Discussed the core ideas and practical cases of radical markets, and combined with the possibilities of blockchain technology and decentralized autonomous organizations.
This issue's bounty: $135
Class Representative | Terry
Review | Han Ya
Typesetting | Wingo
Introduction#
This podcast is the seventh episode of "Green Pill," hosted by Kevin Owocki, with guest Glen Weyl. The theme is Weyl's book "Radical Markets." They discuss the core ideas and practical cases of radical markets, and explore the possibilities of blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations, and other practices.
Glen Weyl was born in June 1985. He graduated with honors from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in economics in 2007. He then completed all the coursework for a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton in just one year and published his thesis in the top economics journal, the American Economic Review. After graduating, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard until 2011, when he moved to the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
Eric Posner, another author of "Radical Markets," is a renowned legal scholar and economist who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the son of Richard Posner, a former Chief Judge of the United States.
For more information about Glen Weyl's publication of "Radical Markets" and the establishment of the RadicalxChange Foundation, please refer to the previous podcast summary, "DeSoc: Pluralism is the Romantic Collection of Individuals."
Quadratic Voting, Radical Markets, and Gitcoin#
Owocki mentions at the beginning of the podcast that the explanation of quadratic voting in "Radical Markets" greatly inspired him and served as his introduction to the Ethereum field: "When I entered this field, the first book I read was Glen Weyl's 'Radical Markets.'"
Using quadratic funding, Gitcoin has been developed, which is the foundation of Gitcoin Grants. As of the time of the podcast, 18 rounds of quadratic funding have been conducted, reflecting on the benefits of public goods funding and market utilization. Therefore, Owocki believes that there is a symbiotic relationship between Glen's ideas and Gitcoin, as Gitcoin puts these ideas into practice to fund open-source software and public goods using Ethereum.
Glen mentions that neither he nor Eric Posner are cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and they did not initially publish research in the field of blockchain. They started writing "Radical Markets" because of the "disruptions" in the existing political system and the development of capitalism. Their initial work was in the field of financial regulation, and they were very interested in the potential transformative effects of new social mechanisms.
Glen talks about the beginning of exploratory writing: "Around 2016, things in the political world started to get really weird, including Brexit and Trump's election. We felt a drive to put some of the ideas we had been developing academically out there in a form that different communities could interact with. We didn't expect one of those communities to be the blockchain world. Vitalik wrote me a 25-page response when discussing this book, and our discussion led to the publication of the paper on quadratic funding."
Quadratic voting, quadratic funding, or quadratic grants are essentially voting methods that allow individuals to express their preference intensities for different options using game theory and mathematical logic. Each person has a certain number of credits that they can use to vote for or against options they support or oppose. The total number of credits each option receives represents the level of support or opposition it receives.
However, each additional vote requires more credits. This prevents a minority from influencing the outcome with a large number of credits and encourages a majority to express their opinions with a small number of credits. In fact, quadratic voting has groundbreaking significance, from the governance of the current blockchain community to the operation of democratic political mechanisms.
However, after the publication of Glen Weyl's papers on quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and quadratic grants, they have sparked much discussion and controversy in the field of traditional economics. Glen himself has also reflected on and criticized them based on the theoretical assumptions of sovereign individuals and absolute game theory.
Regarding the topic of quadratic funding, Owocki introduces the current situation of quadratic grants operated by DAO in Gitcoin, where media projects and platforms jointly donate funds to digital infrastructure and other public goods. One remarkable development is that we have a way on the Internet to involve more people in the demand for digital public infrastructure, to constructively build better solutions through genuine public participation, whether it is the provision of digital infrastructure or the regulation of the entire crypto industry.
Glen mentions that quadratic funding has many different applications, including within companies. Although Ethereum is not a company, it is, to some extent, a private, loose, and decentralized entity.
Projects like Gitcoin support the operation of this ecosystem to some extent.
Within Microsoft, the CTO's office plays an important role in resolving conflicts between different organizations. Some organizations are not willing to contribute to the infrastructure that benefits the entire company; they only focus on the interests of their individual work to gain recognition.
Quadratic funding provides a possible mechanism for the CTO to have a large funding pool instead of a growing bureaucratic system. This funding pool is not commanded by executing orders, but through a decentralized process, similar to a virtual team, where teams come together and believe that "doing this for the company" is necessary. They then provide funding for common infrastructure based on the team's wishes and match the funds through a common pool.
As a radical experimentalist in governance, Glen is concerned about the broader expansion of relevant mechanisms beyond the crypto community, to create a truly broad community of builders based on existing practical foundations. He mentioned a quadratic funding social experiment conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Boulder, where more than 250 donations were raised for businesses such as comic book stores, bookstores, and yoga studios in the city.
"One of the most interesting things to me is that this mechanism can be expanded whether you are in the crypto market or not," says Glen.
Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, Data Dignity, and Public Goods#
Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST), also known as the Harberger tax, is an idea proposed in "Radical Markets" to reform property rights systems.
