Radical Markets: Solutions for a Gilded Age?

Ken Taylor
Is the market the key to freedom and prosperity?

Debra Satz
Don’t markets always lead to economic inequality?

Ken Taylor
Is it possible to make markets work better for everyone?

Debra Satz
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Debra Satz
And I’m Debra Satz.

Ken Taylor
We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Debra Satz
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken and I teach philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Our topic today: Radical market solutions for a new Gilded Age.

Debra Satz
Well, we do live in a gilded age, an age with rampant inequality, the rich getting richer and stagnation for the rest of us.

Ken Taylor
So that’s why we asking that question today is whether markets so called Radical markets can cure the ills of this new Gilded Age?

Debra Satz
How can markets possibly be the cure, Ken? Markets are what got us into the problem.

Ken Taylor
Come on, Debra. Markets are cool. Markets have given us everything from iPhones and autos to skyscrapers and airlines.

Debra Satz
Yeah, but they’ve also concentrated wealth in the hands of the few. And don’t even get me started on some of there’s external effects like pollution and climate change. Ken, you’re romanticizing the market.

Ken Taylor
Well, you want the government to be in control? Not me, Debra, I’ll take the decentralized distributed power of free markets over the concentrated power of the command economy any day of the week.

Debra Satz
De-centralized power? What are you talking about? Economic power is highly concentrated today. But instead of being concentrated in the hands of the state, it’s concentrated in the hands of a few huge multinational corporations. They’re just like the robber barons of Oh, except they go further. They control everything, including our information.

Ken Taylor
Look Debra, I’m going to admit that there’s too much power in the hands of corporations. I’m with you there. But that’s not really the fault of markets, per se.

Debra Satz
Of course it is. We rely on the market way too much.

Ken Taylor
Oh, no, we don’t rely on markets nearly enough.

Debra Satz
You want to give even more power to the market?

Ken Taylor
I do. Because that’s the only answer to the concentration of economic power that you and I both limited, we have to break up the corporations. That way we’ll get more competition, less concentration of wealth, and we’ll let the market operate more freely.

Debra Satz
Ken, I don’t think you understand the true logic of capitalism.

Tom Waits
Oh, Debra, that’s so fancy. What are you talking about?

Debra Satz
The fact that capitalist competition necessarily leads to monopoly. Capitalism is all about economic efficiency. And after all monopolies can be ruthlessly efficient.

Ken Taylor
Monopolies mean less competition, higher prices, less choice. Now how in the world is that efficient?

Debra Satz
Well, look, before the depression, there were something like 100, maybe 200 American car companies, the market decided it could produce more cars more cheaply with just the big three.

Ken Taylor
But look, look then, Debra, you’re getting me wrong. I’m not saying that the unfettered market is all that we need. We also need things like you know, anti trust laws. I’m sure you’re a fan of antitrust law.

Debra Satz
Ah, so Ken, now it seems you want to have your market cake and eat it too.

Ken Taylor
Well, well, if you’re accusing me of wanting markets to be at least lightly regulated against the concentration of Well, yeah, I plead guilty to that.

Debra Satz
Okay. But let’s take this a bit further. Let’s think about labor unions. Do you object to them?

Ken Taylor
No, of course, it didn’t. You know, I grew up in a labor household. I love labor.

Debra Satz
Okay. But labor unions are a form of monopoly, a form of monopoly that helps restrain concentrated corporate power. So monopolies not always the problem.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, yeah. What you’re trying to do to me, you’re trying to do the Socratic thing you’re trying to get me to make more and more concessions to the importance of non market forces and impressive changes. You’re gonna get me on this side of the state or something, but no, no, no, I’m not gonna go there. And let’s not lose sight of the fundamental point. What is that? Is that bottom? Look, you got two choices, Debra, either the markets going to allocate things, or the government’s going to do it. And given the choice between the two, I’ll take the market over the government almost any day of the week.

Debra Satz
Look, governments can focus on fairness, justice, and the common good. Markets don’t care about that. That’s not their business.

Ken Taylor
Haven’t you read your Adam Smith? What, you don’t like the invisible hand and all that?

Debra Satz
You know, the invisible hand is sometimes an iron fist can think about how automation is displaced on skilled laborer and decimated whole communities. Look at the gig economy.

Ken Taylor
What do have against the gig economy? The gig economy is cool, it lets everyone work as much as they want whenever they want. I call that freedom—you got something against freedom?

Debra Satz
Atomized workers struggling to make a living wage isn’t freedom.

Ken Taylor
Look, Debra, I’m going to admit there’s lots of things about here. And I’m going to grant there aren’t any obvious answers. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to explore the surprisingly radical origins of the free market. She files this report.

Liza Veale
What if I told you free markets used to be a cause of the left?

