Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society book cover

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

by
Price
$20.66
Format
Hardcover
Pages
368
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0691177502
Dimensions
5.7 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches
Weight
1.2 pounds

Description

"One of The Economist's Best Business and Economics Books of 2018""E. Glen Weyl & Eric Posner: One of Bloomberg Businessweek’s “Bloomberg 50” Icons of 2018""Both a savage critique of 'techno-feudalism' and an idealistic appeal to share the fruits of our collective intelligence more fairly." ---John Thornhill, Financial Times " Radical Markets . . . could be best described as an interesting new way of looking at the subject that is sometimes called “political economy” - tackling the big questions of how markets and politics and society intersect. . . . I highly recommend Radical Markets . . . to anyone interested in these kinds of issues, and look forward to seeing the discussion that the book generates." ---Vitalik Buterin "Extremely thought provoking and clearly brilliant . . . Radical Markets certainly made me think about property, information, power. Well worth reading." ---Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist "Doesn’t anybody have anything new to offer? . . . . [Y]es: . . . unleash the awesome power of markets . . . to uplift the poor . . . it just might be what the world needs now. . . . [Posner and Weyl are] smart and iconoclastic, and their book bursts with ideas like kernels of corn on a hot stove." ---Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek "What I love is just some new ideas, because the existing ideas to solve the injustices and inequalities aren’t working! A must-read." ---Carol Massar, Bloomberg Radio "A very thought-provoking book is a bizarre fusion of ideas drawn from the classical liberal . . . . and socialist tradition(s). . . . It contains ideas . . . that really do make you think. It is a really fun book to read and of you are someone who actually likes having your suppositions and beliefs challenged, take a look at it." ---Reihan Salam, National Review's The Editors podcast "An arresting if eccentric manifesto for rebooting liberalism. . . . Radical Markets is refreshing and welcome in its willingness to question received wisdom." ― The Economist "I highly recommend this book! Replacing markets by auctions (sort of). Whether you agree or not, it shows how much liberalism is able to renew itself." ---Gaspard Koenig, Generation Libre "Read this difficult and provocative book. It made my head hurt, and then spin. In a world where our current economic and political models are worth defending but are straining, this can only be a good thing." ---Paschal Donohoe, Irish Times "It will pay the readers . . . great intellectual returns to invest significant time in studying this book very carefully. It is ambitious and bold, and I think it should excite the imagination and motivate careful scholarship and analytical rigor among both critics and those who want to pursue the line of argument laid out." ---Peter Boettke, Coordination Problem "This system has enormous potential ― simple, fair, progressive taxes and a more dynamic economy. It would be much easier to develop new infrastructure, build new homes, buy your neighbour’s garden, and pour concrete all over twee villages to build monorails or airport runways." ---Tim Harford, Financial Times "A provocative new book." ― The Economist "This is free market thinking but not as we know it." ---Diane Coyle, Prospect "Glen Weyl, coauthor of Radical Markets , is tackling the core issues: What does human dignity mean in a highly automated future? How can we regain agency over the data we produce? If these don’t sound like economic questions, then get ready to encounter the future of economics. We can’t just complain about how tech is transforming our world; we need to invent the transformation." ---Jaron Lanier, Wired "[A] bold book." ---Michael Sandel, New Statesman "A law professor and an economist argue that the way out of liberalism’s impasse is to expand the role of markets, not to subdue them. . . . Together they point to a possible response to the challenges of populism and protectionism." ― The Economist " Radical Markets is worth reading both for its genuinely innovative suggestions and its well-researched accounts of the development of economic ideas." ---David V. Axelsen, Economics and Philosophy “In 1903, Elizabeth Magie patented the Landlord’s Game, a property-based board game created with two sets of rules: a monopolist set in which the winner took all and an antimonopolist set in which all wealth was shared across society. It is revealing that only the former set of rules took off, giving birth to the bestselling game Monopoly. Radical Markets sketches a vision of how society might look if it adopted Magie’s second set of rules. Unlike playing with Monopoly money, the stakes in this societal game could scarcely be higher, and the importance of this book could scarcely be greater.” ―Andrew G. Haldane, chief economist, Bank of England "I have always been motivated to find ways to unite the power of technology and markets with the goal of creating a more egalitarian society, and the authors of this book offer an exploration of these apparently contradictory strands." ―Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft "Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to rethink democracy and markets since Milton Friedman. Twenty years from now this just might be the book people are talking about. The writing is excellent, with great examples and historical detail. I admire the ambition and willingness to experiment, a rare thing in economics these days. It just might help launch a new branch of political economy." ―Kenneth S. Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash "One of the most exciting books in the social sciences published in the past several years. Very original, using a consistent ideological approach, and intellectually compelling." ―Branko Milanovic, author of Global Inequality " Radical Markets thinks big and builds daring proposals, all on a unified theme: the need for maintaining competition and eliciting decentralized information, whose neglect led to the demise of planned economies. Whether you are convinced by the specific proposals or not, your confidence in your worldview may well be shattered by the depth and originality of the analysis." ―Jean Tirole, Toulouse School of Economics, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and author of Economics for the Common Good "In our difficult times, with mounting anxieties over migration, global inequality, and the cohesiveness of public culture, many are inclined to reject market-based solutions as heartless and elitist. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl argue that market-based ideas of a radically new sort (though based on neglected insights from the past) have the power to create greater equality and reciprocity. Counterintuitive and fascinating, this book will be an essential part of the debate about global issues going forward." ―Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago "I have always been motivated to find ways to unite the power of technology and markets with the goal of creating a more egalitarian society, and the authors of this book offer an exploration of these apparently contradictory strands." --Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft "Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to rethink democracy and markets since Milton Friedman. Twenty years from now this just might be the book people are talking about. The writing is excellent, with great examples and historical detail. I admire the ambition and willingness to experiment, a rare thing in economics these days. It just might help launch a new branch of political economy." --Kenneth S. Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash "One of the most exciting books in the social sciences published in the past several years. Very original, using a consistent ideological approach, and intellectually compelling." --Branko Milanovic, author of Global Inequality " Radical Markets thinks big and builds daring proposals, all on a unified theme: the need for maintaining competition and eliciting decentralized information, whose neglect led to the demise of planned economies. Whether you are convinced by the specific proposals or not, your confidence in your worldview may well be shattered by the depth and originality of the analysis." --Jean Tirole, Toulouse School of Economics, Nobel Laureate in Economics, and author of Economics for the Common Good "In our difficult times, with mounting anxieties over migration, global inequality, and the cohesiveness of public culture, many are inclined to reject market-based solutions as heartless and elitist. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl argue that market-based ideas of a radically new sort (though based on neglected insights from the past) have the power to create greater equality and reciprocity. Counterintuitive and fascinating, this book will be an essential part of the debate about global issues going forward." --Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago "I have always been motivated to find ways to unite the power of technology and markets with the goal of creating a more egalitarian society, and the authors of this book offer an exploration of these apparently contradictory strands." --Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Eric A. Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His many books include The Twilight of Human Rights Law and Climate Change Justice (Princeton). He lives in Chicago. E. Glen Weyl is principal researcher at Microsoft, founder and chairman of RadicalxChange, and visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He lives in New Jersey. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • 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.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(77)
★★★★
25%
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★★★
15%
(39)
★★
7%
(18)
★
23%
(59)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Too theoretical and idealistic for me to actually like; thus, just OK!

