhead exchanges of extraordinary sophistication and, precision. Big-banks have booming profitability while breadwinners suffer; precariousness, income volatility, popular rage.

Proposed project: You won’t sustainably solve this worsening issue without new kinds of markets. They must harness the latest technologies to genuinely empower ordinary people. Only governments have the leverage to initiate this.

A “public option” for today’s markets could deliver universal access, full protections, seamless progression, data-driven human-capital investment, tailored support for strugglers, continuous personalized learning, enormous economic efficiency and inclusiveness; all for 2% mark-up.

This project will scale those markets, elevating; dignity, earnings, and opportunity.

We work for low-skilled work-seekers internationally. They have a foundational problem: inequality of markets. 

Why are workers migrating to platforms that disempower them? It’s where the buyers now are; attracted by cost cutting, one-sided efficiencies and – in the case of companies like Uber – massive price subsidies.

Reporting on Uber reveals; systematic pay cuts, misleading data, brutal algorithmic sanctioning, software to mislead regulators and sharecropping-like schemes for car leasing. Formerly the highest valued start-up ever, Uber is a pathfinder for countless for-profit labor markets.

The shift to services like Uber and Kronos was relentless even before the pandemic. By 2018, 41% of America’s hourly employees didn’t know next week’s hours or pay. 30% of all workers were dependent on at least some “gig work”. The trend is skewed harshly towards African-Americans, women and the young. 

Unsurprisingly, many people go offline and ask around in search of work: it’s the labor market of the nineteenth century. Much of that activity is off-the-books, illegal, unprotected. 

Meanwhile, Wall Street’s hyper-efficient trading drives a suck of resources out of the regular economy into financialization.

Markets need attention. Precariousness now drives financial volatility, health problems and family problems

We have an empowering platform for the spectrum of hourly labor. 

Called a CEDAH (Central Database of Available Hours), it sits on secure servers in California. A Java Enterprise application, it runs on web and mobile. As a non-profit we are committed to open sourcing all tech. and learning. 

A CEDAH in any region serves countless labor market intermediaries who act as employer-of-record and vetting authority in return for a cut of each transaction. 

For a work-seeker, it takes in; her skills/certifications and all types of work she is allowed and willing to do. It allows her to set payrate calculation rules or accept from a range of employer payrates for different types of work for which she is eligible. It needs to know her hour-by-hour availability; today, tomorrow, or weeks ahead. 

Progression through new validation and additional types of work is constant. Extraordinarily granular data is shared. Users of labor are incentivized to nurture pools of regular flexi-employees; one worker can be in multiple pools. 

Launching markets built around worker empowerment is hard. Our manual, with foreword from Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti, explains how to do it.

This project will: advance CEDAH technology and launches towards major implementations.

We serve people who need to sell their time, precisely, outside the home. That means anyone low-skilled without regular employment. 

We are not concerned with home freelancers (translators, web-designers, copywriters) who are skilled and need only a basic matching website to find paying projects. Our people work in shops, warehouses, carehomes, construction sites, cafes and houses. They have to be at specific places at specific times when needed. It's a much more challenging part of labor markets.

About half our people are “Core Irregulars”. They couldn’t do a job even if offered one. They have fluctuating medical issues, caregiving, parenting or studying commitments around which employment must fit. 

We work extensively with this group. To humanize them, I immediately recall; a single mother with three disabled kids never knowing when one would be off school, an injured motorcyclist unable to get out of bed some days because of back pain or depression, a widow with both parents suffering Alzheimer’s and only intermittent daycare access.  

We give these breadwinners the sophisticated labor markets they need, under local control. Our markets can transform; stability, interventions, pathways, roles for unions, education, and models for portable benefits. 

Policy implications of our work magnify this.

Seekers of irregular work are marginalized by so many government and philanthropic programs fetishizing traditional job creation.

But tackling economic issues without addressing market failings can be fruitless. Training 500 apprentices, for example, has limited value if each then gets a “job” where she is scheduled in ways that prohibit progression, or even earning enough to live on. 

And why should buyers of labor relinquish the benefits of one-sided platforms? “Market Making” ahead of any launch is another core competency of ours. 

Ultimately society needs policy guaranteeing fair markets as a right. We lead the world on developing this.