Elizabeth Anderson
Free-market thinking begins in the 17th century.

Liza Veale
This is Elizabeth Anderson with the University of Michigan, and we’re using the classical definition of the left as egalitarianism and the right as authoritarian.

Elizabeth Anderson
They were objecting to domination by the rich who were backed up by the state.yt

Monty Python
Oh King, eh? Very nice. And how’d you get to be that? By exploiting the workers!

Elizabeth Anderson
You already have explorers going off, colonies are being established and really big money can be made on international trade.

Liza Veale
But there was no pretense of free markets. At this time, the aristocrats controlled the state and the economy stood the beta King. They were one team.

Elizabeth Anderson
The state would award a monopoly in candle-making to one manufacturer and a monopoly in trade and wool to another. Really the state rigged the rules of property in favor of really rich people.

Liza Veale
So dissenters began to emerge, and they were coming from this egalitarrian, democratic, liberal way of thinking.

Cromwell
I will bring the law within the reach of every common man. This nation will prosper!

Elizabeth Anderson
The small manufacturers wanted in on those opportunities, and not have them just monopolized by favorites of the state. Their idea was free markets, let us be our own bosses, and we can run our businesses the way we please.

Liza Veale
In other words, free markets make us free, free to be self employed. Because the rigged markets, they don’t just lock regular workers out of the action, it means that in order to support themselves, they’d have to work for the aristocrats.

Elizabeth Anderson
The vast majority of workers would have a boss and the bulk of revenues would go to their employer with them only earning a wage.

Liza Veale
These free-marketeers, they weren’t just articulating their own self-interest—they developed an entire ideology. They argued that, yes, these big monopolies do benefit from economies of scale. But self-employed workers will always be better because they have the incentive of getting to keep what they earn. This is Adam Smith, Tom Paine, and all the way up to Abraham Lincoln. But what these guys didn’t predict is how dramatically the world was about to change.

Modern Times
Get back to work! Attention foreman!

Liza Veale
The Industrial Revolution, and especially the machine age, wiped out sel- employed enterprises.

Elizabeth Anderson
And so we get a fundamental change of reality in the 19th century.

Liza Veale
So today, when people extol free markets, they may still mean no state enforced monopolies, level the playing field. But the rhetoric is also used to oppose a bunch of things that weren’t in play when free marketeers got started. Things like regulations, organized labor and taxing business.

Elizabeth Anderson
This old rhetoric that markets will make you free, which seems pretty plausible before the Industrial Revolution—conservatives just continued to utter the same words, forgetting that the original premise of that argument was that it would make them free of their bosses.

Liza Veale
Elizabeth Anderson argues that the freedom on offer by contemporary free marketeers now has nothing to do with work. It’s about freedom as a consumer.

Speaker 4
Because of Obamacare, I am now stuck with a plan that doesn’t work for me. My choice was taken away from me.

Speaker 5
School choice is a way governments can give parents back their education tax dollars to choose whatever educational options they think best fit their kids.

Liza Veale
But today’s focus on consumers…

Elizabeth Anderson
ignores the realities that people have that work. It’s very rare for conservative rhetoric to even consider the abuses workers face at work. And when they do, the standard argument that they give is if you don’t like it, you’re free to quit.

Liza Veale
That’s a pretty limited definition of freedom. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
And thanks for that tour the evolution of the idea of free market, from radical idea to conservative dogma, Liza. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague Deborah Satz. Today, our topic is the role of markets in creating a better society.

Debra Satz
We’re joined now by Glenn Weyl. he’s a researcher at Microsoft and a visiting senior scholar in economics at Yale. And he’s co-author with Eric Posner of the new book, “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a New Society. Glenn, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Glenn Weyl
Great to be talking with you, Ken and Debra.

Ken Taylor
So Glenn, thanks for joining. I find your book fascinating. I want to know how you first got interested in rethinking kind of rooted and branch the very idea of how markets work.

Glenn Weyl
The summer after I graduated from college, I spent what I thought at the time was the most unproductive summer of my life, which was in Rio de Janeiro. But you know, things come back in unpredictable ways, obviously. And the seeing Rio, seeing all the inequality, seeing the terrible ways in which the slums their work, it really changed my perspective and inspired my wife’s work. She’s a Latin American political scientist, and it inspired me to think about the way the markets can work and not work.

Debra Satz
That’s a kind of an interesting beginning that you were prompted by thinking about inequality. But you might have heard in the opening section, Ken and I went back and forth, along some pretty traditional lines, with Ken arguing in favor of free markets, and my pushing back with collective solutions. So where do you stand on this? Who’s right?

