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03Flagship

Preventive Public Goods

Public goods whose value lies in the harm they avoid.

Preventive public goods are systematically underfunded for a simple reason: their success is invisible. A prevented pandemic, a defused conflict, or an election held cleanly produces no headline. The harm that did not happen is not counted.

This framework names that class of goods and the valuation problem at its center. It argues for treating averted harm as a measurable form of value, and for funding mechanisms that do not depend on crises to justify the spending that would have prevented them.

Examples span the Lab's domains: disinformation prevention, election integrity, climate early warning, AI safety, cybersecurity, and conflict prevention.

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