Transcript

Robert Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where each week we have an unusually in-depth conversation about one of the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve it. I’m Rob Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Today’s guest is about to explain why the blockchain is fundamentally flawed, how we could all vote much better, and why increasing returns to scale break traditional economic models.

First though I wanted to make sure you all know about our job board. It’s a short, curated list of the most promising publicly advertised vacancies we know about right now, kept up-to-date by my wonderful colleague Maria Gutierrez.

She actually gave it an update just a few days ago, and it now lists 199 positions you could apply for, including 76 added in the last month.

It covers a wide range of problem areas, including but not limited to AI research, preventing war, promoting effective altruism, ending factory farming and improving global health.

The kinds of roles are also all over the place as well, including engineers, managers, operations, outreach, researchers and more.

And while most roles are in the UK or US, some are remote, and others are in Canada, China, India, Kenya and a bunch of other countries besides.

If you like this show and want to do more good with your life, you should definitely check it out and see if there’s anything that’s the right next step for you. The address is 80000hours dot org slash job hyphen board .

Ideally I’d suggest checking it each two weeks, or subscribing to our newsletter, which will let you know each time there’s a new batch of positions to consider. That way you won’t find out too late to apply by a deadline.

I’ll stick up a link to the job board as well as the newsletter sign-up in the show notes.

I’ll also just point out that today’s guest would love to have listeners join a conference in Detroit on the weekend of the 22nd to 24th of March. It’s called RadicalxChange, with the letter x, and the tagline is ‘market mechanisms for equality and cooperation’. We’ll stick up links to find out more about about the event in the show notes.

And just finally, we changed the host for our podcast this week, which has allowed us to at last get listed on Spotify. It looks like everything went smoothly, but if you encounter any technical problems with the show, email podcast at 80000hours dot org right away, and we’ll do our best to fix it up.

Alright, here’s Glen.

Robert Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Dr Glen Weyl.

Glen was born and raised in the SF Bay Area, where he was first a socialist activist, and then a Republican and devotee of Ayn Rand. Much of his life since has been about reconciling these apparently contradictory ideologies. He completed a PhD in economics at Princeton, then 3 years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and 3 years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, before joining Microsoft as a Principal Researcher.

He has written a wide range of papers on how we might use technology to build new and better social institutions.

Most recently he has become active in trying to create social change by giving talks to activist groups, working with governments, and advising start-ups, especially blockchain startups.

His most recent book, co-authored with Eric Posner, is Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, which includes some of the ideas we hope to talk about today.

So, thanks for coming on the podcast, Glen.

Glen Weyl: Thrilled to be here.

Robert Wiblin: I hope to getting to talk about your critique of effective altruism, and the various ideas in the book Radical Markets, but first, what are you doing at the moment, and why do you think it’s really important work?

Glen Weyl: What I’m spending my time on is coordinating a social movement that’s trying to provide a coherent alternative to neoliberalism that’s not either sort of statist nor sort of nationalist, and that’s based on a bunch of ideas derived from economic theory, but integrating thoughts from philosophy, sociology, etc., and has really been built up not just through elite academic discourse, but through months of interactions that I and others have been having with a whole range of social actors. It’s been a really interesting and dynamic process.

Robert Wiblin: Is that this RadicalxChange organization that you’ve been founding?

Glen Weyl: Yeah, and the associated movements that are not literally part of the organization, but that are self-organizing, decentralized, etc.

What is RadicalxChange?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so what is RadicalxChange? Is it a nonprofit, or a conference, or a community, or …

Glen Weyl: All of the above. RadicalxChange Foundation is a nonprofit, which is running a RadicalxChange conference, but then there’s also startups and activist groups and so forth that are independent.

Robert Wiblin: What kind of work is it pursuing? Has it taken on any particular kind of policies that it’s excited about, or is it just kind of a discussion of like different institutional reforms that might be interesting at this point?

Glen Weyl: Well, so it has four different aspects. Ideas and research, entrepreneurship and technology, activism and government, and arts and communications. In each one of those areas, there’s a whole bunch of different activities, but ideas and research is sort of helping to generate these ideas and discussion around them. Arts and communications is sort of educating people and helping people imagine this world, and imagine issues with it. Entrepreneurship and technology is experimenting with these institutions in a variety of ways, and activism and government is both doing grassroots organizing around this sort of stuff, but also working with technocratic policymakers and political parties and things like that. That full range of activities is what we think is necessary in loose coordination with each other to make fundamental social change happen in the medium term.

Robert Wiblin: It seems like so far in your career, you’ve spent kind of more time in academia or writing papers and books. I guess, is this an attempt to kind of get into the real world, and get your hands dirty, and trying to make things happen?

Glen Weyl: Yeah, I mean, until four years ago, I was just straight up an academic, and then until about six or seven months ago, I was mostly an academic, and my life has completely changed since then.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Are you enjoying it more?

Glen Weyl: Oh, this is way more what I was made to do than what I was doing before, for sure.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Tell me more. It seems like you have been pretty successful at writing all these papers and being academic, but you love being more active than that?

Glen Weyl: I feel like I’m constantly far more challenged in this role than I was before. I felt like before, there was all these ideas coming out, and I wasn’t even really able to express them, because I had to spend so much time doing stuff that I thought was basically a waste of time, like filling in details to get academic papers to be in exactly the format that was not optimal for society, but was optimal for a narrow set of reviewing processes and so forth. Now I feel like I’m being dramatically more intellectually productive, but also doing it in a democratic conversation with a wide range of people who have become my colleagues. That’s just tremendously rewarding, but at the same time, I’m incompetent at 90% of the things I’m now doing, which means that I’m constantly having to grow. That, I really appreciate.

Robert Wiblin: You think this is likely to be kind of a permanent shift out of academia into, I guess, what’s it, the think tank and policy world, or the-

Glen Weyl: I’m not sure-

Robert Wiblin: … social movement world?

Glen Weyl: … I’d describe this as … I’m not sure I’d describe this as think tank and policy world. I actually don’t really like the term “policy” very much, and we’ll turn to that-

Robert Wiblin: I think we’ll get to that, yeah.

Glen Weyl: … when we talk about effective altruism.

Robert Wiblin: I thought that might rub you the wrong-

Glen Weyl: Because-

Robert Wiblin: … way. I’m not sure-

Glen Weyl: Because-

Robert Wiblin: … what to call it.

Glen Weyl: “Policy” has a very elitist, technocratic, statist feeling to it that I’m not very comfortable with. I would call myself “in the social imagination world,” or something like that, or “the democratic world” would be okay with me.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Cool. All right. Engaged in-

Glen Weyl: [inaudible 00:04:46].

Robert Wiblin: … grassroots organizing. Community organizer.

Glen Weyl: Something like that. Yeah, and that’s certainly an element of it, but yeah, I don’t think I can move backwards in my life, if that’s what you mean, but I find it very hard to predict precisely what I’ll be doing in six or eight months. I think I would be violating the law of iterated expectations if I thought I could predict what I’ll be doing in eight or 10 months, because-

Robert Wiblin: You’d already be doing it.

Glen Weyl: … I’ve been surprised so much that I should be expecting to be surprised again, so …

Initial blockchain discussion

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so we’ll come back to those policy issues later on. Not policy issues, community imagination issues. Yeah. Let’s talk about blockchain and cryptocurrency for a second, which hasn’t really come up on the show yet, but a lot of people have an interest in. I guess for any listeners who still somehow have no idea what the blockchain is or how it works, we’ll stick up a link to another podcast you can listen to about that on another show, or I guess you can just skip this section.