Glenn Weyl
I think I see it a bit differently than both of you and very much related to the segment that you did, I think we’ve lost track of what free markets are really about, about freeing people from the oppression of centralized authority, and that the state versus the market is the wrong way to think about things. States can be sources of concentrated authority, corporations can be sources of concentrated authority. And we have to constantly be changing our social institutions to break up those concentrations of power, whether they come from property from politicians, oppressing people, from employers, all of these.

Debra Satz
So Glenn, I love the way you’re thinking outside the box. But aren’t sometimes concentrations of power. When we the people do things together. Isn’t that a good thing? Do we want to break up all kinds of collective decision making?

Glenn Weyl
Concentrated power, in my mind, is not what happens when we make decisions together. In a democracy, each of us in a democracy has an equal share of a broader decision. concentrated power comes when we delegate a lot of that democratic power to say a judge for an extended period of time to decide on the most controversial social issues that we should really be engaging with as citizens. It comes when, rather than each of us having the freedom to choose a variety of different occupations, we get stuck with a single employer or when we give a lot of social property to a single landowner denying us.

Ken Taylor
So I there’s a lot it beneath the surface of what you just said. And we’re gonna have to dig into it in our our next segment. I know there’s a complicated theory that’s behind what you just said. But we’ll hold off just for a little bit. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the role of markets and making a better society. Our guest is Glenn Weyl, co author of that fascinating new book, “Radical Markets.”

Debra Satz
How can markets be a solution to the problems of stagnation and inequality? Doesn’t the market just produce stagnation and inequality?

Ken Taylor
Monopolies, inequality, and radical markets—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tom Waits
We got a year end clearance, we got our white sale on a smoke damaged furniture, you can drive it away today.

Ken Taylor
Step right up to a new radical marketplace where things are always for sale. I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Debra Satz
…except your intelligence. I’m Deborah Satz, and we’re thinking today about the radical potential of markets. Our guest is Glenn Weyl. Ge’s an economist and a researcher at Microsoft and the author of the new book, “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for A Just Society.”

Ken Taylor
So Glenn, your book is complicated, but here’s one idea I got from your is that all of our property should be available for others to buy like my house is not on the market, but it should be basically always on the market for others to buy almost any time. But what if I don’t want to sell my house right now. So what’s up with all this?

Glenn Weyl
So if you don’t want to sell your house right now, our system has you setting a price that you determine and paying tax on that. And because there would be a tax on all property, and everyone would get the benefits of all property, most families would receive about $24,000 a year, and it would cost about 1000 and a half dollars to pay the tax at current prices. Even if you increase the price by 10 times, you’d still receive on net about $10,000 as a social dividend, so I don’t think any ordinary citizen would have trouble keeping others away by overpricing their property. But on the other hand, the wealthy who hold so much and keep it away from the rest of us would have to compensate everyone for that.

Ken Taylor
So this is like a kind of, it’s like my house is always on the auction block, right? Tell me about the basics.

Glenn Weyl
You choose your own price.

Ken Taylor
I choose my own price.

Debra Satz
Well, somebody might come and buy it at the price I choose. So what if I don’t want to sell? So I just I just want to stay rooted in my community. And honestly, I can’t, you know, I can’t afford to keep all comers away. If I put it on the market. You know, it would get a bid. But I’m rooted in my community. I send my kids to school here I have neighbors with that I’m you know, invested in I’m invested in the local community. What do I do?

Glenn Weyl
So most Americans have reasonable means don’t own their houses outright, very, very few do. Most are either renting or they have a significant mortgage, and they’re constantly at risk of falling underwater being foreclosed upon being evicted from their rented housing when the rent increases, facing natural disasters. No one has perfect security in our society, the way to get security is through wealth and the wealthy have far more security than the poor. What our system does is it taxes, the way in which the wealthy achieve their security by hoarding resources away from the rest of us. And it redistributed to every citizen so everyone can afford the amount of security and stability they want.

Ken Taylor
Okay, okay. Again, it’s a complicated idea. I think I get it. I don’t know what I think about it, but I think I get the idea. But I’m cuz you’re talking about most Americans. And I have to admit something. I live in the Bay Area, and I own a house in the Bay Area. And so I’m really one of the fortunate ones, I bought this house for what seemed like a lot of money, then. But all I did was hold on to it. And it’s worth on a whole lot more. I mean, it’s, it’s obscene amount of money. Right. And I don’t want to sell it because I think it’s going to, are you accusing me of being a hoarder? Sounds like you are exactly, yeah.

Debra Satz
So I have a question though, about that. So I I’m, I think this is a really interesting idea. You’re bringing back an old idea of Henry George’s in some form about, you know, we own land, and it grows more valuable, you know, and we don’t do anything to it. And so why should we deserve the benefits? That just we were lucky. But not all property is like this. So what do you say to the person who says, but look, I worked on, you know, I built this company, or I built, you know, it’s my skill and hard work that did this. And I took a lot of risks. My ownership is a reward for by taking the risks, how do you respond to that person.

