Name: Radical Markets
ISBN: 9780691177502

Radical Markets

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.

What Hacker News says

LeroyRazMar 2025

Your claim that good economicts "know there is no free lunch" is completely false, unsubstantiated and actively misleading.

Many impressive economists believe there are policies that could massively improve the worlds economy, but that implementating these policies is a coordination problem / hard to overcome lobbying / politically intractable, etc...

Radical Markets is great book on exactly this topic.

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yborisMar 2023

I love this idea! Came across it in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

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yborisOct 2022

For an amazing proposal for "every property is always up for sale" see the book Radical Markets

The authors argue that self-assessment of property is the best way to evaluate property - allowing for fair tax collection. If you undervalue the property, someone can buy it through an app. If you overvalue it, you end up paying more in taxes. It's a genius proposal that is worth exploring (by reading the book and by trying in the real world).

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

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timdaubMar 2022

The most-comprehensive argument that motivates its existence, I've found in Glen Weyl and Eric Posner's book "Radical Markets."

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vsliraDec 2021

Good comment. Regarding this whole “zero transaction costs” issue, I can’t recommend weyl and posner’s “radical markets” enough. I’m right wing/classical liberal / leanbertarian or whatever you want to call a pro-market stance, but that book opened my eyes about the conflict between market mechanisms and the absolutist way our capitalist economy understands property. Once you see that absolute property rights are not pre-requisite to market dynamics, you can’t unsee it anymore.

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ekelsenJun 2021

A decent intro is the first chapter of Radical Markets, available here: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf but it also isn't short.

Also a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj186urDU8c

Neither of these is particularly short and still don't address all (or even many) of the practical issues. As with most real policy and law, I don't think something can be both short and cover all the real world cases. There's unfortunately a reason most laws are really long.

I believe the chapter of the book addresses the issue of how will people know what values to set. In addition to the solution proposed in the book, another alternative (of mine), is to allow people to pay some amount of retroactive tax. Let's say someone tries to buy the asset from you for your set price, but you don't want to sell. You can raise the price to some amount the buyer no longer wants to pay, but since you were underpaying taxes on the asset, you need to make them up.

Would such a proposal probably mean people set lower prices than are correct -- yes; would it still make sense for things like homes -- yes.

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