I was a television journalist with additional voluntary experience behind the Iron Curtain, in occupied territories, warzones and shanty towns. I have a deep personal interest in system change through infrastructure. Example: Edwin Chadwick invented public water supply to eradicate cholera in the 1840’s. That was only possible when governments used their powers to create reservoirs.

 In 1994 I successfully pitched the ITV network on a show about the emerging Internet.

The potential of online technologies to create empowering, equitable, economic activity then gripped me. I approached the Demos think-tank with ideas and wrote a paper for them. That resulted in workshops with diverse experts and a book of mine in 1997.

My champion was Geoff Mulgan, Demos CEO, later Tony Blair’s Head of Policy. He introduced me to Charles Handy, Britain’s leading author on economic futures. With Charles’ help I secured an internationally published book in 1999. 

That book codified the markets that would become possible as trading technologies developed, why governments had to play a part in initiation and how they could do that democratically. It was extremely contrarian thinking: prevailing opinion was that Silicon Valley could be left to build the best markets possible.

“Modern Markets for All” is so obvious.

Once you piece together current inadequacies, but unimaginable possibilities, of today’s markets, you see the world differently. For example: In the Coronavirus pandemic, millions didn’t get stimulus entitlements, vital resources were mismatched, responses sputtered. The right markets could have obliviated all that.

Getting a first government to act on anything radical is hard. But they copy successful first implementations rapidly. That makes setbacks survivable.

At County or City level, public agencies can catalyze their own markets for hourly labor. That’s an alternative to gig-work platforms. Working on this with UK, now US, public agencies is exhilarating.

But the bigger picture is breathtaking: nationally, politicians might initiate a concession which pairs official interfacing, and other benefits only government can bestow on markets, with public service obligations and capped charges. That delivers a privately funded, state-of-the-art, platform focused on anyone's full economic potential, beyond just employment. 

 “Modern Markets for All” is a policy as impactful as UBI, Universal Medicare or Green New Deal. But it costs nothing and widens choices. It’s a fight that could be winnable. Navigating towards that possibility is the most exciting life I could imagine.

I started on this journey with all the disciplines of daily or weekly television production: deadlines, budgets, fact checking, writing, navigating sensitivities. 

I have now done thousands of structured interviews about modern markets with policymakers, technologists, corporates, social groups and journalists. Modesty aside, it is a unique battery of knowledge about a compelling possibility for capitalism’s next stage. Every day it is further honed by challenges, queries and rejections.

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There is a practical side to my work. I oversee structuring of new functionality, within clear principles I’ve developed with my technology team. I have sold into central government departments, local authorities, corporates, philanthropies, NGO’s and others with tangible success.

Raising awareness is important. I have been profiled in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, FT and countless other publications. My policy papers about markets have been published by think tanks from the anti-poverty left to the free-market right.

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But I am determined not to dominate this project. A quality technology team has been recruited with diverse expertise. Each has become increasingly specialist around the potential for modern market technologies to serve the base of our economic pyramid.

I want our non-profit to evolve into an equivalent to the Linux Foundation, evangelizing and developing open sourced markets technology and learning. It needs a CEO who frees me up to spread the message and act as product champion. 

I believe I have developed vital authenticity by sticking to core principles for 26 years. I can anchor further development.

There are so many. This is a long-haul journey.

In Britain, I had three central government departments as funders for the original markets build, starting in 2005. But we were opposed by DWP, the labor ministry. They believed government should only focus on job creation not people needing ad-hoc employment.

Despite opposition from this key ministry, we sold 20 city governments on a market launch. Tesco – the UK’s biggest private sector employer – also bought in. But these were dispirate, small-scale, launches. We came to understand markets like ours had to launch with immediate scale. That meant a big push from Whitehall.

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I began cultivating opposition DWP ministers. After a 2010 election, one of our supporters was appointed Minister for Welfare Reform. He went on front pages announcing we were key to his “Universal Credit” scheme to streamline a byzantine welfare state. 

Other launches were wound down. We piloted and integrated with DWP. But Universal Credit was a disaster, now five times over budget and years late. We were shelved.

I turned to the US. I persuaded national bodies to promote us to states and cities. A first philanthropy funded my travels around public workforce boards.

My community has become public officials in the US focused on economic opportunity for underserved communities.