Just OK. Thus the 3-star rating. The authors have written a book that tries to describe how they think the US should tackle the country's poor economic health and serious income inequality among its citizens. They say they agree with some of the Democrat ideas to raise taxes and redistribute income, and they agree with some of the ideas of the Republicans about privatizing everything and lowering tax rates. But my biggest problem with the book is the authors seem to think their idea of how to fix things is the The Third Option: Repub, Dem, and Theirs (the third). When in reality there are many “third options.”

I don't agree that “Radical Markets” as the authors envision is the solution. And I don't agree that what authors propose is even possible to achieve. There is just too much cheating, gaming, and dishonesty in the world for improvement created through the author's proposals. And to aim for equality among people is impossible. Maybe things can be made fair, but never equal.

There is talk of markets that are monopolies or nonexistent that are important and need to be changed. Ok, then take the profit motive out of them. Regulate them big time. Make them little more than nonprofit hangouts. For example, eliminate the profit motive in the healthcare industry. Make all doctors work for low fixed incomes like a social worker if they they want to work as a doctor. Kind of the way ministers work for peanuts. Cut the pharmaceutical companies down by fixing the prices they can charge for drugs. It's not like we need new drugs. So should we let the drug companies charge high prices by claiming they need profits to subsidize new research? But the authors don't suggest doing anything like this.

I suppose if someone wants to figure out a solution to the economic mess the US is in today, then they might do well to read this book. Not to find solutions or good ideas, but instead to think up a better mousetrap than the authors have designed. Sometimes it is good to read somebody else's garbage ideas in order to formulate a better set of ideas of your own. It is for this reason that I think the book is OK. No way did I love it (5-stars) or even like it (4-stars). But for the correct individual this might be a very good book to read. 3 stars!
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Imagine no possessions

So I ordered this without paying enough attention to notice that, for all his references to Gary Becker in the introduction, co-author Eric Posner is… my age!

Turns out he’s the son of judge Richard Posner, from whose text, along with Polinsky’s, my teacher Keith Hylton introduced me to the subject of Law and Economics some thirty (gulp!) years ago and whose blog with Gary Becker was such a joy to read until Becker’s recent passing.

Eric Posner and his co-author Glen Weyl start by surveying the state of the post-2008 world and stating that our economics and our politics have reached the end of the line. Now, they argue, is the time for some radical ideas.

There are, indeed, lots of non-standard ideas here. Hacks, more like. Some are, frankly, duds. One, just one, is solid gold!

Hack number one aims to unlock the economy’s potential for growth by setting underutilized assets free. It is dubbed COST for “common-ownership self-assessed tax” and the idea is that nobody really ought to own anything in permanence. The scheme works as follows: if you’re sitting on an asset you need to let the world know what it’s worth and you must pay tax on that assessment of its value. Crucially, everybody else is allowed to buy it from you at the price at which you’ve assessed it! As a result, the asset is always being used by whoever (thinks he) can put it to its best use and society is always earning a cut.

The thing is, before John Lennon sang “Imagine no possessions” the Beatles first sang “I, me, mine.” Even leaving to one side the fact that this idea is rather “coercive” (as the authors most certainly do!) it’s also rather impractical, because it turns every citizen into a trader. Some of us are good traders, but is that a good use of everybody’s time? And there’s the issue of deciding upfront what the typical lifetime of an asset can be. Plus the fact that many assets require upkeep of the kind you’d try to avoid if your tenure as the custodian was uncertain.

There are myriads of other impracticalities; indeed the authors dedicate pages 64 to 66 addressing a number of them, but just as they are discussing how to solve one problem a keen reader can think of another. Example: to circumvent the fact that many assets are owned on a leveraged basis, the authors suggest that loans must automatically move with property. Erm, right there, that’s the end of banking, the activity of lending chiefly against character, rather than collateral. I could go on…

Hack number two is “quadratic voting.” The idea is to allocate to every citizen a bunch of votes and then allow you to save your vote on one or more issues and allow you to use multiple votes on another, with the caveat that you can only influence the outcome by the square root of your voting power. So the square root of one is one, but if you are allocating sixteen votes to something you really care about, then it only counts as four votes. It’s a neat trick, because that way majorities who don’t really care about a subject can get outvoted on this subject by minorities who actually do. The minority who does so, however, has to give up on the other things on which it can’t vote.

Again, the idea sounds fantastic (and the associated math, whereby the cost of an externality grows with the square of the externality itself, is rather convincing), but the practicalities are daunting. How many issues do we really vote on to begin with, how does one go about allocating votes to people and over what period? How many votes do people get for President and how many for local school council? How should we deal with surprise elections?

Suppose we’ve solved all those problems, bigger ones arise: once we’ve broken one-man-one-vote, have we not opened pandora’s box? This could be the thin edge of the wedge in terms of introducing all sorts of ways to disenfranchise the underprivileged or the poor. Even more importantly, those of us who can do the math know that on the margin our vote will rarely swing any results. We chiefly vote out of civic duty. In my view, schemes that assign weights to votes undermine this principle.

