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The Myth of Individualism

Glen Weyl

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Guest Introduction

My guest today is Glen Weyl: co-author of Radical Markets, founder of the RadicalxChange movement, Ph.D. in economics from Princeton, and in his spare time, works as Microsoft’s Chief Technology Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST).

In our conversation, we explore:

  • How social technologies and economic institutions shape our physical, mental, and social lives
  • The myth of individualism
  • How does RadicalxChange compare & contrast with Piketty’s progressive taxation approach?
  • How to design markets beyond neoliberalism, as mechanisms for complexity
  • UBI, art, and a lot more.

Time Map

  • 7 min ~ Our technologies shape our psychologies, our social technologies shape our social relations.
  • 10 min ~ How does RadicalxChange both learn, and differentiate itself, from neoliberalism?
  • 14:00 ~ How does RadicalxChange’s vision compare, and contrast, from Thomas Piketty/Emmanuel Saez/Gabriel Zucman’s development of progressive taxation?
  • 19 min ~ The neural annealing model of the brain applied to society.
  • 22:15 ~ RadicalxChange seems to achieve decommodification by expanding markets, rather than curtailing them. How is it possible to decommodify society by radically expanding the presence of markets logic?
  • 27:00 min ~ The similarity between Radical Markets and…Buddhism?
  • 29:30 ~ On the Scandinavian models of capitalism
  • 32 min ~ Universal basic income compared with social dividend
  • 35:00 ~ How do we formally recognize the collective nature of value creation in modern economies?
  • 37:30 ~ Land value tax with a twist: self assessed licenses sold at auction (SALSA)
  • 42 min ~ On the general misunderstanding of individualism and the myth of atomized individuals
  • 44:20 ~ Markets and complexity
  • 50:30 ~ Should we nationalize a portion of the capital stock? Eliminate all taxes on capital?
  • 54:50 ~ On John Dewey, human development in economic environments, and play vs. labor
  • 1:01:53 ~ My favorite moment of the conversation. Glen explodes, “UBI is neoliberalism!”
  • 1:06:30 ~ What is progress?
  • 1:12:40 ~ On Quadratic Markets and introducing markets into politics
  • 1:17:00 ~ Why art and artists are central to the RadicalxChange project.

Links from the Conversation