Glenn Weyl
Everything is a combination of risk and social contributions. If you take the greatest Doctor in the world who earned several million dollars a year and you put them on a desert island, he’s not going to have a very easy time even feeding himself, right. So that’s what property systems should acknowledge, we don’t want to take all the rewards that people get our system would take about two thirds of the value of private property and make that common property but leave about 1/3 On average for people and we differ across different types of assets, but, but it should be shared.

Ken Taylor
But maybe so when I sell my house, which is is worth this obscene amount of money, and I’m going to graduate, it’s obscene. I don’t even get the I don’t even get the profit. I mean, I have to sell it and then I have to give two thirds of it to you guys.

Glenn Weyl
You would get you would get the full value. But every year you would pay something like a 7% tax on it. And that tax would share the value of the property over time with the public.

Ken Taylor
And this is a market mechanism, right?

Glenn Weyl
Absolutely. It shows that we don’t have markets at present. Think of all the things that you can’t compete for, you know, everyone talks about the stock market. Everyone thinks we live in a free market society. That’s what Your discussion was premised on right. But most things, there’s no price on them. There’s no way that you could contest if you’re a startup.

Debra Satz
Glenn,I’m assuming there are limits to this system. Right. So there, you know, my son, lovely son, yes. It’s not going to be auctioned off periodically. And so there’s got to be some background.

Ken Taylor
Right, Debra’s’s parental rights, can she auction off her parental rights to her son?

Glenn Weyl
So Debra has a wonderful book that I really suggest her readers about some of the limits of markets. And it’s a book that had a big influence on me. But I don’t want to challenge any of those limits at all. I mean, we could talk about that. And maybe in a future society, it could be interesting to talk about where the limits of markets are. But anything that we don’t currently sell, I wouldn’t want to have be sold. I just want things to be sold on fair terms, things that we already have in the market. I want them not to be monopolies.

Ken Taylor
What about patents and copyrights? You wrote this book? Right? It’s a wonderful book. Suppose I wanted to buy the right to exploit your ideas, right? And do you have to put a price on the on your on your copyright of this book.

Glenn Weyl
So there, there are two aspects of intellectual property that are distinguished in the law. Right now. There’s something that’s called the author’s moral rights, and there’s the property rights in the intellectual property, the intellectual property rights, I think, should be up for auction. But actually, you can’t sell the author’s moral interest because it’s part of your name. So you have the right to stop people from doing defamatory or inappropriate things with your work, regardless of whether you own the copyright on it. But the copyright in terms of its commercial value, I think you should be able to, and it should be into the system.

Ken Taylor
I heard you say, because I was trying to get at what’s, you know, I’m a philosopher, not an economist, and I don’t even play one on the radio. I heard you say something that got me wondering what was actually beneath this? Because you said something like, you want people to have the attitude toward things. Suddenly, like many things, I don’t know, if you mean all things that we have too, like a spot on the beach, right? We occupy a spot on the beach, we don’t we don’t we don’t have any ownership of the spot on the beach, we occupy it for time we move on others tickets, same thing with your house, same thing with this factory, I mean, it’s something if somebody else can make a better use of it, then you shouldn’t be so attached to it. Right? And I was like, what kind of fundamental philosophy is underneath that? It seemed it seemed to me like some combination of utilitarianism and Buddhism or something like some weird amalgam? Is that right or wrong? Or on the right track? Or on the rock track?

Glenn Weyl
Well, well, I think, Eric, my co author is a bit of a utilitarian, I wouldn’t call myself that, I think, my fundamental views though, I don’t express them in the book, or something more like, I believe in some notion of progress or evolution of civilization or something like that, in, in growth of intelligence in order to so that’s, I think, my fundamental beliefs, so they’re not really reflected in the book.

Debra Satz
So let me push a little bit more on the value side, because I mean, one thing you might think is really important in progress is getting people to be more altruistic to identify with other people to identify with the common good. But the market, you know, like mechanism, you know, brings about results without anybody really having to do that. So I’m wondering, in your kind of view, where, you know, things like cooperation and altruism fit in? If I’m, you know, putting up my house, and then I’m auctioning it off the people who are buying it may, you know, maybe they want to burn the house. I mean, and they’re, you know, they have weird desires.

Ken Taylor
Maybe yeah, they want to convert our neighborhood to factories, they want to convert our neighborhood to open open space or something like that?