Glen Weyl: I should listen to that, I guess.

Robert Wiblin: I think EconTalk had some good episodes on this, but yeah, we’re going to avoid rehashing all of it, but yeah, a couple of months ago on Twitter, I noticed that you wrote, “It seems to me that the most serious, organized, and broad-based movement for a positive, forward-looking, liberal vision of the future is the blockchain movement. Especially Ethereum. So when people ask me, ‘What is blockchain good for?’ I respond, ‘What was the Temple of Jerusalem good for? For making it rain? Or for helping create and preserve a people who eventually led to Jesus Christ, Benjamin Disraeli, and Karl Marx?’ It seems to me that in the same way, the ‘use case’ of Ethereum is less any particular technical question and more offering a vision of the future that can save us from returning to the 1930s next time we hit a recession.” Yeah, very optimistic there about Ethereum and the blockchain community. Can you expand on that? What is it about that vision of the future that you’re particularly excited by?

Glen Weyl: I think first of all, there’s very few spaces in our society for talking about fundamental notions of legitimacy and political organization. In particular, our society has gone increasingly, and I’m talking especially about the U.S. I think it’s less severe in Europe, but in the U.S., there is an attitude that technology’s going to be disruptive, we can have all sorts of technological change, but that changes in our social institutions are just sort of dismissed. I think blockchain, by casting the problem of social organization as a technology problem, which is not really what the blockchain’s about, it’s primarily a question of social organization, but by casting it in that way, it’s opened up a space for the exploration of these fundamental questions of social legitimacy, which I think are the critical questions facing our society right now, our societies right now.

Glen Weyl: I think that, to a large extent, those questions are only being answered by sort of nationalists and statists of various sorts, and I don’t think there’s been a lot of progress by broad liberals in answering those types of questions. I don’t think all of the blockchain world is liberal, but a large chunk of it is, and so I think there’s been a really interesting space for genuinely liberal thoughts to be aired and explored there.

Defining liberal

Robert Wiblin: What do you mean by “liberal”? That’s a word that has a lot of different uses.

Glen Weyl: Yeah, so I have my particular meaning of liberal, which is broader than most of the standard uses, I would say. I would describe liberalism as the opposition to hierarchical, historically derived, arbitrary centralized authority, and in favor of dynamic, emergent social organization.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, yeah. Why is that a better way of organizing things?

Glen Weyl: Well, it offers the possibility of progress. I think other forms of organizations are rigid, and non-adaptive to changing circumstances, and/or are what you might call totalitarian or unitarian. They don’t allow for complexity, and richness, and diversity.

Robert Wiblin: We recently had an interview with Martin Gurri that it’s going to come out before this interview. Have you read his book, The Revolt of the Public?

Glen Weyl: No.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Yeah. You should check it out. It deals with some similar themes of, I guess, like hierarchical organizations versus grassroots ones, and I guess the tension between them and kind of where each of them has its strengths and weaknesses and, yeah, where the balance should lie. Yeah, so how do you think that this more, I guess, [inaudible 00:09:10] a greater willingness to rethink how society ought to be organized could save us from a Great Depression?

Glen Weyl: One thing on this issue of hierarchical versus grassroots organizations, I think it’s important to distinguish liberalism as I described it from any particular set of institutions which may or may not manage to achieve those liberal goals. One major problem with grassroots organizations at present is that they are often quite inefficient in various ways, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily a necessary property of non-hierarchical or non-historically-derived institutions. It happens to be a property of many such things that we’ve observed. I think that’s important to keep in mind. Fundamentally, I don’t think it’ll save us from the Depression, but it will save us from the reactions that came to that.

Glen Weyl: In the 1930s, the Great Depression let loose two totalitarian regimes that nearly wiped out human life or what was worth living for, and we were saved from that, I think, ultimately, by a redemption of liberalism by things like the New Deal and other social reforms in Europe, and those offering a coherent liberal vision of where things could go instead. I think without those visions, we would have gone somewhere very dark, and so I think right now, that’s what we need to discover. We need to discover a vision for today that offers people a plausible alternative to nationalism and statism as ways of addressing the current crisis in legitimacy in wealthy countries.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, so I guess some people might look at the ’30s and think that what we needed was less radical rethinking of how society ought to be organized, because that kind of gave us fascism and communism, which you weren’t optimistic about, but I guess you think it’s okay to do radical rethinking as long as it’s within the liberal tradition or as long as it’s not kind of of a statist form?

Glen Weyl: Well, first of all, radical rethinking, I think, is called for by the conditions of society. I don’t think there was an alternative. Whether one would have liked to have preserved a world where a few people are incredibly wealthy and everybody else is starving in Depression-like conditions, and you could have thought, “Oh, that’s not such a bad world. At least we avoided fascism or communism,” I just don’t think that that was tenable. Even if you’re inclined to think that that’s fine, I think you would just, you would not do well, and John Maynard Keynes very much made that case that in order to survive, liberalism had to adapt. I also think just there are fundamental intellectual incoherencies in liberalism back then and liberalism now that are going to come home to roost at some point, regardless, so I actually also agree with the intellectual critiques of the nationalists and the statists today.

Glen Weyl: I think that they’re right to say that neoliberalism and capitalism are just fundamentally intellectually bankrupt, but even if you don’t agree with that, I think that most people think that now, and so unless you have a plan to exterminate them or eliminate their political voice, you’re unlikely to be able to survive in democratic societies without addressing the concerns that they have.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. In what way are they intellectually bankrupt? I guess I’m fairly in favor of this new wave of neoliberalism, which is like more, perhaps more of a economically rationalist center-left politics, but it seems to me like kind of the current system has given us the best of times, setting aside risks from new technologies which, of course, I’m worried about, or perhaps the risk of war between the U.S. and China. It’s like poverty is declining very quickly. It’s like globally, equality is increasing very rapidly. It seems like there’s the glass is pretty half-full.

Glen Weyl: I think the fundamental problem is that what makes civilization possible is the fact that we can all do more together than we can each do on our own. That’s a idea that is called increasing returns in economics, and the problem is that basic economic theory will tell you that capitalism does not lead to good outcomes in the presence of increasing returns. I think most of the problems that we are seeing in the world today can be traced to that. Global warming is an increasing returns phenomenon. It affects everyone on the planet. Most of the network industries that have so much concentration of power that we’re worried about them are increasing returns phenomena. Most of the issues around insurance has to do with the fact that insurance has increasing returns properties to it. That’s why people think about things like single-payer systems and so forth.

Glen Weyl: Most of the major social issues that we’re dealing with, community, and the feelings of destruction of community that people have, come from the inability of the, quote, “magic,” unquote, of capitalism to deal with increasing returns, when in fact, increasing returns are literally what’s responsible for everything good that you were talking about since the Great Depression. Yet you go to literally any economics textbook, you read any of that stuff, one of the first things it will tell you is, “All this works under the assumption of decreasing returns. If there’s increasing returns, we don’t really have anything to say about that. Go talk to someone other than an economist,” more or less. What that amounts to is basically saying, “Everything that’s responsible for all the wealth that we have, we don’t really have much to say about that.”

Robert Wiblin: It’s happened by accident.

Glen Weyl: Then this little edge case of like decreasing returns, which we know cannot possibly be most of what’s going on, or we wouldn’t have all the wealth that we have, well, that, that we can account for. Then we’re going to say, “Oh, all the wealth we have is attributable to this thing which we know only works in the edge case which we know can’t have anything to do with all the wealth we have.” That’s just like … I’m not saying that that immediately means any particular alternative system, but to think like, “Things are pretty good,” intellectually, when that’s the state of affairs, I think takes sort of really bizarre intellectual gymnastics.

