Paradoxical contaminations in human development: immaterial goods and cryptocurrency trusts

This paper explores and raises questions about the role of diverse forms of economic coordination for the vitality of people and their communities. We build on a specific notion of "vitality" from Sacchetti (2024) and suggest the relevance of economic institutions that emphasise the role of shared processes that build upon relational good to promote vitality. We emphasise economic institutions that place at the heart of the identificaiton of their aims and objectives inclusive and cooperative processes, which benefit from "contamination" of motivations, ideas, knowledge and resources more generally from multiple publics. We then compare the nature and effects of inclusive and cooperative processes in the social and solidarity economy with cooperation designed within blockchain technologies. We argue that, despite both economic coordination modalities are argued to root in cooperation, only the first mode of organising production builds and reinforces at the same time relational goods and the vitality of people and territories, focusing on mutual help, deliberative practice, use of creativity and solidarity. Blockchain technology applied to cryptocurrency trust, differently, focuses on the creation of material wealth but crowds out shared inter-personal processes and actions, thus hampering vitality. It follows that cryptocurrency trusts feed wealth on the one hand but subtract from vitality on the other. The wealth creation effect can be hence off-balanced by the loss of immaterial goods. We conclude that contaminating Ideas of wellbeing with coordination solutions that mostly ground on material wealth and extractive practices can lead to paradoxical outcomes in our economies.