Glenn Weyl
Well, I think that that’s a great question. I think it’s one of the central things we’re concerned with in the book. And I actually think that the ways in which markets have encouraged selfishness could really be powerfully addressed by the system. Because think about the beach example, or think about all the property that my neighbors have, right now, I think in this very selfish way. I own this, you own that. I don’t care what happens to your stuff, I care, whatever, it’s my stuff. That’s what capitalism encourages me in this system, because I have access to everything. And because I receive a social dividend that’s based on everything, the difference between myself and the things that belong to me, and other people gradually starts to break down. And that could potentially as you were suggesting, Debra, lead the way from our present society, maybe to a very different formative organization, as people’s values through this system, our lead market mechanism.

Debra Satz
It’s a conjecture about how the and I agree I you know, one of the things I loved about the book is it’s thinking about Institute and how we could design really think outside the box about designing new kinds of institutions. But there’s a worry that if you change the institutions, but you don’t, I mean, maybe they’ll have this effect on people’s motivations. But suppose they don’t, supposing that, you know, very selfish people are bought buying and selling these things, and they’re just out to kind of, maybe they’re just out to maximize their own share on the, but they’re not thinking about, like, what’s really good for all of us.

Glenn Weyl
Yeah, there’s a wonderful line from Rousseau that says, that he, you know, takes laws as they might be in men as they are. And I think that that’s the approach we try to take in this book. On the one hand, we try to design institutions that will improve people morally. But on the other hand, we don’t assume that people will change from their present form and rely upon that in the way that say communism and other social schemes did. And that’s really the core of what we’re trying to achieve here.

Ken Taylor
I see I see that makes it so see your the conjecture that you endeavor, just talking about, that’s sort of what made me think there’s some kind of combination of Buddhism and utilitarianism in here. But I get that I get I get the thing about laws as they might be, and humans as they are. But I want to ask you, the other, I want to imagine a scenario, because again, I’m thinking about where I live, and is this stuff is hotly, this kind of issue is hotly debated, I believe that land on the in the Bay Area is, is not well allocated, right? It’s allocated to lots and lots and lots of single family housing. And it’s really, really, really expensive, and it’s getting more and more expensive. Now, they are the developers, they want to take the land and reallocate it to much more dense housing. There’s the city councils who answered to the citizens who want to resist that they’re the locked out who would buy all that more dense housing and have more housing. So but it sounds to me like this is it sounds to me like you’re actually the developers this going back to this selfish thing? The developers would say, yes, yes, yes to you. Because I’m going to buy up all this housing, I’m going to put it to an economically more efficient use. But the people who vote the city council that resist and resist they thinking, you’re going to take away my community, and the poor people who the poor people who are locked out or say, give me entry into this community. And it seems really complicated. I don’t see how you could get a universal buy in because of all the different stakeholders and all their different places?

Glenn Weyl
Well, look, I don’t want to start with housing. Housing is a ambitious long term goal. I want to know more about how the system works. I want to start with more modest things. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re talking to the FCC about using this for managing the spectrum. We’re talking to the UK Government about using it to manage oil drilling rights and landing slots at Heathrow and things of this sort. We’re, we’re we’re looking at this in blockchain communities Aetherium, that that’s really what we’re, we’re thinking about in the near term.

Ken Taylor
Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. I mean, you’re a real world guy. I’m in the I still want to think about whether this could be a total solution. Because I think this thing about housing in places like this is where one place where I understand auctioning off the spectrum and all that. But one place where the rubber really meets the road is when you get these real life forces arrayed in a way that they are. Right. And I know you think it’s an ambitious thing. But I wonder if you think there’s, there’s reasonable hope that, you know.

Glenn Weyl
There could be so I do think so look, the most powerful rhetoric that the wealthy use to defend their privilege is the free market, as your debate earlier was already illustrating. And that’s what we break down in this book, we really show that free markets truly understood and fully implemented, are a powerful force to break down entrenched privilege rather than the other way around. And so that that I think, is really what makes this possible, is it changes the whole discourse, rather than trying to sidestep markets at reclaims.

Debra Satz
So Glenn, can I go back to one thing? So I I like, as I said, I really love the book. And I think there’s so much that’s fascinating in it. I want to go back to the issue I raised when I was arguing with Ken at the very beginning in our set piece about labor unions, because there’s a very, you know, anti monopoly thrust to the book. But of course, labor unions are are monopolies and some of the restrictions on labor unions in today’s current world. restrictions that I think are are not not well supported are antitrust types of risks. striction. So the ban on secondary, the ban on secondary strikes or sympathy strikes is a kind of anti monopoly. So what’s your view about unions? And you have two views like a transitional view for the world we live in and a view for your ideal.

Ken Taylor
Briefly, Glenn.

Glenn Weyl
Yeah. So I mean, the book is very pro-union. In fact, there’s one chapter that’s all about building new kinds of union for data—

Debra Satz
For data workers. Yeah.