Increasing returns to scale

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so let’s go a little bit slower. Can you explain why the framing of the increasing returns to scale is the best way of looking at this problem and maybe what do the models say is going to be the inefficiency when you have increasing returns to scale? Like what is happening, and how are we getting things wrong?

Glen Weyl: Let me start with the example of public goods, which will probably be more familiar to people, and then a lot of people will probably object, “Well, there aren’t really that many pure public goods,” and whatever, and we can get into that, but the point is that the basic logic of public goods is the logic behind why increasing returns doesn’t work under capitalism. The logic of public goods are, imagine there is some thing that we can all pour money into, which will generate benefits for all of us rather than just for one of us. Now, each of us has an incentive to contribute to that thing until our personal marginal utility equals the cost of contributing further to that thing, but the actual optimality condition is that the sum of all the benefits that we receive is equal to the cost of one of us contributing one additional dollar. What you then get is, if people are individualistically contributing to that, a factor one over n, roughly, underfunding of the resource. Right?

Glen Weyl: That is not a small inefficiency. That’s not like, “Oh, the marginal tax rate is 70%, and therefore people only have 30% of the incentive.” This is like orders of magnitude underfunding of the relevant thing. Then you might say, “Well, how common are public goods?” If you want to say 100% pure public goods, maybe not that common, but there’s like no 100% pure private goods either. Then the question is, where on that spectrum do most things lie? My claim is, what makes something like a public good is that it has increasing returns to scale, that we can achieve more together than we could each achieve on our own. Then you have to ask yourself, “Do you think that as an overall description of human civilization, the notion that we would be all basically equally well off if we were, or even better off, in the case of decreasing returns, if we were isolated in individual huts, interacting with no other human beings?” I think most people think probably not. Probably, that would not lead to as high flourishing of human civilization in whatever sense you take that to mean.

Robert Wiblin: Kind of a public good, like, say, creating a piece of information, then, everyone can use for free, is that the kind of thing we’re thinking there is increasing returns to scale, because you have more-

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: … people who then-

Glen Weyl: Yeah, so-

Robert Wiblin: … can produce that?

Glen Weyl: Let me give you an example just very concretely from everyday life of where I think … It’s pretty obvious that capitalism is sort of orders of magnitude off of leading to anything like efficiency. Imagine that The New York Times, tomorrow, discovers incontrovertible proof that Donald Trump is literally receiving a daily batch of orders from Vladimir Putin. Right? How much money do you think that The New York Times will make as a result of having discovered that relative to the amount of money they’d make from having a really good cat video? Possibly more? Probably not, but certainly not many times more. The reason is that that information that they discovered, nobody needs to read The New York Times piece, and certainly not for like years and watch tons of ads in order to figure that out, whereas the cat video holds your attention for a while. Right?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah.

Glen Weyl: The value of the information they create just bears no relationship whatsoever to the reward that they’re getting, or at least the ratio of noise to signal is like 99.9 or something like that.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. I went on a rant about how there’s no reason to think that capitalism makes information economics work well, I think, back with, back in an episode with Brian Christian, on Algorithms to Live By. I’m curious to know, are there other common examples outside of kind of information economics where things are much more inefficient than what people realize that’s not commonly recognized?

Glen Weyl: Well, I mean, first of all, all monopolies are basically just examples of this. Every distortion that you consider to be a monopoly distortion is effectively an example of this, because, like why do monopolies exist? Because a bunch of people split up can’t do the thing as well as one person who does it all together, but then if you turn that into private property, the person’s going to use that to extract as much rent as they can rather than providing as much value as they’re able to. All of the oppression of corporate power, all of the stuff about monopolies, and most of the environmental crap that we are dealing with, like climate change. Again, you fix the climate, we all benefit from that, and you can’t really exclude people from that. I mean, that’s actually maybe about as close to a pure public good as you get, and then you’ve got all these different countries that all want their selfish things, and we just don’t have institutions for actually dealing with that.

Glen Weyl: Now, maybe to some limited extent, some democracies in some cases try to deal with that, but democracy is just like a profoundly messed up and not relevant mechanism, at least as it’s currently practiced and adapted to the actual challenges of public goods that we’re facing as a world.

Back to crypto

Robert Wiblin: Okay. All right. I want to take a step back for a minute back to crypto, because we’re going to come to these mechanisms for public good funding later on, and it might be worth talking about the book first. What do you think are the biggest downsides of the crypto community? I guess I only have vague exposure to it, and it seems to me like whoever came up, or whatever group of people came up with Bitcoin are clearly geniuses, and Vitalik is, Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, is otherworldly, I think, in his insightfulness, but I guess it also seems to have kind of attracted a lot of overconfident people, and people who are drawn in by ideology more than anything else. I guess at the worst end is kind of a lot of scammers and bullshit artists who’ve seen a chance to make a quick buck. Do you see them damaging the community, or you think it’s still overall, it’s like a very good group?

Glen Weyl: Oh, so first of all, I would say that the technology that is currently called blockchain, which has a bunch of different elements to it, I think is a dead end, and I think it has very, very few applications, if any, where I think that that’s going to be the right type of a data structure to use. I also think it has very problematic social implications. I actually think the ideology instantiated by the actual technical protocols right now is dark and deeply problematic, and I think that, like there is a spectrum from really intelligent person who has a good understanding of what’s going on, through deeply naïve and somewhat self-deluding deliberately because of potential greed and so forth issues, through to outright scammers.

Glen Weyl: Like if you ask for the center of gravity of that within the typical thing in the community, it’s definitely towards that latter end of the spectrum, so there are huge problems. However, like capitalism has enormous problems, as I’ve been trying to say, and there is very little space in our society for seriously reconsidering that and for people to think boldly about these things. I think that this is offering a space for that, and that’s extremely important.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, you’re completely confounding my plan for this interview here, because I thought you were going to be like, explain how the blockchain’s going to be very useful, and I was going to have to explain why I’m kind of skeptical that its applications are terribly useful. Yeah. Okay, talk to me about the technical side. Why do you think that the blockchain is overrated or that it’s like … It sounds like you even think it might be harmful overall.

Glen Weyl: Yeah, so first of all, I think that the data structure instantiates a view of how data, like where data originates and how it should be stored, that is pretty inimical to what’s the right way of thinking about where data is and how it should be stored. In particular, I’m a big fan of decentralization, but the blockchain is not really based on that concept. It’s really based on the notion that a large chunk of all data should be completely public, and then a bunch of stuff should be utterly private. That is ultimately, and maybe we’ll turn to this more later, sort of the anathema of the way I think about things.

Glen Weyl: I actually think that everything has some sphere of intimacy where it should be shared, and some other sphere of intimacy, or of society, into which its leaking would be problematic, and that it’s almost never the case that you want things stored completely globally. On the other hand, it’s almost always the case that you don’t want them to be overly cloistered, and so data structures that instantiate the appropriate level of decentralization and that actually store data in relationship to the communities to which it pertains, have to be a much closer to optimal way of thinking about data structures. That’s at the very core of how it’s conceived, I think, a fundamental problem with the blockchain.

Robert Wiblin: Can you cash that out in an example, where the current approach would, I guess, lead to things being too public in a way that’s harmful, and how it might be organized better?