The US public workforce system spends $3bn+ a year on training, recruitment, data-gathering and support for low-income citizens. But it is driven by 6 performance metrics, all focused on traditional job creation. That leaves millions who need, or want, flexible employment at the mercy of for-profit labor markets.

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I started raising awareness of this in the US in 2016. Getting myself into podcasts, publications and webinars for workforce leaders, speaking about the plight of irregular workers and the emerging research, I began to identify an informal network of innovative boards around the country. They chafed at turning away people obviously in desperate need because their funding was tied to outdated performance metrics.

So, I persuaded four national and one state philanthropy to fund a pilot launch with the 7 workforce boards of Los Angeles County. We encountered opposition from traditionalists and indifference from corporates who don’t want alternative markets emerging.

We were due to launch in Spring 2020 after winning over hospitality/events employers. That cratered with the pandemic. I arranged a shift to emergency at-home childcare as a first sector.

To clarify: we are a company limited by Golden Shares. It's a uniquely British structure aimed at innovative non-profits with specialist assets.

MM4A non-profit Ltd. (UK registration no.  08636992) is a company who's founding paperwork includes Golden Shares issued to the founder and philanthropic funders. The company's articles forbid it from ever paying dividends. All income is plowed back into development.

Those articles could only ever be changed if EVERY holder of a Golden Share consented.

In the US we are closely partnered with a 501(c)3 set up by the City of Long Beach to promote economic innovation.

We are driven by the conviction that “everyone in the world should have the best markets now possible in which to purse economic opportunity”. That is a hugely disruptive notion. 

The best markets are (a) broad (b) deep (c) fully featured (d) transparently run (e) low, or no, overhead. That’s now possible in ways that weren’t viable previously. But if those markets were to become reality it would change so much.

Why buy or sell journeys in Uber if a system of markets spanning the entire micro-economy has the vast scale that means it charges 2% rather than 30%? What’s the point of retail banks if fully featured markets, freely available to anyone, offer all their functions so much more cheaply and effectively? 

What if “fully functioned” includes a sophisticated parallel currency? How do vehicle rental companies compete with armies of motorists suddenly able to rent their vehicles with protections, ancilliary services, micro-insurance and all the data imaginable about demand/supply/pricing around their home?

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Behind that end goal there’s countless innovations along the way. They cover:

• Technology: Very granular time-based markets have to be enormously sophisticated under-the-hood. For example; how do you ensure legal controls on working hours remain effective on the day clocks go backward? We’ve figured it out.

• Policy: A concession creating the best markets possible has to factor in (a) Maximum Average Transaction size (b) mandatory franchising of market sectors to maintain consistency but avoid corporate dominance. Our detailed briefings on both are linked.

Why will our project impact on humanity? The need to work/sell/trade is fundamental. Very few really seek a life of purposeless pleasure. 

For regular people, time is the key economic asset; it’s what employers pay for. Making the way time is sold better informed, more empowered, better protected, and much more efficient would ripple throughout the economy:

• Immediate outputs: Increased earnings and opportunities. More granular, personalizable, education pathways. More responsive welfare. Interventions to help strugglers become much more cost effective to target, administer and analyze. Quality of life.

• Longer-term outputs: Steady reversal of the institution-dominated capitalism we know today as the smallest sellers begin to compete with the same efficiencies. That should erode financializiation, bringing resources back down into the main street economy. Tackling climate change, political extremism and corruption becomes easier.

Our route to a more equitable world is more sustainable than models like UBI (Univeral Basic Income) or Federal Jobs Guarantees. Both those are often pre-emptively accused of waste and unfair appropriation of others’ wealth through taxation. We level the playing field that created such an unbalanced economy originally. 

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Can we evidence this with data? We offer the following planks of our theory of change:

• Employment – most people’s main source of earnings – is fragmenting, often alarmingly. 41% of America’s hourly employees don’t know next weeks’ hours or pay. 40% of Americans have been active in shadow economy. 30% needed legitimate side-hustles.

• Current markets for the less well-off are inadequate for workers. Successful “gig work” websites can slash worker’s earnings (see for instance reporting on Lyft, Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Amazon Flex or TaskRabbit). They manage by punitive algorithms and deploy other tools to keep a market over-supplied so buyers get their needs met instantly and cheaply.

