Name: Radical Markets
ISBN: 9780691196060

Eric A. Posner

E Glen Weyl

Revealing bold new ways to structure markets for the good of everyone, this book shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant 19th-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation.

Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

Radical Markets

E. Glen Weyl

Revolutionary ideas on how to use markets to bring about fairness and prosperity for all Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking—and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against—on its head. The book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone. It shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl demonstrate why private property is inherently monopolistic, and how we would all be better off if private ownership were converted into a public auction for public benefit. They show how the principle of one person, one vote inhibits democracy, suggesting instead an ingenious way for voters to effectively influence the issues that matter most to them. They argue that every citizen of a host country should benefit from immigration—not just migrants and their capitalist employers. They propose leveraging antitrust laws to liberate markets from the grip of institutional investors and creating a data labor movement to force digital monopolies to compensate people for their electronic data. Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition—Radical Markets shows how.

Sebastian Leck

Radical Markets has interesting ideas but it varies in quality from chapter to chapter. The best chapter was the one on the hidden impact of large institutional investors on the economy. The chapter on improving the immigration system, meanwhile, left me wondering if the authors had met any real human beings before. 

The book was at its strongest when it challenged traditional ideas about central planning and market systems. Despite a long public relations effort to make markets seem natural, they are the products of institutional arrangements, and the two authors argued that markets can be designed better to "decentralize power while spurring collective action." They have all sorts of wild proposals to do that, from a compulsory society-wide auctions to a voting system that lets citizens save up votes and spend more of them on issues that matter to them.

The biggest problem with the book for me was that it was written by a lawyer and an economist who see the world through a simplified economics lens. There's a lot of abstract logical problems and discussions about optimization rather than the granular, historically-grounded writing that you'll get from most social scientists and historians.

Each chapter begins with a hypothetical anecdote that reads like a fictional short story set in a world that has implemented the policy solution they suggest. The characters in these short anecdotes are not believable as human beings, and they were revealing about the way that the authors perceive social issues. 

In particular, an anecdote about a fictional Haitian immigrant called Delphine and a right-wing, working-class Frenchman named Fabian felt unrealistic and unnecessary. Besides the awkward characterization, it fully buys into the idea that anti-immigrant sentiment originates from economic anxiety, which is debatable as a premise. (One example of the prose: "He had hated so many Muslim immigrants who he had felt were changing the culture of the country, but he came to have a paternalistic and condescending love for the Haitians he managed and hosted. Their love of France, their gratitude, their struggles to adapt and learn...they all melted Fabian's jaded heart.") Another anecdote that I think was intended to be a parody of Silicon Valley hustle culture fell flat.

Overall, if you're interested in economics or political economy, it's worth picking it up but skipping the chapters that lose your interest. Their big idea—the perpetual auction—is in Chapter 1 and then the rest of the chapters are variations on this same way of thinking in different areas.

Keven Wang

Omar

I read this book as a way to instill new ideas, spark new thinking, and not as a realistic or pragmatic guide to solve problems. I like most of the ideas, but they are presented, purposefully, in a radical or visionary way that seems far too out there for it to be realistic. Because of this, it is at times easy to fall back into reading it purely as a theoretical/interesting thought experiment and not critically to consider how we might implement some of the ideas. 



That said, I think the concepts and ideas will resonate. In particular, finding creative ways to redistribute voting power in a way that actually reflects people's passions, similar to a market, and it's not simply binary voting (yes/no) where each person counts as one. The ideas exposed are interesting in that regard. 



I also enjoyed the discussions around private property and how we might rethink it, particularly for land which is so limited and often its private ownership can truly hinder development of great goods for society. I have long been thinking about the problem of land ownership in places with high demand and loved the concepts explored in this book. However, I also think that there's something terribly unsettling of moving from our current model to one in which anyone might bid and buy your place immediately if they are willing to pay the price you've reported your place to be valued at. While I like the direct link between the price you post & your taxes, to eliminate gaming the tax system, I don't think that just because someone else can afford to pay that price and wants it you should have to move out right away. It puts the long-term security, particularly of the retired with modest income, at the mercy of rich buyers. 



Overall, I give this 4 stars because of the interesting ideas discussed and the many benefits to society as a whole. However, I do think that for me to be more excited about the ideas I'd need a more pragmatic view of how the ideas would be introduced in a way that don't create chaos and unintended consequences that hurt vulnerable sectors of society.

Radical Markets Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

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