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…a lot of libertarians are into the idea of decentralised knowledge when it comes to Hayek and the market. But when we talk about politics, suddenly they think that there’s no knowledge out there. And I think that… that’s nuts. … politics is just like all these other things – there’s lots of local information out there.

Prof Glen Weyl

Imagine you were put in charge of planning out a country’s economy – determining who should work where and what they should make – without prices. You would surely struggle to collect all the information you need about what people want and who can most efficiently make it from an office building in the capital city.

Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society and solve this so-called ‘knowledge problem’.

But when it comes to politics and voting – which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals – the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs turns to skepticism.

Today’s guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won’t have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wrote Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with Eric Posner, but he has already moved on, saying “in the 6 months since the book came out I’ve made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that.”

He believes we desperately need more efficient, equitable and decentralised ways to organise society that take advantage of what each person knows, and his research agenda has already made some breakthroughs.

Despite a background in the best economics departments in the world – Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago – he is too worried for the future to sit in his office writing papers. Instead he has left the academy to try to inspire a social movement, RadicalxChange, with a vision of social reform as expansive as his own. (You can sign up for their conference in March here.)

Economist Alex Tabarrok called his latest proposal, known as ‘liberal radicalism’, “a quantum leap in public-goods mechanism-design.” The goal is to accurately measure how much the public actually values a good they all have to share, like a scientific research finding. Alex observes that under liberal radicalism “almost magically… citizens will voluntarily contribute exactly the amount that correctly signals how much society as a whole values the public good. Amazing!” But the proposal, however good in theory, might struggle in the real world because it requires large subsidies, and compensates for people’s selfishness so effectively that it might even be an overcorrection.

An earlier proposal – ‘quadratic voting’ (QV) – would allow people to express the relative strength of their preferences in the democratic process. No longer would 51 people who support a proposal, but barely care about the issue, outvote 49 incredibly passionate opponents, predictably making society worse in the process.

Instead everyone would be given ‘voice credits’ which they could spread across elections as they chose. QV follows a square root rule: 1 voice credit gets you 1 vote, 4 voice credits gets you 2 votes, 9 voice credits gives you 3 votes, and so on. It’s not immediately apparent, but this method is on average the ideal way of allowing people to more and more impose their desires on the rest of society, but at an ever escalating cost. To economists it’s an idea that’s obvious, though only in retrospect, and is already being taken up by business.

Weyl points to studies showing that people are more likely to vote strongly not only about issues they care more about, but issues they know more about. He expects that allowing people to specialise and indicate when they know what they’re talking about will create a democracy that does more to aggregate careful judgement, rather than just passionate ignorance.

But these and indeed all of Weyl’s proposals have faced criticism. Some say the risk of unintended consequences are too great, or that they solve the wrong problem. Others see these proposals as unproven, impractical, or just another example of overambitious social planning on the part of intellectuals. I raise these concerns to see how he responds.

Weyl hopes a creative spirit in figuring out how to make collective decision-making work for the modern world can restore faith in liberal democracy and prevent a resurgence of reactionary ideas during a future recession. But as big a topic as all that is, this extended conversation covers more:

  • How should we think about blockchain as a technology, and the community dedicated to it?
  • How could auctions inspire an alternative to private property?
  • Why is Glen wary of mathematical styles of approaching issues?
  • Is high modernism underrated?
  • Should we think of the world as going well or badly?
  • What are the biggest intellectual errors of the effective altruism community? And the rationality community?
  • Should migrants be sponsored by communities?
  • Could we provide people with a sustainable living by treating their data as labour?
  • The potential importance of artists in promoting ideas
  • How does liberal radicalism actually work

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The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

I would say that the technology that is currently called blockchain, which has a bunch of different elements to it, I think is a dead end, and I think it has very, very few applications, if any, where I think that that’s going to be the right type of a data structure to use. I also think it has very problematic social implications. I actually think the ideology instantiated by the actual technical protocols right now is dark and deeply problematic, and I think that, like there is a spectrum from really intelligent person who has a good understanding of what’s going on, through deeply naïve and somewhat self-deluding deliberately because of potential greed and so forth issues, through to outright scammers.

If you ask for the center of gravity of that within the typical thing in the community, it’s definitely towards that latter end of the spectrum, so there are huge problems. However, like capitalism has enormous problems, as I’ve been trying to say, and there is very little space in our society for seriously reconsidering that and for people to think boldly about these things. I think that this is offering a space for that, and that’s extremely important.

The idea [of quadratic voting] is that every citizen will be allocated an equal budget of voice credits, which they can use to vote on different issues or candidates in favor of or against. They have to pay out of their voice credits the square of the number of votes that they buy. The reason that the square is the right formula, is that you want people to buy votes in proportion to how much they care about an issue. In order for that to be the case, people have to buy votes just up until the point where the next vote is worth it to them. In the quadratic formula, and only in that formula, the cost of the next vote is proportional to how many votes you’ve already bought.

That gives everyone an incentive to weigh in precisely in proportion to how much they care. That’s how to think about it from a utilitarian perspective. But more broadly, what I would say that is quadratic voting gives an opportunity for people to express their commitments and their engagement with different aspects of social life in a fluid and open way that is not allowed under standard voting protocols. Albert Hirschman once said that, “Authoritarianism actually gives people a great ability to speak sometimes, than does democracy, because it’s too cheap to speak under democracy.” So there is no way for people to actually show that something’s really important to them.

Whereas, under authoritarianism, if you go out and protest in the street, you know that’s really an important thing to someone. In some ways, what quadratic voting does is without the violations of freedom, gives people an opportunity to truly show what’s important to them.

I just read a book by Hannah Arendt called “On Revolution” that I really love, and that accords a lot with my perspective. So she compares the French and American Revolutions. And she argues that really what made the American Revolution work was that basically under the tutelage of King George, all these people came and they organized themselves into these local democratic communities. And that came to be the way that they lived and what made sense of their lives long before they ever even considered throwing off the yoke of the king. And so the king provided the authority, but the power actually lay in democracy, and then all the revolution had to do is just change authority to be more consistent with the nature of power that had already come to exist. Whereas in the French Revolution, the power structure was all centered around the king and everything below that was very disorganized. And so …

And everything below that was very disorganized. What ended up rebelling against the king was something very disorganized. Therefore, these disorganized people couldn’t really demand that you put that disorganized structure in charge of everything. Instead, all they demanded was just some concrete goal that they wanted. That left a power vacuum into which a very centralized things enter.

I think my view of social change is that we actually need to build the society. We have to build the legitimacy that we then eventually want to be christened by the state or replace the state, rather than to, from the top down, impose that sort of thing.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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