What is Radical Markets?

A 2018 book by the legal scholar Eric Posner and the economist Glen Weyl. It argues that private property and one person, one vote are human-designed systems that can be redesigned, and puts forward five bold reforms. Weyl later moved on to Plurality and has criticized the book's way of thinking himself.

Land belongs to its owner. Elections run on one person, one vote. We tend to think of these as rules that simply are. But they are systems that people thought up and built. And if people built them, couldn't they be rebuilt in a better form? Radical Markets is a book that sets out bold reforms starting from that question. It is also the earlier book of Glen Weyl, one of the authors of ⿻ Plurality.

In short

Radical Markets is a book published in 2018 by the legal scholar Eric A. Posner and the economist E. Glen Weyl [1][2].

It argued that private property and one person, one vote are not unchangeable laws of nature but systems designed by people, and so can be redesigned in fairer and more efficient forms. It then put forward five bold reforms [1][2]. After this book Weyl moved on to ⿻ Plurality, and in 2020 he criticized the book's way of thinking himself [3].

For example

Quadratic Voting in the Colorado legislature (2019). According to Plurality, Quadratic Voting (QV), proposed in this book, has been used "frequently in the Colorado State Legislature to prioritize spending" in the United States [4].

According to the Spanish-language Wikipedia, in April 2019 Democratic members of the Colorado House of Representatives used QV to set priorities for the next two years among 107 bills. Each member was given 100 virtual tokens [5].

A worked example (calculated for this article from the QV rule that votes cost the square of their number in tokens). To put 9 votes on one bill takes 9 × 9 = 81 tokens [5]. That leaves 100 − 81 = 19 tokens, so you can put at most 4 votes (4 × 4 = 16 tokens) on another bill. You can show strong feeling, but you have less left to spend on anything else.

The self-assessed property tax and NFTs. The book's property tax, under which you set your own price and must sell if someone wants to buy at that price (later called partial common ownership), is, according to Plurality, "particularly easy to enforce in digital asset registries, such as blockchains", and has gained popularity in recent years for NFT (one-of-a-kind digital token) art works [6]. → Harberger tax

Reception in the crypto world. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, wrote a long review based on an advance copy, arguing that the book's proposals fit well with smart contracts (self-executing contracts on a blockchain) [1]. A review in the Korean newspaper Hankook Ilbo also reported that because Buterin backed the book strongly enough to review it himself, it became a talking point in the blockchain industry early on [2].

In more detail

Five proposals

According to Buterin's review, the book is divided into five parts, each discussing one reform [1]:

A self-assessed property tax. Owners declare the value of their property themselves and pay tax on it, and anyone can buy it at that price. → Harberger tax
Quadratic Voting. Voting in which votes cost the square of their number in points. → Quadratic Voting
A new system for immigration.
Breaking up large investment groups. Breaking up the big investors that make industries such as banking, which look competitive, actually behave like monopolies.
A market for personal data. → Data dignity

A review in the French magazine Le Grand Continent summarizes them in a little more detail. The tax in (1) would average around 7% a year, with revenue going to public goods and a social dividend for all citizens. (3) is a system in which each citizen can sponsor a migrant worker. (4) is a ban on large investors investing in several companies in the same industry. (5) is treating users as data workers and paying them [7].

The core idea

Buterin sums up the book's thinking like this. Markets and prices are an excellent way to decide how resources are used. But markets stand on property rights that society has built. There are many ways to build property rights, and some may be better than today's. Freedom is a wide space in which many different designs can be chosen [1].

In other words, the position is not a choice between the market and the state, but redesigning the workings of markets themselves. Buterin also writes that the book has many ideas that replace the case-by-case judgment of officials with mechanisms driven by financial incentives, so they suit blockchains, which have no reliable courts to fall back on [1].

Where it came from

Chapter 5-7 of Plurality writes that the desire to harness the dynamism of markets while addressing their limits comes from "the thought of Henry George and his followers, including economics Nobel Laureate William Vickrey, to whom the previous book written by one of the authors of this one was dedicated" (that is, Radical Markets) [6].

Toward a movement

According to an article in TIME, the book drew a lot of attention on its publication in 2018. Weyl channeled that energy into founding the RadicalxChange Foundation, a nonprofit that advances the book's ideas [8]. The Reverse Alignment coalition website's profile of Weyl also describes the book as one of The Economist's books of the year for 2018 [9].

On the other hand, Weyl wrote in 2019 that the book was long and was a collection of largely independent policy proposals rather than a coherent social philosophy, and that his thinking had broadened a great deal since the book [10].

Self-criticism, and the turn to Plurality

In a 2020 essay, "Why I Am not a Market Radical", Weyl acknowledged the book's problems [3].