• There is widespread, dangerous, disillusionment with the current model of capitalism. 40% of Americans now regard socialism “as a good thing”. Even organs like the Financial Times call for “Resetting Capitalism”.

Markets are the cornerstone of capitalism. Society has little idea of how a new generation of trading technologies could positively transform them.

 Markets like ours can’t grow incrementally. They have to start with a “big bang” of aligned demand/supply/intermediaries in any city. A better measure of our current state is: how close are we to achieving those "big bangs"?

The more sophisticated a new market is, the more scale it needs to be of use. Expedia, for example, is widely used to book travel. But imagine an early Expedia with only 1,000 US hotel rooms in its database. It would constantly be unable to match. A traveller would be better with simple websites listing hotel phone numbers. Expedia became viable when MSN suddenly bought in 90m buyers, attracting a flood of suppliers. 

We have to find the equivalent in hourly labor markets in any city. We call this “Market Making” and have an open source manual “How to Make a Market for Irregular Employment; a Guide for States, Counties and Cities”. 

We lined up $20m of demand for our first US launch in the Long Beach area in early 2020, largely in the hospitality/events sectors. That would have sustained a first 8,000 workers. But demand cratered with Covid. We are rebuilding around childcare, working to ensure families with public funding for childcare can use it at home, not just in groups.

More significantly, at least 7 other cities are tangibly moving towards launches of their own, starting the market making process.

Number of people currently served in the US: 700. In one year if current proposal authorized: 12,000. Five years: millions.

Our Minimum Viable Product; launch of markets at city level:

This immediate application of our work focuses on city-level markets for hourly labor run by accountable local authorities.

• One year: Get our Southern California operation to $20m turnover and 12,000 workers. At that point it becomes financially sustainable. Have at least five other US regions well on the way to launch of their own. Ensure the platform is ready for scaling anywhere in America.

• Five years: Over 100 cities have launched markets like ours. We have fully open sourced the technology and have a devolved network of developers and market launchers around the world. Our non-profit is a co-ordinating and evangelizing hub, constantly sharing learning.

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Big Vision:

The “Big Vision” for our work aims at national or large-region governments initiating a concession that induces corporates to invest billions in building new micro-economic infrastructure they then run under public service obligations. This is a volatile possibility; it goes way beyond hourly labor. Broad targets are:

• One year: A first country has launched some sort of commission/investigation that asks “Are our citizens and businesses held back by inadequate markets compared to what’s now possible?”. That should quickly put Inequality of Markets on the agenda for policymakers in multiple territories.

• Five years: At least three countries have formally adopted “Modern Markets for All” as a policy commitment. Concessions have been won and resulted in markets that demonstrably empower many millions of the less well-off every day.

We have four challenges, each reinforcing the other. The overarching theme: it takes time for the big institutions we need on-board to accept what is happening to markets.

1) Philanthropies and government remain focused on traditional jobs. The New York Times captured this in an article about exploding uncertain employment. They summarized: “Even stalwarts of the progressive movement seem to reserve economic prosperity for the full-time worker”. (Sept. 11, 2018) 

Public employment services are railroaded by performance metrics forcing them to focus on job creation. Decision makers at philanthropies typically arrived in their position through a ladder of regular jobs. “Gig work” can be instantly perceived as inherently uncertain, low quality, demeaning. So funding focuses (unsuccessfully) on reversal, rather than shaping an alternative model.

2) Lack of Data: Official data gathering lacks the granularity to capture fragmenting economic activity; it’s hard to make our case. 

3) Communications issues: It can be hard to get people thinking about “markets” in the way we need. Markets should be assessed like electricity supply, highways, broadband. Are they good enough? If not, what should be done? Markets are not amorphous or naturally occurring. They are vital utilities.

4) Technology: Think about how Wall Street has changed from open outcry and phone-based stockbroking: the trillions circulating through a new era of exchanges with algorithms writing algorithms to identify opportunities. That’s the modern markets difference. Scope out the equivalently sophisticated functionality for markets at the bottom. Building it is constantly challenging.

1) Jobs focus: We’re positioning ourselves with a strong USP in search of funders and government leaders wanting to widen focus post-pandemic. Our  site frames how philanthropic funding pours into “quality job” initiatives leaving aggressive start-ups free to roll-out their vision for fragmented labor markets. 