Glen Weyl: Well, I mean, basically, the blockchain says you are anonymous online, and then everything you do online is totally public and completely transparent, but think about your reputation. Your reputation is not something you need to share with everybody in every context, but on the other hand, it’s incredibly important that you not be anonymous, because if you’re anonymous, then you’re unaccountable. Instead, the appropriate thing to do, like if I was looking into you, Rob, and saying, “Is this a guy I should be doing a podcast with,” probably what I wouldn’t want to do is go to some global repository where every action that you’ve ever taken is either listed or completely detached from you. Instead, I would go to some people, I would get, in confidence, some references about you. You see what I’m saying? Like-

Robert Wiblin: Right.

Glen Weyl: That’s the way that human societies are and should work. Things should not be either global or utterly individualistic and private. They should always be shared with some communities and not with other communities, and the blockchain just doesn’t have the affordances, naturally, to allow for that sort of a structure at a technical level.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so are there any applications that you are excited about? I guess, what’s your view on the kind of use case side of things, or is that not your area?

Glen Weyl: The problem is that I don’t have a lot of examples of things for which I really think blockchain is necessary and sufficient as it’s currently instantiated. There’s lots of things that people in the blockchain community are trying to think about that I think are really important problems to think about, but the technology, as it currently stands, I’m not sure there’s anything I think is really a desirable application.

Robert Wiblin: Is there a vision going forward on the technical side for how we could produce a data structure that doesn’t have to have this dichotomy-

Glen Weyl: Oh, I mean, I’m-

Robert Wiblin: … between super public and super private?

Glen Weyl: I’m working on that stuff a lot, and I think the notion that mechanisms, rather than discretionary centralized authorities, should be the basis for us interacting in information structures, I’m a huge supporter of that, and I think that, honestly, that’s really what has gotten many of the people excited about blockchains, but I don’t think the actual technical structure of the current setup, I have a clear vision for an area where I really think of it as the right, right application. I mean, maybe there’s some notion of central reserve deposits, or other things that really should be global public records of some sort, where something like this is not terrible, but even there, I would say the proof of work consensus is really a bad way to do it.

Robert Wiblin: Explain that.

Glen Weyl: It’s basically the stuff that means you have to mine things, and there’s all this waste of energy and so forth, so that’s not a very good way to structure it. Yeah, and there are other problems as well. Like even in those narrower things where I don’t think the problem is the data structure per se, there are many ways, issues with how it’s implemented at present that I think are fundamentally flawed and need to be replaced.

Radical markets

Robert Wiblin: Okay, all right. Let’s move on from the blockchain and talk about your book, Radical Markets. I’ve read it twice now, and I can honestly say that, the first time, at least, I was just incredibly excited. I felt like a young economist again, back when I was an undergrad, because it’s, back then, all the time, there’s all of these big new ideas that you’re encountering that hope to explain the world and show you a path forward for making it better, and now I’m like, become old and jaded, and it’s hard to find any really exciting new ideas anymore, but you had, at least four of them that I really hadn’t heard before, which I thought was very impressive.

Glen Weyl: Well, and the thing I would say for myself is that when I came up with those ideas, I experienced that sort of joy as well, but even more so, in the six months since the book came out, I’d say I’ve made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that. It’s been just one unending sort of trip through a candy store for me working on this book project, so-

Robert Wiblin: I need to start reading all of your new papers, evidently, but yeah, so, unfortunately, we’re not going to have that long to talk about the proposals in the book. I think there’s only one that I really want to dive into, because we’ve got so many other issues to discuss, and I guess people can read the book if they’re interested, and I can stick up links to reviews, both positive and critical, but yeah. Maybe just quickly, can you try to summarize this as fast as possible, like what are the five proposals that you put forward in the book, and what’s the case for them?

Glen Weyl: We propose an alternative to private property that’s based on the idea of auctions where everyone, every corporation or person with significant private property would self-assess the value of the asset and pay a tax on that self-assessed value but have to sell the asset at that price if someone else came along to buy it, and this would both fund enough to dramatically reduce inequality, would basically make two-thirds of private wealth common property, and at the same time, it would make a much more efficient and dynamic economy, because no assets would be subject to the current monopolization, and they could be much more easily transferred to new uses.

Robert Wiblin: Rob here chiming in after the recording. I just wanted to offer some more information on this first proposal in the book, because I think it will come in quite handy later in the episode. The proposal is called the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, or COST.

Imagine that you owned a piece of commercial real estate with offices on it. Under the COST you would have to pay an annual tax of, say, 10% on the value of that property.

Now a classic problem with such property taxes is that it’s hard to know the value of any particular piece of real estate.

The COST solves this in a clever way. You get to say what you think the property is worth to you at any point in time, and pay the tax on that amount. But there’s a catch – your valuation would be listed publicly, and you have to be willing to sell it to anyone at that self-assessed price.

This obviously gives you a reason to report a high value, to avoid being forced to suddenly sell it for a price that’s less than how much you actually value it.

But on the other hand, you’d like to suggest a lower value if you could get away with it, to reduce your tax bill.

The point at which these considerations balance out is if the tax rate is the same as the rate at which that kind of property naturally changes hands. So if it’s efficient for a piece of commercial real estate to get a new owner each twenty years, then with a 5% tax rate, your best bet is just to write down how much you actually value the piece of property. Neat huh!

Now, taxes like this would obviously also discourage you from investment in creating valuable things, because as that thing became more valuable your taxes would go up, extracting some of the value. This is a good reason to keep tax rates lower than they otherwise would be, but Glen thinks that suitably low rates would have an acceptable effect on investment rates. Keep in mind other taxes could be reduced as the COST increased.

For Glen a big benefit of having public prices on significant pieces of property, and allowing folks to quickly buy them at that price, is that it will improve allocative efficiency, by reducing search costs and the amount of time-consuming kind-of competitive or strategic bidding behaviour among buyers and sellers of unique pieces of property.

Glen speculates that we could end up funding much of government using the COST, and that it could ultimately end up being applied not only to things like commercial real estate, but all forms of wealth.

In a way this would mean we fund government by renting all of our significant property from it.

There are obviously pretty serious practical issues here, but the book does a decent job of making them seem surmountable, at least for some kinds of property.

Anyway, now you know about the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax. Back to the second proposal in the book.

Glen Weyl: The second idea is called quadratic voting. It’s an alternative way of voting that protects minorities rather than them needing to be protected by new rights and things like that, separate rights. The notion is that everyone would have a budget of voice credits they could spend on different issues where the cost of the number of votes that they get is the square of the votes that they get on that issue. That allows for truly representative decision making where everyone can weigh in in proportion to how much they care, which we think would resolve a lot of the current tensions around democracies.

Glen Weyl: Third, we propose a new system of migration where, rather than nation-states having the primary responsibility for migrants coming in, and therefore most of the benefits of migration accruing to wealthy employers or the migrants themselves, we would allow individuals in communities to sponsor migrants and to benefit from them coming so that you would have far broader support for migration as well as potentially much higher levels thereof.

Glen Weyl: Fourth, we argue that almost all of the market power that exists is not as actually ignored by competition policy at present and that most of that comes from two sources. One is institutional investors who own most of the corporate economy and have no interest in seeing people compete. That’s like Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and from the power that companies have over their workers rather than over their consumers, and that there are simple, very simple, antitrust policy changes that would address these issues, and these should be implemented, and that they would have macro-level effects on inequality and growth.

Glen Weyl: Finally, we argue that all the data that all of us are every day feeding to Google and Facebook is what trains all of their artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that everyone is saying are going to replace us as workers, and that if we just recognized that data as the labor that it is, we would be able to provide people a sustainable living rather than telling them that they’re useless.

