Glen Weyl is the co-author, with Eric Posner, of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. Despite its subtitle, the book is decidedly pro-market, arguing that price mechanisms are invaluable tools for allocating resources and building healthy societies. But those markets have to be carefully designed to achieve that goal.
Glen Weyl
The book argues, among other points, that large-scale private property actually distorts the function of markets, and that public goods like land should be managed through structures that benefit everyone (like auctions). The ideas, as the authors acknowledge, are in many ways a 21st-century update of the work of Henry George, who campaigned against private monopolies of natural resources, and in favor of collectively-owned systems like public transit. The book has been greeted with something close to rapture: Harvard economist Ken Rogoff called it “perhaps the most ambitious attempt to rethink democracy and markets since Milton Friedman.”
The book has attracted another big-name fan: Vitalik Buterin. The Ethereum creator saw “multifaceted and plentiful” connections between the book’s ideas and the goals of his smart contract platform. Buterin and Weyl have since worked together on papers refining the book’s ideas, and to start RadicalxChange, a conference and growing organization.
Source: https://breakermag.com/vitalik-buterin-thinks-this-mans-ideas-can-break-americas-political-logjam/