Glenn Weyl
But, but yes, you’re right, Debra, that, fundamentally, this book is what I would call a liberal book are a radically liberal book, it believes that the fundamental goal is to break up concentrations of power. But as our founders recognized, sometimes you need concentrated power to combat concentrated power. That’s not the ideal. The ideal is that you just break up those concentrations of power, but where they’re inevitable because of economies of scale, or things having to do with government, you need things to check those concentrations of power. And unions can play that role in industries where there’s that concentrated power.

Ken Taylor
So this is fascinating stuff. Well, we’ll take a talk deeper into it after a break, but you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re exploring the topic of markets, radical markets, and capitalism with Glenn Weyl, co-author of the fascinating book “Radical Markets.”

Debra Satz
Can expanding the market into voting make democracy work better. Could it help us overcome the deadlock and power from political elites that threaten and cripple our current system?

Ken Taylor
Markets, voting, and political power—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Pet Shop Boys
We’re shopping, we’re shopping.

Ken Taylor
Shopping without ever really owning anything—now that’s the radical market for you. I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Debra Satz
…except your intelligence. I’m Debra Satz, and our guest is Glenn Weyl. He’s the co author of “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.

Ken Taylor
So Glenn, there’s another part of your book that we have. I mean, there’s so many ideas in your book, and we can’t possibly do it justice. But one of the things that I there’s another part of your book that shows that you really are a fan of markets. And because you, you’ve been arguing that we could make politics more responsive by introducing, I don’t know if you’d call it a market, but market like mechanisms into the voting processes. Can you tell me a little bit about how you think that’s gonna work, this thing you called quadratic voting?

Glenn Weyl
I think a huge problem we have right now is that minorities in our democracy can’t really defend themselves, they rely on judges to stand up for their rights and interests. And that leads to a lot of concentration of power. So we want to change that. We want to give every citizen the ability to weigh in even more strongly on the issues that are most important to her, and defend her most crucial interests. And we do that through a system called quadratic voting, where everyone has a number of credits that they can spend across different issues. But to stop extremists from having disproportionate influence. If you put a lot of votes on one issue becomes increasingly expensive to get another vote on that issue, according to a particular mathematical formula, which is the basis of the idea.

Debra Satz
And I want to go back to what I, the point I was pushing in discussion with you earlier about motivation, self interest versus altruism, because isn’t part of the problem with our voting system that people just, you know, vote their own preferences, their own individual preferences as if it were buying things. Whereas really what we want is for us to deliberate together about what the right thing is to do. So how, how is your system? If you let me express my stronger preference for something? How are you going to ensure that I’m taking other people into account?

Glenn Weyl
So we could assume that everyone’s going to when they vote act in the common interest, and there’s endless philosophical writing that seems to take this assumption in a way that I think is quite naive? Let’s not let’s not assume that. Let’s allow for that. Let’s have a system which if people do that, and we can encourage people to do that, it will lead to better outcomes. But that also allows that if people have deep disagreements, if there are African Americans who are systematically oppressed, if there are women who are not, whose needs are not perceived by men, that they’re able to express that see that way.

Debra Satz
Yep, you’ve got like That’s a nice story. But what about like the racists who feel like, you know, integration is happening against their very strong preferences or, you know, the people who—

Ken Taylor
Or the single-issue voters who could who, for example, who could just spend all their votes on the single issue, right.

Glenn Weyl
Except they get far less influence if they did that. So the quadratic formula has the property that if you had 100 credits, let’s say, tennis shoes, if you put all your votes on one issue, you’d only get 10 votes on that issue. If you spread it out evenly across the issues, you could get about four votes on all the issues I get you. So you get far more influence if you’re willing to spread it out more equally, but whatever.

Ken Taylor
But if I’m a single Wait a minute, though, but if I’m a single issue voter, that’s a rational, that’s a reasonable payoff, right, and I get to distort, the I get to, I get to spend so much credit on that single issue, which disproportionately matters to me and matters less to other people.

Glenn Weyl
And if that’s really true, then that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s very likely to be true in practice. And we’ve run a survey using quadratic voting. And we had out of 6000 people, we ran on it only one person who put all their credits on a single issue.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Okay, and you what you’re gonna respond to Debra, before I cut you off.

Glenn Weyl
I was just gonna say, look, the truth is that, yeah, there are there are a few people who the overwhelming, most important thing in their life is the racial superiority of white people. I think that’s a very, very tiny part of the population. And, in fact, in the, you know, the surveys that we’ve done, you get, you get almost no one expressing views like that. But because they’re not supposed to. Well, possibly, but I mean, they, they in Charlottesville, they didn’t seem to be so deterred by that. So that I think the truth is, and in fact, we’ve gotten the survey, people being much more honest about various things. So if you think about women’s pay equality, very progressive men will say, I strongly support that. But when you put them on a budget constraint, their preferences change, and they and women continue to stand up strongly for that. And men retreat quite a bit on that.

