Radical Markets

Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

By: Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Narrated by: James Conlan

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

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 19th 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.

Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition - Radical Markets shows how.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2018 Princeton University Press (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Using Markets to Improve Society

Provides a thought provoking and mind expanding discussion on how various forms of markets can be used to improve society. Thesis is that by using advanced and innovative markets, combined by similar voting techniques (specifically quadratic voting), we can find ways to improve the efficiency and fairness of our societies. It is not simply saying that 'more markets' are required, instead it is a proposal to use various market techniques to better solve our problems. I found it a very good listen.

Terrible Reader ruins this book

The underlying text is greatly interesting — but the reader is just awful, monotone and lacking all comprehension of the underlying material. It’d be like me reading Spanish (which I can pronounce but have only limited understanding of) while smiling the whole time and trying to sound “suave”.
I seriously thought the book would reveal in the end that it was read by a computer, an AI. In which case that AI would have failed the easiest of Turing Tests. I can not recommend this version. Read it instead.

H

Great ideas to use markets to improve the world

Overall, one of the best books I've ever read. Basically describes ways markets could be used to increase economic inefficiency, decrease inequality (and in particular, increase the proportion of rewards going to productive labor vs. accumulated capital), and fix various systems (political and social). Largely an extension of the ideas of William S. Vickrey.

Things I particularly liked about the book: a credible argument against "conventional" Georgist land-value tax (difficulties in valuation), and an interesting alternative. A superior form of voting (accumulated/bankable votes). "Quadratic" increases in cost for certain policy preferences (such as reducing pollution, or regulations. An interesting immigration scheme where individuals could sponsor foreign workers, gaining a portion of their income, to more broadly distribute the benefits of immigration along with costs.

The chapter on data (data sovereignty, data markets, etc.) seemed pretty weak in comparison to the rest of the book (ironic given the background of the authors), and detracted from the whole.

One interesting element was prefacing each chapter with a fictional story of what life would be like under their proposed rules -- more abstract policy arguments should include these.

There were a lot of flaws with the specific proposals they make, and overall I think for most private property, taxation is theft, and their taxing schemes were in some ways even more immoral than the status quo (personal/portable property being taxed in such a way that third parties could forcibly purchase it for the declared value at any time seems rife for malicious exploitation by trolls, or effective censorship of unpopular people), but they propose testing in much less challenging environments (such as as an alternative way to distribute public assets like radio spectrum or resource exploitation on public property), which I'd support.

I strongly recommend this book.

Radical.

Really worthwhile discussion of quadratic voting. This could be the overdue revision reviving democracy.
More questionable endorsement of sponsorship based immigration. Where it exists it leads to serfdom as in the Gulf.

Love the premise, let's explore the ideas!

Excellent book with some very unique ideas. I believe many of these ideas will be utilized in decentralized economic systems going forward. It will be interesting to see how these radical markets interplay with trustless consensus mechanisms such as those used in blockchain.

Content great; Narration bleh

This book totally changed the way I think about markets. Its contents are revolutionary and insightful (tho the narration was robotic and hard to pay attention to). Still, the narrator was much better than many others I have heard.

Ideas radical and different - good to chew on

The book does a good job of coming up with creative but potentially fantastic ideas for improving economics and government. Quadratic voting was utterly convincing to me. The VIP program seemed like a win. All the ideas were thoughtfully portrayed and the book does a great job explaining possible problems that would need further solutions.

Even if you don’t agree, your thinking will be made stronger by having chewed on the ideas. Not all non fiction can say that.

is this a human narrator?

Very interesting book, but it sounds like an AI is narrating, with no common sense breaks between sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters. The pace is brisk and perfectly uniform, through dense and banal passages alike.

I thought at first that it must just be an inexperienced narrator, but he is excellent from a purely technical standpoint: diction is flawless, with no detectable switches from one recording session to another and never a mistimed pause for breath. Maybe he's just profoundly uninterested in the topic and isn't bothering to understand what he reads?
In any case, I found the uniformity of narration and lack of appropriate pauses to get incredibly frustrating after a while.

I do recommend the book, just not the format.

Economically 'incontournable'

Must read or listen for anyone working in the economical or political sector. Happy I listened to the audiobook and not read it, but still agreeing with other feedback I've read : the narrator is not the most fun to listen to. Hope they'll re-record this one day because the content is fantastic.

Interesting but not a Page Turner

Interesting read for the politically wonkish and Freakonomics listeners, I know but one person I could ever recommend this to. It does provide some fantastic dinner conversation though.