2) Data deficit: Academics and researchers now do the work for us. More and more reports show a low-skilled “job” is increasingly just gig work at the behest of one dominant buyer. Issues like mental heath, food insecurity, and poor housing are linked to deteriorating quality of work. It’s getting harder to argue training people for “jobs of the future”, even at enormous scale, will be sufficient. We collect, and exploit, these findings constantly.

3) Communications: We are working with a prominent philanthropic figure on an Op-Ed that makes the case for tackling Inequality of Markets. Approaches to economic/policy bloggers are laying the ground.

4) Technology: There’s no magic-bullet solution. It’s just painstaking work endlessly drawing up specifications; simplifying them, restructuring them. 

Our guiding technology principles are (a) we don’t reinvent the wheel if someone else has solved the problem, we only focus on unique aspects of empowering, granular, time-based markets (b) we design for any model. 

On portable benefits, as one example, we are absorbed by how markets like ours can support any scheme, from multiple competing providers. We need to facilitate workers picking-and-chosing as many as they want, using each as they wish, with all relevant information and reporting. 

We have formal and informal (exploratory) partnerships in hand. Those that are public include:

• Pacific Gateway: The public workforce board for City of Long Beach, CA, and surrounding areas has set up a 501(c)3 to serve populations underserved by mainstream workforce services. They have a particular interest in acting as catalysts for innovation in the public workforce system. Other workforce boards have partnered with Pacific Gateway in initiatives to extend our service area.

• Polymorphism Ltd: British software development company specializing in Java Enterprise installations. They’re team of developers based in the North of England have been overseeing our technology since it became increasingly specialized in 2010.

• Living Cities: This national US urban development charity first bought us to America. They have acted as fiscal sponsor and overseer after introducing us to key national bodies.

We have other partners involved in a UK relaunch, introducing us to philanthropies and spreading our message.

We need to evolve the model as we scale. The typical business plan for a for-profit labor market requires enormous amounts of up-front capital to advertise and subsidize a path to sector dominance. We can’t do this as a non-profit.

So why be a non-profit? Recouping start-up investment in the model above involves significant market manipulation; favoring more profitable sellers, secreting of data, keeping the market oversupplied to attract buyers. 

Markets structured around needs of the supply side can’t do this. So, to launch a market with integrity, we have to harness the heft of public bodies. That is much easier as a non-profit.

That means we currently rely on philanthropy/government funding to get to critical mass. We typically provide our platform in a given area, to a specified ceiling of capacity, for a given period. New functionality gets commissioned. Our launch expertise is funded for application in a particular region such as Los Angeles County.

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This makes for an ad-hoc business model at this stage, constantly responding to funders' diverse priorities. Getting a first market to critical mass is vital in progressing us to a model that better suits our needs.

Currently, our business priority is showing funders we can deliver value for money, particularly around high-tech, an area with which they may be unfamiliar. Transparency is vital. For example, we use the Jira workflow tracking system for software development and give funders log-ins. We also share formalized monthly reports on progress.

We need a first city market with around $20m in wages going through in a first year. At that point we could:

• Seek public funding: With a wide market, and the data it generates, we can make a compelling case for workforce funding. That model is established. Every state workforce agency in the US already licences an online platform for all types of jobs. Examples: Alabama JobLink, IowaJobs and CalJobs. Costs can be blurred but, as an example, Pennsylvania paid $35m to update their online job bank. 

• Impose transaction charges: Our system is already configured to do this. We see 2.5% as acceptable. (For-profit labor markets typically take 20-30%. However, we have to allow for tax, benefits and intermediary fees charged to the buyer of labor.) On $20m turnover a year, that generates $500,000 to pay for a team and system support in each city.

• Launch “Freemium” services: We could offer the basic service free, then charge public agencies or philanthropies wanting data or use of our tools for interventions.

Our costs, uncertainties and decisions are largely in today’s formative stage. Once a first market is running robustly it can be replicated quickly and cheaply. 

Mid-term, our aim is to change performance metrics governing US public employment services. If they moved to incentivize support for all workers every agency would need markets like ours.

Beyond operational income we seek to replicate the Linux Foundation which raises some $30m a year in corporate subscriptions. 

In Britain three central government departments, corporates, and 20 city authorities collectively invested around £9m ($11.23m) in building our core system. That was a mix of grants and revenue from delivering the kinds of services listed above (platform licensing, commissioned functionality, project management of launches).

