It does seem like common sense that they would be linked. But there is also research:

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...

I haven’t heard that statistic before. And the formulation seems imprecise? Does continuously beating the market mean that every single minute your portfolio value gains relative to the market?

I am working on Community Notes for Bluesky: https://github.com/johnwarden/open-community-notes

I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.

I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.

Author here. @sokoloff also pointed this out in their comment. You are right, the example confuses by making the group sizes different.

I will update the article so it reads like this:

    Ten wealthy art patrons each contribute €1,000,000 to the local public art museum.
        Total Contributions: 10×€1,000,000=€10,000,000
        QF allocates:  (10×sqrt(1,000,000))²=€100,000,000
    Subsidy: €90,000,000

    Ten lower‑income individuals each contribute €100 to replace lead pipes in their neighborhood
        Total Contributions: 10×€100=€1,000
        QF allocates: (10×sqrt(100))²=€10,000
    Subsidy: €9,000.

Here, both groups get their contributions multiplied 10x. But the high-income group gets 10,000x the subsidy.

Given the assumption of wealth equality (and other assumptions), the QF paper proves that allocating more money to art maximizes social welfare, because if people contribute more to the art, it means art it has more utility.

But given the reality of wealth inequality, and the theory of diminishing marginal utility of wealth, the wealthy may contribute more to art simply because they can afford it, and because 1,000,000 may not have any more utility to them than 100 has to a very poor person.

Exactly.

The authors of the QF paper describe it as "an extension of the logic of quadratic voting." They involve similar formulas and both are theoretically optimal (or efficient), and have a single equilibrium. These properties are proven using somewhat similar math.

But they apply to quite different settings and are not really the same thing. With Quadratic Voting, people pay for votes (with cost determined by a certain formula). With Quadratic Funding, people contribute to projects (with matching funds determined by a certain formula).

QV also makes many assumptions that rarely hold in reality, just like QF does. I may write an article about this someday.

Yes, as you (sarcastically) imply people do indeed try to use QF to make actual decisions, not recognizing the proofs are based on assumptions that don't match reality.

There's nothing wrong with making proofs based on simplifying assumptions. A lot of incremental progress is made that way. The problem is not the QF theory, it is that people are using QF in the real world because they think it has all these great theoretical properties in the real world -- not recognizing that the underlying assumptions are unrealistic.

What straw man? The assumptions underlying the theory of QF are spelled out cleanly in the original QF paper. The article is just enumerating these assumptions and showing they don't hold in reality.

The numbers in the example are indeed impossible to measure. But QF is claiming *optimality* -- that it maximizes social welfare -- when certain assumptions hold. To show that QF does not maximize social welfare when these assumptions don't hold, it suffices to show a single hypothetical counterexample.

> Do you have any evidence that these supposed assumptions exist?

By existing, so you mean “hold in reality?”

The point of the article is that the assumption that underly QF do not hold in reality.

> Pillaging these funds seems like it's almost a trivial endeavor assuming

It is, and in fact the authors point this out in the original paper:

"…if the size of this group is greater than 1/α and the group can perfectly coordinate, there is no limit (other than the budget) to how much it can steal."

> I have to say that the biggest flaw I see isn't theoretical, it's practical.

Exactly. The theory is fine -- given all these assumptions hold. In practice, these assumption don't hold.

For example, one of the assumptions is absence of sybil attacks, fraud, or collusion. Obviously, these assumptions may not hold.

You can defend against sybil attacks in various ways. But how do you stop people from colluding (e.g. I $10 to 1000 friends, tell them they can keep $5 if they contribute $5 to my project)? There are collusion-resistant forms of quadratic funding, such as COCM, but these do not have the desirable theoretical properties (such as optimality) that vanilla QF has.

> accepting the social and individual utility of enjoying the arts, but denying any such utility for enjoying the saved lives

But in the part of the article you quoted above, the author (me) specifically acknowledges the utility of enjoying saved lives. But this is a critique of the quadratic funding mechanism, which is a public goods funding mechanism meant to maximize the utility each individual independently derives from enjoying public good.

The whole point of the article is to critique this assumption -- to point out that people's motives are sometimes altruistic (they derive utility just from knowing other people benefit), but the optimality of QF assumes this vicarious utility does not exist. As the article states "When individuals make contributions for purely altruistic reasons, they don’t directly experience the utility themselves. And yet the optimality of QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only."

QF makes assumptions like this, but it's not because the authors assume these assumptions reflect reality. They are just simplifying assumptions that allow formal proof of properties like optimality.

Also this article is explicitly challenging these assumptions.

> levels the playing field by a factor of 10 versus the starting point.

Let's say there were only 10 poor people that contributed to the pipes. The total funding would be $10,000 -- a subsidy of $9,000. So 10x multiplier both for the pipes and the art.

Then let's also say that the marginal utility of $100 for a poor person is equivalent to the marginal utility of $1,000,000 for a rich person.

So we have the same number of contributors for each project, but a much higher marginal utility-per-dollar for lead pipes. But the socially optimal funding would be at the point where the marginal utility-per-dollar are equal for both projects (per the Equimarginal Principle).

Well it's also unfair if we assume large difference in the marginal utility of wealth -- for example to go to extremes, we might assume that a $10 contribution from a low-income individuals represents the same sacrifice as a $1,000,000 contribution from a high-income individual. If that were the case, a $100 contribution from a low-income individual represents 10x the utility of a $1,000,000 contribution from a high-income individual. So in that case the lead would pipes have both more contributors, and higher utility per contributor, than the art. So total utility would be maximized by giving more money to the lead pipes.