Glen Weyl: To provide people with sustainable living rather than telling them that they’re useless.

Robert Wiblin: That sounds like you’ve had various changes of opinion, and you’ve learned lots of new things since the book came out, I guess, about eight months ago. Which of these do you now think is the worst? Are there any that you’ve gone cold on?

Glen Weyl: I think my interpretation of them has changed quite a bit, but I don’t think that there’s anything we said in the book that I don’t think would be an improvement of the status quo as described in the book. I think probably the one that I think is most misconceived in terms of how it’s described is the Immigration one. I think the Data is Labor one was also described poorly in the book.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, how do you think you miscommunication them?

Glen Weyl: I think fundamentally the whole book, but especially those, are too individualistic and don’t think enough about supporting social institutions or even … they just conceive of the relevant actors as too much being isolated individuals rather than being various groups or public good providing entities or however you wanted to describe that. I think that that was confused and confusing.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, is there any of these that you think is just kind of a no-brainer, that should just be turned into policy? I guess you hate that word, but should be done sooner rather than later?

Glen Weyl: I think the things that are closest to “policy” are the things in the Data is Labor chapter and the Antitrust chapter. I think those are rapidly happening in both Europe and increasingly even in the US. I think that that stuff is policy-ish and is being treated is such. I think it’s making great progress.

Robert Wiblin: The Antitrust one there is the idea that kind of an index fund that owns all of the companies in America. It would have to choose … if it gets efficiently big, it would have to choose just one airline and say that it’s going to invest in so that it can’t own a large fraction of all of them and then just encourage them not to compete with one another, which is just an obvious kind of … yeah, [inaudible 00:33:59] of trust.

Glen Weyl: Yesterday we had the great tragedy of having lost Jack Vogle, who is the Founder of Vanguard, and not just a hero but a personal mentor of mine and my wife’s. A truly great man. When I first told him about my views of this, it was a subject of some contention. One thing I greatly admire about him is that over the course of several years since then, he really came around. He was one of the most important voices warning of too much power being in too few hands in that industry. That’s something I think definitely needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Quadratic voting

Robert Wiblin: Great, all right. Let’s dive into one of these ideas in greater detail. One that I haven’t heard discussed on other podcasts as much, which is quadratic voting. You gave a very quick description of quadratic voting earlier, but kind of what is it and what’s some more detail, what’s the case for it being better than just a one person/one vote system that we have today?

Glen Weyl: The idea is that every citizen will be allocated an equal budget of voice credits, which they can use to vote on different issues or candidates in favor of or against. They have to pay out of their voice credits the square of the number of votes that they buy. The reason that the square is the right formula, is that you want people to buy votes in proportion to how much they care about an issue. In order for that to be the case, people have to buy votes just up until the point where the next vote is worth it to them. In the quadratic formula, and only in that formula, the cost of the next vote is proportional to how many votes you’ve already bought.

Glen Weyl: That gives everyone an incentive to weigh in precisely in proportion to how much they care. That’s how to think about it from a utilitarian perspective. But more broadly, what I would say that is quadratic voting gives an opportunity for people to express their commitments and their engagement with different aspects of social life in a fluid and open way that is not allowed under standard voting protocols. Albert [Hirschman 00:36:11] once said that, “Authoritarianism actually gives people a great ability to speak sometimes, than does democracy, because it’s too cheap to speak under democracy.” So there is no way for people to actually show that something’s really important to them.

Glen Weyl: Whereas, under authoritarianism, if you go out and protest in the street, you know that’s really an important thing to someone. In some ways, what quadratic voting does is without the violations of freedom, gives people an opportunity to truly show what’s important to them.

Robert Wiblin: So it’s the idea that each year each voter would get 100 voice credits that they can then spread out over various issues that they want to vote on? Or, is it that people could buy these voice credits? Or is it kind of both ideas are there?

Glen Weyl: It’s complicated because it depends whether you’re talking about a proposal that I’m making over what time horizon and where, but I think if you asked my ultimate vision of the world, probably I have a vision where this sort of expression of voice replaces income. So there’s not even a clear notion of money. Then even asking the question becomes difficult. In the short term, I would say you should give voice credits in relatively egalitarian and legitimately accepted ways that are easy for people to grasp and be happy with.

Glen Weyl: Is there some realm in between those two where you might use something more like money? Possibly, but it’s probably not that much.

Robert Wiblin: All right, so when was this idea first proposed? Was it you and your colleagues who originated it?

Glen Weyl: The truth is that there is nothing truly new under the sun. There are precedents in some form for pretty much everything. You can, in some ways, trace this back to Roger Penrose in the 1940s. You can, in some ways, trace it back to the 1970s and 1980s. But in terms of something that is recognizably decodable as quadratic voting, and intelligible even to most economists as such, it originates in a paper in 2012 that I wrote. I came up with it in 2009.

Robert Wiblin: Has it been applied anywhere? Where do you think it might have the greatest contribution?

Glen Weyl: It’s been used a lot in polling right now.

Robert Wiblin: Okay.

Glen Weyl: But it’s also been used in export/import regulatory compliance, block chain stuff. It’s been used inside lots of organizations. It’s been used among students. But in the long term, I think the most important ways to deal with global public goods like climate change or something like that. But that’s obviously going to take longer than some of these other applications get. There’s a whole range of things.

Robert Wiblin: Can you explain how would this help with climate change? For that matter, how is being used in this import/export regulation?

Glen Weyl: They’re using it elect block makers, who then verify compliance with various regulations, and the participants who have to elect them come from the governments or other organizations that are involved in regulatory compliance for import/export. In terms of climate change, the idea would be that you have to come to an agreement on international rules that have very disparate impacts on many different people. You need to have a clear understanding of the trade offs that people have between different aspects of that agreement because some aspects have huge effects on one country, others have huge effects on others, and you need a way to make that credible. In that process of bargaining, quadratic voting is a natural tool to use to express those views.

Robert Wiblin: I see. So we’re imagining at the Paris Climate Conference, where they’re trying to come up with [crosstalk 00:42:18]-

Glen Weyl: Well I don’t know what city they’re moving onto now, now that Paris is over, but yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, the next question of that. I guess-

Glen Weyl: Nairobi.

Robert Wiblin: I guess we’re going to do the voice credits, and I suppose in order to make this appealing to countries it would have to be, to some extent, in proportion to their power or their influence, or their size or something.

Glen Weyl: Probably, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: So more powerful countries get more voice credits, otherwise they’re just not going to be interested in participating.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: But then this will kind of streamline the negotiations and the trade offs that have to be made between different countries because they will be easier for countries to communicate sincerely how much to care about different issues.

Glen Weyl: Which is kind of the polling application that I was telling you about, right?

Robert Wiblin: Right. Do you want to explain how it works in polling?

Glen Weyl: We ran a survey for about 5000 people, where there were 10 hot button US issues like repeal Obamacare, deport a bunch of illegals, et cetera. People had 100 voice credits to allocate in favor of or against these different issues. According to this, sum of the squares is equal to your total budget rule, so that’s the idea.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Maybe explain in that concrete case. I imagine people have probably seen polls before. It’s like you’ve got 100 points that you get to divvy up between different issues that you care about. In that case, it’s linear rather than quadratic so you can give like 10 different issues, 10 points.

Glen Weyl: Here, what happens is you keep pressing plus or go up on something. It’s like a thumbs up or a thumbs down. As you do, the scale down to an increasing rate so you can visually see the fact that it’s got this quadratic structure to it.