Since refocusing on the US, we have raised just under $2m in total. It’s not clear if we have permission to release exact figures but key funders - and the programs they enabled - have been:

• Berggruen Institute: Explore US policy implications of our markets.
• British philanthropy: Explore viability of launch in US/transfer to US servers.
• Annie E. Casey Foundation: Collaboration of 25 workforce bodies. July 2017 report.
• Walmart Foundation: Americanizing of the UK markets technology for open sourcing.
• Kauffman Foundation (two rounds): Rapid exploration of a possible California launch and tech. development.
• Wells Fargo Foundation: Market testing across LA region.
• Irvine Foundation: Project Manager for LA region.

Our previous funders are happy to act as referees.

Our financial needs depend on how ambitious funders will allow us to be. Broadly; $1m will allow us to drive a first cohort of cities to sustainable launch over 12 months. (That's so low cost because the platform is funded and the key cost is only business development people.)

Completely rebuilding our technology so it is ready for open sourced operations anywhere in the world would be around $15m. We would need a scoping project to finalize that figure.

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But few philanthropies are yet ready to overhaul markets at the bottom of the economy. We get funded by fitting into philanthropies' existing themes. 

That means aligning our development and launches with ambitions like job creation (fluid employment can be a ladder into a job for those lucky enough to have 4o hours of availability for work a week), boosting entrepreneurialism (our markets create micro-entrepreneurs) or tackling child poverty.

Respectful of the caution of funders we have a menu of discrete projects which can be commissioned individually or in clusters. Each brings irregular employment into different strategies. This list can be shared.

Because of our responsibilities to maintain a sophisticated system we ringfence cash for operational needs as it comes in. Everything we need to run through to end of December is in the bank. 

We need funding to expand, not tick over.

One expenditure line we would like to revitalize: my salary. To maximize development on scarce resources, I have not taken any salary since end of 2018, living off savings/partner. This will become untenable at some point in 2021.

Our work now merits serious scrutiny. A prize win should deliver all those. Currently, we are perceived as an outlier. We should be moving centerstage post-pandemic. Debate about quality of markets needs to move up the agenda as economic activity fragments.

To make that tangible: someone in a job enters the labor market every few years when it’s time to move on. A precarious worker can be in and out several times a day in search of her next assignment. The markets she uses; their breadth, depth, functionality, data, and fees extracted, determine her income and opportunities. The markets she could be using would offer her a breathtaking spectrum of economic potential.

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There is a danger our world-leading work on better markets for the economic base continues being swamped by better resourced organizations believing they can stop the fragmentation of employment. We do need some mindshare to make our arguments, given current lack of focus on market quality. Winning a prize can open a lot of doors. Specifically:

• Funding: It could help move us out of incremental, novelty, funding to build relationships that accept what we’re trying to do and why it is worth doing. 

• Data: When decision makers are willing to give us time, we can show the unstoppable growth of irregular economic activity. Prize winning prompts curiosity.

• Communications: As above, we need space to make a case that most are unaware of. Raised profile helps.

• Technology: This is always going to remain hard!

Policy development is a big theme for us. 

Capitalism has always needed facilities it can't itself provide. It couldn't produce coherent highways for the motorized age, only ad-hoc patchworks of incompatible tracks and toll-roads. It couldn't provide telephones in remote areas, which was unprofitable. Nor could it generate a stable money supply, just thousands of dissipated currency systems. 

All these failings were addressed with public policy. Modern marketplaces are the latest in a long list of technologies that need government to create conditions that unlock the social potential. (Government should not fund, design or run a "public option" for modern markets, just ensure the private sector is incentivized to do so.)

Public water supply, joined up roads, universal electricity; all seem obvious now. But they were once insurmountable aspirations for policy makers. 

How do you shape and advance that kind of policy in the fractious 21st Century? All help welcomed.

There is an obvious list of philanthropies that should be giving us a lot more scrutiny than they do: Omidyar, Schmidt, Ford, Blue Meridian, Siegal, Dalio, Blackrock, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Humanity Forward.

All have some sort of sweetspot around markets/government/high-tech.

Outside of this prime focus, we get offers of partnership that we can't follow up because we lack the resources. Funding has to come first as we look at the post pandemic economy and the role we could play in it.