The third hack, Visas Between Individuals Program (VIP) would allow each citizen to bring to the country an immigrant for a fixed period of time on a pre-agreed stipend and to earn for himself any money the immigrant would make in the host country in excess of the pre-agreed stipend. The idea is that everybody comes out of this better and that the people of the host country benefit directly from immigration, rather than read in textbooks that it’s a good thing…..

Erm, where do I start with this brilliant idea?

I almost stopped reading right there, but thank goodness I didn’t, because hack number four (no more implementable than hacks one, two or three) aims to solve an important problem of twenty-first century capitalism that has a much deeper and much more concentrated cause than I ever realized.

Long story short, if you ever come across “Radical Markets,” go straight to page 168 where the authors give the answer to one of the big unsolved mysteries of modern finance. To wit, anybody you ask what’s wrong about twenty-first century capitalism in America will list at least one of the following:

1. Market Power, the result of continuing mergers eliminating competition among companies in every sector both for our custom and to employ us.

2. Lack of investment, as companies increasingly prefer to buy back their own shares, rather than invest in capital and human capital.

3. Inequality, as CEOs benefit from said buybacks via their share option schemes, while everybody else is left with fewer options in terms of picking employers.

The authors explain that a major contributor to this malaise is the fact that at least thirty percent of all stocks are owned by indexers and quasi-indexers such as Fidelity, Vanguard, Blackrock etc. The main thing these companies need is the stock index to go up and they don’t even need to exercise their substantial voting power to force it up. CEOs know that to keep their jobs they need to get the share price to go up now, and who cares about later. As part of the bargain, their own share options make them millionaires, while the ones who get forced out have the consolation of a golden parachute.

The hack the authors propose is simple: no investor with more than 1% of the market should have more than one holding per sector! “Good luck with that one,” I hear you say, but God knows it would do the trick: these players would suddenly need to win in the marketplace!

Hack number five isn’t much of a hack: the authors observe that while we have a way to unionize as workers, we have not found a way to do so as providers of our own data to Google and Facebook. “Datapoints of the world, unite” they scream, but I read the chapter and I could not find any concrete proposals, not even of the unworkable variety…

Finally come the chapters that attempt to tie it all together.

Whether you agree or disagree with the authors, there is no denying that the two of them are still looking for a unifying theory. You read this book and you hope they can somehow pull these seeds of ideas together, but they decidedly don’t! Five or six “hacks,” even if they are good hacks, do not amount to redefining the field of Economics.

So this was a fun read that kept me on my toes, taught me stuff and even came with a major “aha” moment, but it wasn’t worth the praise lavished on it by the luminaries on the back cover. It would be an amazingly dangerous first book in Economics for a layman, let’s put it that way.
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Libertarian Solutions

This book—with a quote on the back by crypto-celebrity Vitalik Buterin—is having its cultural moment, quickly making the rounds in libertarian-leaning circles (Silicon Valley, blockchain, etc.).

It describes five political and economic frameworks, which are each a subset of what the authors self-define as “radical markets:"

I. Cost (Harberger Tax): all property has a publicly visible self-assessed tax. Anyone can purchase the underlying asset at any time at the inferred price.

Are there any examples of such a structure being deployed in the wild, and what have been the results? The one widely-practiced implementation of cost that I’m familiar with is with public companies and private equity. In a publicly-held company, fiduciaries are often obligated to sell a company to the highest bidder when there is an offer to take the company private. Leveraged buy-outs and hostile takeovers are common in this space. The basic strategy is to put all revenues into debt service, and liquidate aspects of the company that contribute to its long-term viability, as well as the social and environmental wellbeing of its stakeholders. This results in significant short-term increase in profitability, but can often compromise the company (or society) in the long-term.

Another challenge here is that such this structure is at odds with an understanding that humans can be in relationship with place. Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language,” goes as far as to say that ownership (and never tenancy) is the only ethical form of residence, as it encourages a sense of equity and stewardship in relation to a place. I’m immediately reminded of Colonialism and the seizure of land from indigenous peoples the world over, backed by superior financial capital and a paradigm that values land through economic utility. Although there are ways that people lose their property already (by not paying taxes, or through illegal behavior), a cost doesn’t seem compatible with a healthy and responsible relationship with place.