According to Weyl, the book carried two confusions of economics: a view of people as isolated individuals who exist before society, and the view of experts designing from above. The book valued situations in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts (→ supermodularity), but, Weyl writes, the analytical tools it used assumed that such situations hardly exist [3].

QV, for example, treats participants as identical particles with no relation to one another. This raises a contradiction: how should lovers, colleagues or members of the same religion be counted? What gets called collusion and treated as a problem, Weyl writes, is actually the natural working of the human connections that QV wants to support [3].

In the same essay, Weyl also writes that he continues to think many of the book's ideas were major advances in social technology [3].

In his commentary on the Japanese edition, Ken Suzuki contrasts the two books. Radical Markets, he writes, proposed methods by which highly atomized, individualistic people reach optimal solutions through market and voting mechanisms, while in Plurality diverse people solve problems by collaborating in communities [11].

What is debated

Is it about abolishing private property? The Le Grand Continent review criticized several points. It is hard to accept the premise that value is being extracted everywhere through the monopoly power of private property. In a downturn, property could shift to people with money, so wealth could end up more concentrated. And the book ignores values that cannot be turned into money, such as a family home full of memories. The review also writes that the book should be read less as a legal manual than as political philosophy that takes the idea of property down from its sacred pedestal [7].
How contested it is. Buterin warns in his review that at least the first three proposals are already highly controversial, and go against many people's moral intuitions about property and markets [1].
Differences in how the authors and year are given. A note in chapter 2-0 of the English edition of Plurality adds Buterin as an author and gives the year of publication as 2019. But the note in chapter 5-7 of the same book, and the notes in chapter 2-0 of the Japanese and Taiwanese Chinese editions, list only Posner and Weyl, and chapter 5-7 gives 2018 [6][12][13][14]. The book's co-authors are Posner and Weyl.
Reading it as a prequel leads to contradictions. Because Weyl made the self-criticism above in 2020, reading Plurality as a continuation of Radical Markets runs into contradictions [3]. In a 2025 conversation with Sunji Lee, asked about the free-trade argument cited in the earlier book, Weyl contrasted the spread of free trade with the kind of cooperation that builds bridges between nations and keeps them standing. He did not, however, give an assessment of the earlier book itself [15].

Where it fits in Plurality

Plurality refers to its predecessor in several places.

Chapter 2-0 says of the role of "neoliberal" policies (leaving things to the market) in the stagnation and inequality of the past half century: "One of us was also co-author of a book that contains a review of the evidence as of roughly a decade ago" [12]. → Three paths

Chapter 5-7, "Social Markets", names the earlier book as part of the line from George and Vickrey, and introduces partial common ownership and Quadratic Funding [6]. → Property and Contract

Chapter 5-6, "⿻ Voting", refers to QV as the procedure "one of us invented". It then cautions that the clean square-root rules "are only optimal when voters are perfectly internally unified and perfectly externally uncorrelated/uncoordinated" [4]. This overlaps with the point about QV in Weyl's self-criticism above.

The limits of seeing people as isolated individuals lead on to the book's criticism of monist atomism.

Sources

Vitalik Buterin, "On Radical Markets" (2018) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html
Hankook Ilbo, review of Radical Markets (2019, in Korean) — https://www.hankookilbo.com/news/article/201910031442743030
E. Glen Weyl, "Why I Am not a Market Radical" (2020) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/why-i-am-not-a-market-radical/
Plurality, 5-6 "⿻ Voting" (the paragraph on the Colorado legislature and the next) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Votación cuadrática, Spanish-language Wikipedia (in Spanish) — https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votaci%C3%B3n_cuadr%C3%A1tica
Plurality, 5-7 "Social Markets" (the paragraph on the previous book and Vickrey, the item on partial common ownership, notes) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/ ［CC0］
Le Grand Continent, "Radical Markets : abolir la propriété pour libérer le capitalisme" (2019, in French) — https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2019/12/25/radical-markets-abolir-la-propriete-pour-liberer-le-capitalisme/
Will Henshall, "Inside Audrey Tang's Plan to Align Technology with Democracy" (TIME) — https://time.com/6979012/audrey-tang-interview-plurality-democracy/
Reverse Alignment coalition website (profile of Weyl) — https://reversealignment.ai/
E. Glen Weyl, "What is RadicalxChange?" (2019) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/2019-02-25-xjekue/
Ken Suzuki, commentary on the Japanese edition of Plurality (in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/nb8b59a6b775d
Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf", notes — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, Japanese edition, 2-0 "IT と民主主義　拡大する溝", note 56 (in Japanese) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/jpn/ ［CC0］
Plurality, traditional Chinese edition, 2-0, note 29 (in Chinese) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/tree/main/contents/traditional-mandarin ［CC0］
Shueisha Shinsho Plus, conversation between Weyl and Sunji Lee (in Japanese) — https://shinsho-plus.shueisha.co.jp/interview/e_lee/30554

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