Radical Markets - I Mean Really Radical

Policy proposals from the White Queen. (It's a Lewis Carroll reference. No, I'm not talking about the Mad Hatter or the Red Queen. It's from "Through the Looking Glass".)

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

By: Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl Published: 2019 384 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A series of radical proposals for restructuring property, voting, immigration, investing, and employment. All of the proposals seek to solve the problem of "monopolized or missing markets" in ways that seem pretty strange. One has to wonder if there's a good reason those markets didn't exist in the first place.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Posner has his finger in all sorts of things, and has defended everything from post-9/11 government surveillance to increasing foreign aid. I guess the throughline is a belief in technocratic solutions?

Weyl is an economist working for Microsoft who helped popularize the idea of quadratic voting, and had a political awakening while reading Ayn Rand. This feels more like his book than Posner's but perhaps I'm imagining that.

Who should read this book?

I read this as part of an ACX/SSC book club. Most of the people didn't like it. They felt that it was too radical. (Though you can't say we weren't warned, it's right there in the title.) But if you want to see what mechanisms Georgist economists come up with when they're completely unrestrained, this might be the book for you.

What does the book have to say about the future?

Hayek is famous for noting that the big advantage of markets is that they are giant distributed systems for discovering prices and allocating resources effectively. They're obviously not perfect, and socialists have long dreamt of having a centrally planned economy that would be fairer and work better. Posner and Weyl imagine a future where computing power and machine learning could take over some of the work currently being done by markets, and thereby improve the outcomes.

Specific thoughts: "Six impossible things before breakfast"