Robert Wiblin: But it’s getting more expensive to vote, and harder and harder.

Glen Weyl: Exactly.

Robert Wiblin: Again, so the reason is that casting extra votes is like imposing a greater and greater imposition on other people? Is that the idea?

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: But why is my second vote a greater imposition on someone else than my first vote? From their point of view, they don’t care whether I voted twice, or two other people have each voted once.

Glen Weyl: Basically, if the system is working optimally, then suppose you don’t participate. The system should be doing what is best for everyone other than you. Now, if I start voting, I’m moving away from the optimal point for everyone else. But the loss from moving away from an optimal point is always second order. There’s no first order loss, because otherwise you would have moved where we were before to somewhere else.

Robert Wiblin: This makes it a bit more intuitive. So you’ve got some kind equilibrant point, that’s like [inaudible 00:44:46] what everyone else wants. Then as you move away, the size of the imposition of other people’s preferences is like a triangle or a square, or-

Glen Weyl: Exactly.

Robert Wiblin: Something like that.

Glen Weyl: Right, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: And so then it’s growing to the square because the area of a square or a triangle is to the square. Okay. That’s makes it a bit more intuitive. Did you want to paint a vision for how this would work in kind of state or national elections?

Glen Weyl: Yeah, I mean I think eventually we would like to have a system where there is some pool of voice credits that you have to spread across many different elections, including state, local, national, referenda, elections for high office, elections for parliament, et cetera. And you can spread your votes across all of these so you can weigh in on the things that are most important to you, and weigh less in on things that less important to you. You could save it across to weight on the elections that are most important to you and less on the ones that are less important to you.

Robert Wiblin: One concern that people would have with anyone being able to vote more than once it that it would lead to some people dominating a decision, although they’re worried about the inequality that this would create. Is the quadratic formula of using a square root a sufficient dampener, that you think it would have an acceptable [crosstalk 00:45:57]-

Glen Weyl: Certainly that’s true, but the other important thing to recognize is that there exists no system that is truly equal because in the end we elect representatives. Those representatives weigh in much more than the rest of us do. There’s always going to be a system by which we reveal that some people decide to have more influence than other people do. That is in the nature of politics. The question is, can we do that in a way that’s as optimal and as free, and as equal in an aggregate sense as possible? I think that quadratic voting does that in a way that no other system that’s yet been proposed does.

Robert Wiblin: So that raises the point that presumably some people would anticipate, that if we had opted quadratic voting that they would influence because they get more power in a less observable way. They have more discretion in a less observable way here, where was quadratic voting would [inaudible 00:46:49] someone, and they might oppose this. Do you have any sense of who those people might be, and how they might be appeased so that they don’t mind it so much?

Glen Weyl: I think one important thing to recognize is that quadratic voting actually can give you efficiency gains. It doesn’t have to be the case that things come at one person’s expense and benefit someone else. You can actually get better outcomes overall. In addition to that, I think that there are going to be people who will be disadvantaged by this. I actually think it’s a bit hard to tell precisely who those people will be. They may not even be within some particular, identifiable, externally visible group. I’m not sure in the case quadratic voting I could even very clearly tell you who the people are going to be who will benefit or be harmed. It’s not even clear that they could predict it.

Glen Weyl: My guess is that there are some groups that have really disproportionate and political power because of quirks in any given electoral system, like farmers in the United States, who are going to be disadvantaged by moving to any sort of reasonably coherent electoral system, or people who are benefiting from gerrymanders. I don’t think that’s a specific quadratic voting feature. It’s more a general feature of any plausible electoral reform.

Robert Wiblin: I guess in as much as people can’t tell ahead of time who’s going to win and who’s going to lose, that’s good because there’s not going to be an identifiable lobby group that knows that they’re getting [crosstalk 00:48:15]-

Glen Weyl: That’s James Buchanan’s idea of a Constitution. A Constitution is meant to made in such a fashion that it’s hard for people to clearly identify where they’ll end up standing, so they were put in a quasi behind the veil of ignorance position.

Rob’s quadratic voting concerns

Robert Wiblin: I’ve got some possible concerns about this to bring up. First, I was going to ask what do you think are the biggest downsides of quadratic voting, and if it’s used very much, or if it does get used it turns out badly. Why would that be?

Glen Weyl: I think that the biggest issues with quadratic voting have to do with the fact that it assumes a fixed [inaudible 00:48:50]. This other idea of liberal radicalism tries to address that. The other biggest issue is that it kinds of solves the collective action problem almost too well in the sense that if people are acting purely self interestedly, it should lead to optimal outcomes.

Glen Weyl: Actually people are altruistic towards other people to some extent, and we’ve evolved mechanisms that sort of address our selfishness. Because this is such a powerful solution for that, it almost maybe goes too far. We need to find other ways of sort of figuring out what those other social structures are, and sort of compensating for them somehow if we’re going to have an optimal system.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I think we’ll come back to that with a liberal radicalism case, because I think the problem of altruism is most striking there. [inaudible 00:49:39] Cohen wrote about quadratic voting. My reservation about this and other voting schemes, such as demand revelation mechanisms, is that our notions to formal efficiency are too narrow to make judgments about political processes through social choice theory.

Robert Wiblin: The actual goal is not to take counter preferences and translate them into the right outcomes in [inaudible 00:49:55] sense. Rather, the goal is to encourage better and more reasonable preferences, and also to shape a durable consensus for future belief in the policy. Did you have any reaction to that?

Glen Weyl: I think that it’s not a very coherent argument to criticize a technology derived from loosely optimizing Condition X to say there’s Condition Y, and it was not designed to optimize Condition Y. You have to actually argue that it will do worse in achieving Condition Y, which is something … As far as I could tell when I read Tyler’s post, he never actually does. I think there’s many good reasons to think quadratic voting would do a better job of achieving a lasting consensus and overall social engagement better than one person/one vote does.

Glen Weyl: In particular, it allows people to specialize and to have diverse social commitments rather than to be forced into a single coherent notion of the nation, and have everyone be equal with regards to that. Which, I don’t think is a good basis for a rich society. I actually think it leads to sort of a Russoian coherent nation that is not meaningful concept whereas quadratic voting allow for more expression within this collective context of people’s rich and diverse social commitments.

Glen Weyl: I think there is other important points here, which is that Tyler says that about this collective setting, but when he turns to private goods he’s obsessed with the market. He’s all into everyone expressing whatever they want. But if what he said was correct, then why should we have market mechanisms to allocate private goods? Because those are even more subject that sort of a problem, in my view. In fact, I think in quadratic voting setting, those issues are much less present because actually we’re engaged in some sort of a collective thing, and we’re weighing on our different collective commitments.

Glen Weyl: Whereas in a private market, why should we allocate goods to whatever it is that people happen to demand, when all those demands are ultimately just the outgrowth of collective conditions?

Robert Wiblin: I think much of this will be Tyler’s view, but a lot of people might think that people have more well-considered preferences about a private goods that they’re going to consume, like what kind of car to buy or what house to live in, than they do about matters of public policy because if they buy a bad car, they suffer personally. The burden is on them for that bad decision, whereas if they vote for a bad public policy then overwhelmingly the burden of that, past their ignorance or their bad foresight, is on other people.

Glen Weyl: Yeah, but that’s all the more reason why you’d want to move to a system like quadratic voting rather than to one person/one vote, because one person/one vote absolutely maximizes the problem you just described. It literally takes that to the furthest extreme that it could possibly take it by literally taking the men over every one of their ignorant … like the max over their ignorance, and assigning as much weight as possible to the person who’s maximally ignorant in that way.