II. Quadratic Voting: votes can be stockpiled and deployed on issues deemed priorities by the voter, but with an inverse logarithmic weighting—one credit is worth one vote, four credits are worth two votes, nine credits are worth three votes, etc.

The authors of this book have experience with this system, as they founded a company—Collective Decision Engines—based on this technology.

The basic idea capitalizes on the failure of voting systems without built-in scarcity, such as the five-star rating system, where the mean tends towards four (instead of three), and there are a surprising number of ratings at both ends of the spectrum. A scarcity-based voting system requires participants to carefully prioritize issues, and only vote on a small percentage of issues that they care most about.

One of the challenges that I see with deploying such a system in the real world surrounds the impossibility of accurately predicting when significant political questions will arise in the future. Quadratic voting is driven by budgeting, and it seems almost impossible to determine years in advance when the next Bernie or Trump will be coming up for election. If anything, it seems quadratic voting would drive voter participation down (which is already alarmingly low), as there would now be scarcity.

Although being quadratic helps to neutralize this exploit, given that most eligible voters in the US don’t vote, there could be hacks related to get-out-the-vote techniques that target older voters with decades of unspent votes piled up…

Personally, I find quadratic voting the most promising framework shared in this book, and am interested in learning more about how and where it is being deployed in the world.

III. Immigrant Equity: citizens have the right to literally invest in immigrants, by sponsoring their time in the new country in exchange for a percentage of their income. The inspiration behind this mechanism is to encourage nationalists to become more cosmopolitan by sharing in the yields of open borders, all the while opening labor markets and reducing global wealth inequality. Although the ends sound very desirable, the means sound dystopian, akin to sharecropping.

IV. Shareholders as Owners: shareholders simultaneously are too concentrated across sectors, but not concentrated enough in individual companies. I had trouble following this section of the book. I don’t agree that the purpose of corporations are as profit engines (and it seems that the authors had some questions along these lines as well). I also don’t think owning shares should be conflated with true ownership; corporate law scholar Lynn Stout does an excellent job debunking this concept in her book, “The Shareholder Value Myth."

V. Payment for Personal Data: we already treat people as products—why not start financially compensating them for their value? Just like the way that fossil fuel companies don’t have to pay for climate change (yet), big tech companies don’t pay for their most valuable resource—all of the free personal data and labor that their products (users) supply them with. But because of this, these companies often need to take circuitous and inefficient routes in coming to their most valuable data. Why not just start paying people for what they want, so that they could better communicate their needs? Although this is a novel solution to this problem, a more comprehensive solution would be for services like Google and Facebook to discontinue their ad businesses, switch to a zero-knowledge paid or gift-based revenue model, and for there to be a Universal Basic Income to deal with technology-driven unemployment.

In summary, I think that there are a lot of interesting ideas in this book. I would absolutely agree with the authors that these ideas are not ready for prime time, and I’d be interested in seeing ways that they’re put into practice and experimentation.
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Radical Markets is one of the most creative and passionate works of Economics I have ever read...

Radical Markets is one of the most creative and passionate works of Economics I have ever read. The authors start from the (timely) premise that the modern liberal order is in crisis, and offer a series of solutions that break through the stale statist vs capitalist debate. The topics covered may seem scattered at first, but they are united by a common belief that well-designed markets can make society both more equitable and more productive.

Some reviewers have criticized the solutions put forth as too extreme or impractical; but I believe that's missing the point. Unlike many "radical" thinkers, they aren't asking us to overthrow the status quo based on tenuous evidence or pure speculation. Instead, their ideas have evolved out of the rich and rigorous world of formal economics, and they recommend a gradual approach to testing and tweaking their ideas based on empirical evidence. Moreover, even if their ideas are not fully adopted, the benefits of incremental adoption of could still be massive.

You may disagree with the particular solutions provided by the authors. You may even disagree with the premise that our societies and economies need radical change. But at the very least, the authors will challenge you to defend assumptions you hold very dear. That alone is much more than can be said of most recent economic thought, and is surely worth the price of admission.
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"Radical" ideas, clear exposition and A LOT of food for thought

This book is one of the must-reads for those even barely interested in economics.
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Would Require a Total Upheaval of our Society to be Implemented

Authors Eric A. Posner (University of Chicago) and E. Glen Weil (Yale) have produced a very provocative book, “Radical Markets”, on what needs to be done to stem the tide of inequality, political conflict, and rising corruption. The authors propose a new way to organize markets for “the good of everyone.” This spirit of “liberal reform” is promised to lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation.