Specifically, it is a method that allows everyone to freely buy and sell the resources they own or use (such as land, houses, stocks, etc.). Each person must assign a price to the resources they own or use and pay taxes to the government based on that price. If someone is willing to offer a higher price to buy the resource, the original owner or user must sell or transfer it. This prevents resources from being hoarded or wasted inefficiently and promotes the flow of resources in society, using tax design to promote social equality and the provision of public goods.
The design of the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax is often closely related to Universal Basic Income (UBI), where the government or collective organization uses the tax to maintain the surplus and distribute it to everyone in the organization in the form of UBI for redistribution. This radical left-wing reform idea does not completely abolish private property rights, and personal belongings are excluded from the tax system within a reasonable range.
It is worth noting that Glen believes that the combination of Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, quadratic funding, UBI, and central fund allocation will lead to strong institutional innovation. However, the practice of quadratic funding will bring new possibilities to the existing central UBI model. These concepts are not simply combined by adding them together.
Glen illustrates the potential answers to market failures and tragedies of the commons through examples of road congestion charges and market competition. When discussing public goods, Glen suggests that we move away from the traditional binary perspective of public versus private and consider the concept of "community goods." For example, the indivisible surface area of Washington Lake is a community good, not a global public good or a private good.
Once you consider this, you will realize that most of the people you interact with are not anonymous strangers who only interact with you in the market. In fact, some people have stronger or weaker social relationships with you, depending on how much community goods you share.
This feeling will be amplified in the crypto world, where people involved in different projects and organizations will have stronger cross-overlapping effects. Solidarity among individuals should be an effect that grows with the sharing of community goods, and it may even be a pre-existing predisposition.
This is also a shortcoming of quadratic voting from a perspective that relies too heavily on the assumption of rational individuals and atomistic independence. Therefore, Glen believes that future designs of related mechanisms need to better incorporate the understanding and utilization of existing social relationships and solidarity to improve fund allocation mechanisms.
During the conversation, Glen talks about the concept of "digital dignity," which is a way to protect individual data rights and privacy. Everyone should own their own data and be able to benefit from it. This idea is not unfamiliar to believers in Web3, and the exploitation of platform data is an important topic in labor theory, Marxist research, and government-society relations.
Glen envisions a blockchain-based digital dignity platform that allows users to control their own data and collaborate with other users within a community framework to share benefits. This model undoubtedly enhances democracy, innovation, and social fairness.
Further Reading#
Through this podcast, especially Glen's own statements, it is evident that "Radical Markets" is not a research work exclusively for the crypto world. It focuses more on the market regulation issues in the real world, which involves the arrangement of democratic systems and reforms of property rights systems. The crypto world provides the technical means and practical possibilities for these ideas.
It is difficult to simply judge and describe a political or economic work as left or right, especially in a book like "Radical Markets" that could be opposed by both the extreme left and the extreme right. However, we can still use the traditional spectrum for description. The free market is undoubtedly the foundation of the book, but the more prominent value orientation of equality (whether it is quadratic funding, Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or UBI) can be labeled as left-liberal (or even stronger).
The crypto world is not isolated from the traditional world; the economic and social activities of the traditional world will have an impact, and the thought experiments and governance of the crypto world continuously provide new possibilities for the traditional world. The social value thinking brought by "Radical Markets" easily reminds us of the famous "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty, who proposes a global progressive tax system to address inequality in the operation of capitalism.
Quadratic funding, improvements in the provision of public goods, Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, and the design of a digital dignity platform are the answers provided by "Radical Markets" to the same issues. If you want to better understand "Radical Markets" and its institutional concerns and economic positions, we recommend comparing it with "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and reading a concise guide, which can be found here: "The Mystery of 'Martians Owning Earth' in 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century.'"
Vitalik's thoughts on reading this book: Vitalik Reads Radical Markets
✨ Subscribe to the "Green Pill" podcast ✨
https://availableon.com/greenpill
🟢 YouTube link to this episode 🟢
Collaborator Recruitment#
As a Workstream launched in Uncommons, the "Green Pill Podcast Study Group" encourages collaboration and invites more people to get involved. Specifically, we are recruiting the following roles:
Class Representative
Listen to the podcast, produce post-listening notes, and publish them on the Uncommons media account.
It's not just translation! It's about expanding and summarizing based on understanding the content.
Share your notes and understanding at the study group.
Bounties will be awarded based on the duration of the podcast, at a rate of 3 USDT per minute.
Typesetter
Format the content based on the notes and column information provided by the class representative.
Each article is worth 15 USDT.
If you are interested in any of the above roles, please sign up on our Dework page:
https://app.dework.xyz/greenpill
If you are interested in our Workstream, please copy and open our Notion page:
https://greenpillcn.notion.site/GreenPill-62cbfc461cb44fd0a55f62a8104928bc
Our related output content will continue to be published on the Uncommons community's related media platforms, so please stay tuned.
About Uncommons#
Uncommons is a public sphere where a collective of Commons Builders explores Crypto Thoughts together.
Uncommons 是一群致力于公共物品建设的 Web3 爱好者、社会建设者和互联网公民自发组织的公益性社区，前身为 GreenPill 中文社区。
Telegram : https://t.me/theuncommons
Notion : https://uncommons.notion.site