Glen Weyl: Whereas quadratic voting actually allows for the revelation of how important and knowledgeable things are to people. There’s a huge amount of evidence that people would vote if they have the chance to flex more on things that they’re more knowledgeable about. I think precisely if you’re concerned about that problem, is precisely why you should value quadratic voting.

Robert Wiblin: That sounds right. Some people might have the intuition that … Let’s you’ve got this pre-existing problem of a population that just does not know a ton about public policy issues, that have chosen rationally to be ignorant about those issues because they can’t have much effect on them. Even after the application of quadratic voting, each individual in a large population still can’t have that much influence, even if they spend a lot of voice credits on an issue. They’re only a small fraction of the total poll.

Robert Wiblin: This is another issue that’s come up from some critics, that they’re concerned that minority interest groups that really have a hobby horse that perhaps they haven’t thought about very well, would then have perhaps too much influence in the system collectively. Did you have any thoughts on that?

Glen Weyl: The evidence that we have from political science is that on almost every issue in almost every social class, there is what Martin [Gillands 00:54:12] calls a “issue public”, which is some subset of those people who really care about, are informed about, and have preferences on that issue that treks a reasonable model of what would be in their interest. But the problem is, in many social classes, that’s a very small fraction of the population. Whereas among the wealthy, it tends to be most people.

Glen Weyl: So I actually think allowing self revelation of things actually allows you to clear out the noise that’s supplied to the preferences of many classes, and to get the signal from those people. I actually think our current system, by swamping things so much noise and so much things that are easily influenced by wealth and advertising and stuff like that, basically makes it impossible for the signal for much of society to be heard.

Robert Wiblin: We’re talking very abstractly here. Is it possible to kind of cash out that intuition like in a specific case where you think quadratic voting might make things go better?

Glen Weyl: For example, if you look at economic issues, there is a relatively small part of the working class that really understands economic issues. Their preferences tend to far better track what an economist would predict would be the incidents on those people of various policies. They tend to be people maybe who have some experience with that particular policy issue, or they work in a tax office or something like that. They usually don’t know about the rest of other economic policy issues, but on some issue they really know that issue really, really well.

Glen Weyl: The problem is most of their neighbors don’t know crap. They vote for some, let’s say, republican or whatever, who’s going to really work against their interests because they just don’t think about the economic side of stuff at all and they get advertised to a lot. That person, if instead their neighbors voted more on local issues, or social issues, or whatever it was that they actually were more knowledgeable about, the relative magnification of the voice of working class people would actually be far greater than the magnification of the voice of say wealthy people who are going to be knowledgeable about everything and not be able to spend their votes on everything.

Robert Wiblin: This requires people to be more willing to spend their voice credits on issues that they’re more informed about, rather than perhaps passionate, but ignorant about.

Glen Weyl: The evidence we have also suggests that when us ask people to prioritize, or you ask people intensity that it does a good job with tracking those things that people are most knowledgeable about in surveys.

Robert Wiblin: Okay.

Glen Weyl: So there’s good reason to think that that would actually be the case.

Robert Wiblin: You can imagine that it could go the other way, that the more informed people become, the more uncertain they are. Whereas, the more-

Glen Weyl: That’s not the evidence we have.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, interesting. So just empirically that’s not how it works.

Glen Weyl: No.

Robert Wiblin: Do you have any concerns about minority groups in society, kind of the tail wagging the dog if there’s small groups that can save up all of their voice credits to do something that the rest of the population isn’t into?i suppose that’s compensated for, for everyone else, by the fact they again get a [crosstalk 00:57:06] of other decisions.

Glen Weyl: They pay for those externalities, and they actually pay disproportionally. So that minority group actually is less overall influenced, but just gets an influence on the one issue they care about. I think that from my perspective, that’s how trade works. It’s like saying suppose some group saves up all of their income in order to buy the best cars in the society, and then starves to death otherwise. Is that really skin off of their nose? Or off someone else’s?

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Yeah, I think I’m reasonably convinced. Do you think that we could use this to make other organizations that currently don’t really have voting apply voting? For example, within projects with incorporations, or like most organizations, we don’t use voting. I think part of the reason is that one person/one vote has major flaws that it doesn’t consider the strength of preferences, or indeed like the extent of people’s knowledge. Would more sophisticated voting systems make it more appealing to use voting in a wider range of context?

Glen Weyl: I think that’s likely, and I think that’s likely to be one important application coming in years. Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I guess that’s place where you could try it out on a smaller scale, and it’s like, “Well that’s dangerous,” if doesn’t work as [inaudible 00:58:15] says.

Glen Weyl: As a general matter, I think all of the ideas we’ll be talking about today are things that I want to become part of every day practices before they’re ever blessed by a state as some official and extremely important part of the social fabric.

Robert Wiblin: One thing that occurred to me, was how do you stop people … Let’s say there’s a minority group that really cares about X. So it’s got gay people who are very passionate about gay marriage. There’s other groups in society that will have difference preferences from that group, but they know that this minority group is going to have use up lots of their voice credits in order to vote banning gay marriage from getting up. How do you stop them from putting this vote up again, and again, and again, to kind of exhaust the voice credits about people who they generally disagree with so that then they can up other things because they’d run down a little bit.

Glen Weyl: You can have an endogenous agenda setting mechanism, where the agenda is … you only get something up for a vote if there is a certain number of sort of signatures. That’s the way that petitions for referenda usually work. Those signatures could be based on voice credits. Therefore, in order for a troll to do that, they would have to commit a lot of credits, which would wipe them out more quickly than the people they’re trying to wipe out would be wiped out by it.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so the idea is this kind of a fixed cost for putting something up to a vote that would rarely make it appealing to try to up other things just-

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. I guess depending on where that amount is set, it could either be too discouraging, or not discouraging enough, right?

Glen Weyl: Ultimately, that thing should be set equal to whatever the social cost of changing the underlying policy is, or something like that. Some of the things around liberal radicalism that we’re going to be talking about should help reveal that. That set of issues was part of the inspiration for thinking about that.

Robert Wiblin: It seems like it doesn’t have … does it have to be set in proportion to the social cost of putting up the policy? Because you kind of know that it’s not going to get up. The point is that you just know that in order to avoid from getting up, some other group has to spend a lot of voice credits.

Glen Weyl: The thing is, the other group doesn’t need to send a lot of voice credits in order to stop it unless there’s already been a bunch committed to it. Otherwise, it’s basically free to stop it from getting up. It’s not actually the case that like, in equilibrium, what you were saying is going to happen. You can’t really get some group to spend down to avoid something unless there’s a credible threat that it actually passes. The only way to get a credible threat that it actually passes is for someone who’s part of this conspiratorial group to put stuff up.

Glen Weyl: Then unless the conspiratorial group is like the majority of the population, but then it’s not really conspiratorial … Anyways, [inaudible 01:01:02] don’t actually happen. The only way that something like what you’re saying can happen is if people have some false beliefs, or if there’s some friction in the system or something like that.

Robert Wiblin: I guess you could have risk aversion on the part of the minority group, if they really don’t want this thing to get up. So they always overspend ahead of time.

Glen Weyl: There are many frictions in any system that one has to work out experimentally, and put in reasonable safeguards against. So I’m not saying that there would be none like that in quadratic voting. I just think a lot of these elaborate discussions are at very least, very premature and probably wrong, and probably missing other things that will come up. It sort of has to be discovered.

Robert Wiblin: How high do you think it would be for people to come to accept quadratic voting as legitimate?