This will be an engaging read for you if you believe (or at least be open to the authors’ arguments) that:
1. private property is inherently monopolistic
2. private ownership needs to be converted into a public auction for public benefit
3. the principle of one person, one vote inhibits democracy
4. and that we must replace our most sacred institutions to reduce corruption and reignite business initiative.

The authors point out flaws in solutions offered by both the left and the right.

The right’s flaw has been timid and unimaginative in its vision of social changes necessary to make markets flourish – holding on to a nostalgic notion of idealized markets and market fundamentalism with governments focused on protecting private property and enforcing contracts.

The left’s has been its reliance on discretionary power of government bureaucratic elites to fix social ills - imagined by the left to be benevolent, ideologically neutral, and committed to the public good. These elites are sometimes arbitrary, corrupt, incompetent, or are perceived that way whether they are not. They are distrusted by the public (think about nationalistic movements here and abroad).

Their basic premise in “Radical Markets” is that “markets are, and for the medium-term will remain, the best way of arranging a society.” But with the most important markets monopolized, we need to create something new that will lead to truly competitive, open and free markets. This would entail a radical restructuring of property rights by making them conditional (we would need to continuously “bid” for property we already own), immigration policy and voting (allow 100 million more immigrants into the United States, change how investors can hold shares in corporations, and revise the one-person, one-vote rule.

The authors propose that: data be treated as labor where individuals are compensated for the data harvested from their activities; there is a self-assessed tax on all private property that converts ownership into an auction with the proceeds funding and generous social dividend for all citizens; visas are between individuals so individuals would sponsor a migrant worker; institutional investors are banned from diversification within industries; and voters would be incentivized to allocate a budget of voices across issues or candidates in proportion to how important they find each.

“Radical Markets” proposes radical solutions. One of the book’s failures, in my opinion, is that cultural issues – divorce, dual income families, fatherless homes, deferred childbirths, etc. – which are at the roots of inequality are ignored.
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Old ideas made new

When this came out, the real focus was on the immigration proposal that was more or less slavery with extra steps. Then there was also the part where all property is continually for sale. I wasn't sympathetic to most of the proposals they had in here - one, quantum voting sounds interesting but can also feel full of holes once you start asking questions - because they feel like some sort of rehashed cross between radical libertarianism and public choice. These both have been in practice used as intellectual justification to further marginalize the already marginalized. That is not the state goal here, it is market worship in extremis, but I worry about Market Failure even more when it become your god.
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Markets can free us from capitalism as we know it

Solidly written, well argued, completely novel concepts for organizing both our consumption choices and the state. Anyone who considers themselves a scholar of ecnomic systems should read this as it represents a possible new movement and direction.
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A pastiche of economic fallacies

A pastiche of economic fallacies. His introductory framework for understanding wealth distribution was so wrong that I didn't stick around to find out what edifice he erected on it. If you love Picketty, the Gini Coefficient, and other misapplications of statistics, presumably you will make it further into this book than I did.
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An analytic, thought-provoking and constructive book

This book points out obviously problems with the way society is currently organized and then makes simple proposals for organizing markets in entirely different ways to achieve better outcomes. Reading it is a valuable exercise for anyone involved in formulating policy. Much of what is happening today is in fact a reorganization of markets and society. Airbnb has already changed the nature of property ownership. Why not stop to think creatively and proactively about how we might tax property ownership to achieve better and more flexible social objectives? If you don't like the authors' proposals, what do you think might work better? The answer "whatever we're already doing right now" is not a good one, particularly given the degree to which technology has changed and is changing. The book is clear in setting out some of the problems. When it comes to voting, for example, the book does a nice job of laying out the classic problems with organizing a democracy. Some of these problems are prominent right now. You may not think that quadratic voting is the solution, but it is worth spending a last a bit of time asking yourself what might be a better approach, and you'll enjoy the process of asking yourself how a different approach would work. I really appreciated the opportunity this book gave me to do precisely that.

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