Debra Satz
Glenn, I, you know, I’m I think there are, you know, there are a lot of different voting schemes that people have proposed, which probably all in some way might be improvements on the status quo. But I actually think there’s a core problem, which has to do with the motivation that people actually have, and that we don’t have a lot of role I agree with, we can assume that people are care about the common good, many people don’t. But the question is, how do we build institutional structures? And how do we, you know, promote certain kinds of norms to get people caring about the other person, and I didn’t see anything in your in this, that better, at least on that dimension.

Glenn Weyl
To me, I think it’s deeply unrealistic to imagine that everyone will think about the full common good on every issue, just as in private spheres, we allow people to specialize and have pride in a career where they know more about some things than about others. So to in collective decision making, I do think we should embrace the fact that some people are experts on some things and not others. For you take me for example, I consider myself something of an expert on economic policy and transformative ideas and so forth. But I don’t even know who runs for local offices in my area. And many of my townspeople would be much better at representing the collective good in that area. And I think that, you know, people give charities and something people are passionate about certain people, you would treat Lao people to express things.

Ken Taylor
So can you trade votes on your system? So can I tray, my McLemore, my credits to you? So when it comes to economic policy, suppose I really care about the local stuff, right? I want, I got my credits, but you can give me some of yours because you don’t care as much, you’re not informed. And I could give some to you, because you’re going to do the economic voting on behalf of both.

Glenn Weyl
Well, through the system, you effectively do that, though not You’re not allowed to outside of the system, because you would have the same set of credits eventually, that you would use on the local issues on the, you know, on the national issues. And by choosing to use your credits in one place, you’d be expressing that greater strength.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but I can’t I can’t ally with you to say, you’re going to be like my proxy for this issue.

Glenn Weyl
No, because, well, maybe eventually. So there’s an idea called Liquid democracy where you can actually delegate votes, but this system, but that tends to lead to a lot of concentration of power and people with much authority, but this system would naturally deter that because you have this decreasing value of your vote as it goes on. So the more concentrated the more deterrence there is, right?

Ken Taylor
So we got a question from an email or a caller whose phones aren’t working correctly. Luis in San Francisco says most of the discussion centers around a centralized way of thinking as if one person can come up with a system that works, as opposed to an organic, bottom up way of finding solutions to the problem. I don’t know. Would you agree with that I that you’re that you’re not thinking of this as a kind of bottom up, chaotic system finding its equilibrium, you know?

Glenn Weyl
Well, I think we need to have ideas that help people help inspire those bottom up processes, I think it’s a back and forth between them. And actually, you know, I’ve come to feel when I talk about these ideas, that they really belong to young people, not to me, because—

Ken Taylor
Well you’re a pretty young guy.

Glenn Weyl
When I talk to when I talk to students, you know, when I, when I talk to older people, usually they struggle with how radical the ideas are, many students aren’t even familiar with our present system. So they they’re not not devoted to it. And so when I present these ideas to them, they are able to see deeper into them, both the benefits and the flaws and the ways to improve much better than I am.

Debra Satz
So I’m a little worried about this idea. So go and I’m a little worried about this idea of some people specializing and like, you know, caring about the local community, while other people don’t, or some people, you know, if you’re thinking about like, making laws, it’s really important that everybody get a chance to, you know, weigh in.

Ken Taylor
I’m not sure, because I think I think Glenn is, I think it’s like the one person one vote. This assumes that you have equal stake and equal interest and equal knowledge in all areas in which you might be asked to vote and your system is allowing us to say, I don’t know enough about that.

Glenn Weyl
But there’s a huge amount of interest, I mean, of evidence, there’s a wonderful book called affluence and influence by Martin Gilens, which is all about the fact that there’s something called issue, what he calls issue publics, people who, within every social class or group are knowledgeable and interested and focused on particular issues. And I think that those people often get sort of washed out by the noise of people who have the same interests, and might have the same opinion of them, but just don’t know as much about the issue.

Debra Satz
Yes, I agree with that. But I also think there are uneducated on people who don’t have knowledge on and passion, they have passionate and strong interests in organo, right, like around, you know, some of the climate deniers.

Ken Taylor
So you know, your system doesn’t align passion and knowledge, it doesn’t guarantee that passion and knowledge will be aligned.

Debra Satz
Yeah, you’re just doing the strength of people’s preferences, not the content.

Glenn Weyl
I think, ultimately, if we have a democratic spirit, if we believe in a system where the people are going to speak, rather than there’s going to be some authority that will determine who’s knowledgeable and who’s not. And we’re going to allow for people to express some sense of knowledge. It has to be done through people expressing themselves in some way of making trade offs. And I think that there’s lots of empirical evidence that strongly suggest, in fact that there’s a very strong correlation between knowledge and people’s passion on issues. Huge amount. There’s a huge, there’s a huge amount of political opinions. But the thing is, it’s not fundamentally about that evidence. Do you have a commitment to the principle of democracy, which is to say that you and I and US who are quote, experts shouldn’t be the ones who determine who has knowledge and who does that it should be through some democratic process.

