Crowdsourcing Machines

Democracy, Disintermediation, and Finance

May 5, 2015

Overview

This seminar will explore various initiatives aimed at decentralizing the levers of public finance, and increasing the level of citizen and community participation in government budgetary decisions. Questions to be addressed include:

How can public finance be harnessed to address issues such as political corruption, copyright overexpansion and structural racial wealth inequality?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of promoting citizen-level investment through conditional cash-transfer programs?

What are the capacities and limits of participatory budgeting practices?

Participants

Speaker

Dean Baker

Co-Director

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Speaker

Larry Lessig

Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership

Harvard Law School

Speaker

Michael Menser

Co-Founder, President

Participatory Budgeting (PB) Project

Speaker

Alan Aja

Assistant Professor, Deputy Chair - Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies

Brooklyn College (CUNY)

Core Resources

More Money Can Beat Big Money

Lessig, Larry. “More Money Can Beat Big Money.” The New York Times (2011).

The Artistic Freedom Voucher: An Internet Age Alternative To Copyrights

Baker, Dean. The Artistic Freedom Voucher: An Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights.” Center for Economic Policy Research, 2003.

From A Tangle Of Pathology To A Race-Fair America

Aja, Alan, et al. “ From a Tangle of Pathology to a Race-Fair America.” (2014).

Executive Summary: A People’s Budget – A Research And Evaluation Report On Participatory Budgeting In New York City

Projec, The Community Executive Summary: A People’s Budget – A Research and Evaluation Report on Participatory Budgeting in New York City. The Urban Justice Center, 2014.