Ken Taylor
Glenn,this is a great discussion. We’ve only scratched the surface of your of the ideas in your book, but I got to say goodbye to you. It’s been a radical conversation.

Glenn Weyl
For me, too.

Debra Satz
So thank you, Glenn. Our guest has blamed Glenn Weyl. he’s a researcher at Microsoft and a visiting senior scholar and economics at Yale and the co-author of the fascinating book, “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a New Society.” So Ken, what do you think now?

Ken Taylor
I think we got to get into it and show that’d be this is really complicated stuff. And, you know, it’s it’s really complicated stuff, but it’s radical and thought provoking. But the conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is Cogito ergo Bogo—sorry Descartes, I think therefore I blog and if you have a question that wasn’t addressed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you send your questions or comments to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might just feature it on the blog.

Debra Satz
You can also become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.or. And now here’s someone with a monopoly on verbal speed: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales…I saw a picture of an ATM allows you to buy or sell Bitcoin so you can spend money on money that is also a collectible kinda like Confederate money only you can spend it too but why would you? Also you can make your own Bitcoin by mining that is generating a kajillion algorithms to get the right one which used to be achieved by one hacker in his basement now involves limited partnerships. vast warehouses full of computers, the equivalent of a steam engine the size of a house, putting a bicycle backwards across the street. Economists are quite excited about it. By and large, the new economy is not based on actual products. The main thing is debt projection slivers hedging. I just read the head of at&t met with head of HBO to tell him he’s doing a good job, but he needs to do a whole lot better know that HBO is part of a mega global corporation, which it was before remember AOL Time Life Warner man, nevermind the amount of subscribers HBO now has is not going to cut it. According to New York Times, he will have to find a way quote to move beyond 35 to 40% Penetration to have this become a much more common product unquote, having upwards of 100 million people show up every month to watch you and what role is that a losing proposition? Well, this one, I guess, in the same super corporate vein, I read that Disney is feeling the pain around the movie solo, which is only made $210 million, making it and return to the Jedi the lowest earners in the franchise. Defending expectations and causing bean counters to rethink the whole Star Wars thing hits rule and thinks make money but not as much money as hoped. That’s one aspect of capitalism and there’s the things not making money right now. But just wait, which is Amazon the driverless car, the Trump presidency it gives one pause it’s crazy. Certain Americans still claim that capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread. That doesn’t make sense. since sliced bread is an artifact of capitalism. A great thing for sure, but sliced bread also meant less work for bread cutters and there’s your damn exploitation right there. Before you know it robots are making bread slicing it even as your doctor is telling you to cut down and bread consumption excuse me your robot doctor. So now we have 500 Different kinds of bread two thirds gluten free used to be this would be monitored by the FDA. But now thanks to the Internet where gluten free because somebody posted a thing on Facebook. Once again a fear we didn’t know we had is toward it. Remember though after fire and the wheel it’s up and pretty much icing on the cake product wise. Capitalism exists to expand the horizons of cake and what kind of person gets to eat it. You imagine yourself as the kind of person who eats gluten free chocolate cake before you know it by golly of another niche market. That’s why capitalism like sticks so much and moves fast and burns up quickly. Catching. Now investors are excited to buy super tall skyscrapers not cheap housing to help solve the housing crisis know the market says we need to build skyscraper penthouses. For billionaires a buyer just paid 32 million for a penthouse and the 94th floor it for 32 Park Avenue in New York. The third tallest building in the US great view I doubt it a building that tall crowds out light in every direction. Who would build near it? Also, according to Wikipedia, the ideal buyer is a member of the global elite who collects residences doesn’t really live there. So what’s the point? Maybe he’ll Airbnb it but who’d want to stay that high up I’d be scared of earthquakes, thunderstorms high wind, because it takes a month to get to the lobby. Whole thing seems as stupid as driverless cars once they work who’s gonna buy them much easier to have them come when you call, which means fewer cars like a taxi or a bus. Driverless cars will become part of the infrastructure and the marketplace does not give hoot one about infrastructure unless it can talk with a sexy robot voice and knows how to slice bread. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Debra Satz
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

Ken Taylor
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Debra Satz
Thanks also to Merle Kessler Karola Kreitmeier, Angela Johnston, and Collin Peden.

Ken Taylor
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Debra Satz
The views expressed or (mis-expressed_ on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University, or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Debra Satz
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Debra Satz.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Debra Satz
And thank you for thinking.

George Carlin
If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some shmuck will buy it from you.