Glen Weyl: People who try it out have a really good time with it, and say that it generally makes sense to them. I actually think that a harder thing honestly for people to come to believe it’s legitimate is democracy. The truth is, we don’t actually use democracy that much. Quadratic voting and the lot of the organizations that you’re describing, the harder thing is to get them to even think about any form of voting at all, much less quadratic voting.

Glen Weyl: But look, any major social change is going to take a long time. I think that this one is one that whose benefits manifest themselves relatively quickly. It should have the ability to spread relatively quickly, but it will spread still in an organic way through different social groups. It won’t come to be seen legitimate until many people have had experience with it. I think that will gradually happen over the course of five or 10 years, or 15 years or something like that.

Robert Wiblin: In a world where people can kind of trade voice credits sometime in the future, do you think that it would actually end up being more cost effective for a wealthy advocate for an issue to buy those voice credits than just to own The New York Times, or to try to engage in advocacy in some other form.

Glen Weyl: I don’t think people should be allowed to just trade voice credits across people. That has to be [inaudible 01:02:53] in the system.

Robert Wiblin: I see, that has to be prevented.

Glen Weyl: Absolutely, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, you still have the quadratic function that dampens people’s-

Glen Weyl: Yeah, but if you buy voice credits from somebody else, then that turns it into a monetized system.

Robert Wiblin: But it sounded like you’re open to a monetized system where you might be able to pay taxes to get votes or something.

Glen Weyl: Potentially. Potentially, but I wouldn’t want that-

Robert Wiblin: That’s very far down the road.

Glen Weyl: Yeah, well some amount down the road. Then there are things that are further down the road than that, which eliminate most private income and we can talk about those. So yeah.

For listeners excited about quadratic voting

Robert Wiblin: Okay, just before we get to eliminating income, if there’s any listeners out there who are very excited about this idea of quadratic voting and any of this, definitely [inaudible 01:03:33] who are very into voting reform as general, what needs to be done and what organizations or people can they get involved with to push this forward?

Glen Weyl: There’s all sorts of start ups that are experimenting with things like this. Start ups like Democracy Earth, you can come to the Radical Exchange Conference. I have lots of people who come to the Radical Exchange Conference. You can find at www.radicalxchange.org, and you’ll get exposed to all those there. We would love to explore applications to local democracy-

Glen Weyl: We would love to explore applications to local democracy, to citizens’ petitions. We’d love to find someone in Taiwan. The Taiwanese government wants to experiment with this, but we need someone who’s sort of technically inclined in Taiwan who wants to work with the Taiwanese government on this. So that would be a great avenue, if anyone wants to do that.

Glen Weyl: So yeah, we have many avenues like that. Yeah. Get involved with radical exchange. The whole goal of it is to, you know, do the stuff … We have local groups all over the world that are, in a collaborative way, trying to experiment with these things. So, you know, join a local chapter, start a local chapter if there doesn’t happen to be one in the area that you’re living in.

Robert Wiblin: What kinds of skills do you think are most needed? Like what’s the ideal kinds of people to move this forward? Or does it take all kinds?

Glen Weyl: Well, it absolutely takes all kinds. But, you know, the types that I want the most are artists.

Robert Wiblin: I did not expect that. Explain that one.

Glen Weyl: Artists of all types. Yeah. Filmmakers or video game designers … Because what’s going to make this really compelling for people ultimately is the user experience and the way in which people are able to imagine how a world based on this would be different. And we need people to help with that sort of thing even more than we need experiments, because there’s lots of experiments that are going on.

Robert Wiblin: This makes me think, could this be first applied … or could a lot of people get kind of first exposure with this on Wikipedia or on YouTube or on like a [crosstalk 00:01:27].

Glen Weyl: Or on a video game.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. Or in a video game. Yeah.

Glen Weyl: Yes. So I think probably the best commercial application of this, and this is something, because I know a lot of your listeners are probably in tech companies, I think the best commercial application of this is to replace reputation systems online.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. That seems like a no brainer, really.

Glen Weyl: Because like right now you think about like … Right now you have like a private tip on Uber, right? But that’s much more credible because it’s actually your money. Or you have this review thing which has like almost no informational content. So why not have something that’s in between those where you get voice credits and you can spend them to vote up or down someone’s reputation.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. No, it makes total sense.

Glen Weyl: So that just seems like a no brainer to me. So I think that that’s one of the most interesting applications.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess like dating sites, I guess, have tried to create more credible signal by giving you these things. So it’s like you have one vote a day or something for the person who you’re most interested in. And then try to recreate this. But you could all do it in this more fluid, quadratic mechanism that you could then apply to all kinds of different online services.

Liberal radicalism

Robert Wiblin: All right. with that throat clearing of quadratic voting out of the way, let’s talk about a more recent idea that you’re even even more excited about, which is liberal radicalism. Or … You put this into a paper, “Liberal Radicalism: A flexible design for philanthropic matching funds.” A paper that you wrote with Vitalik Buterin, the credit theorem theory, and Zoe Hitz …

Glen Weyl: Zoë Hitzig, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Zoë Hitzig. So, yeah, you think you’re particularly excited about it? And you’re not the only one. Economist Alex Tabarrok called it, “Quite amazing and a quantum leap in public goods mechanism design.” So take it away. What’s the proposal of liberal radicalism?

Glen Weyl: Well, so right now the way that we organize most of these increasing returns things I was talking about before, all these things we do together in big groups, is either we have like corporate monopolies of various sorts, charities that are totally underfunded because of the free rider problem, or democratic states that are like extremely rigid and have very little relationship to anything like optimal connection to the relevant goods. So I would submit that like most public goods problems are just like really poorly served at the moment. And what liberal radicalism tries to do is use ideas that sort of came out of quadratic voting. Rather than to vote for a fixed organization, to allow a new principal for the formation of organizations of people. And the notion is based kind of on the idea of matching funds. So in the state of New York, or in New York City in particular, if you contribute to a political campaign less than $100, you get matched six for one, as long as there’s enough other contributors and there’s some threshold.

Glen Weyl: But you might ask … “Well that makes sense.” It’s sort of like, “Well, no one really wants to contribute to political campaigns because they’re not going to make a difference, so it would be good if we match them because then maybe they’ll contribute more.” So that makes some sense. And also like, “We’ve got all this money, we want to give it. Who should we give it to you? Should we just give it to the guy who has the best polling ratings?” Well, that doesn’t sound right. You want someone who actually people are into and willing to contribute to. Right?

Glen Weyl: So it all sort of makes sense, but then you ask, “Okay, why only up to $100? Why some particular threshold? It’s all totally arbitrary.” So then you could ask what’s actually the optimal system for doing something like that. And it turns out that it’s this particular formula which is the square of the sum of the square roots contributed being the amount that’s received by the organization. And that’s the liberal radicalism formula. And the idea of liberal radicalism is that we would have a new type of organization that maybe it would eventually replace states and corporations, that would be based on this principle.

Robert Wiblin: So this formula is that you take everyone’s personal contributions, how much personal sacrifice they’d be willing to make, then you square root it, you square root each of them and you add them all up and then you square the sum of that.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Is there any way of making intuitive why that is the optimal formula? I guess I don’t want to get too bogged down on that. People can read the paper [crosstalk 01:09:27].

Glen Weyl: I think the closest way that I think of to explain it is from Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative. So Immanuel Kant had this idea that probably your philosophically inclined readers are familiar with, that you should act as if by your action everybody else would act the same way. Now, selfish people won’t generally do that. So the question is, could you come up with a mathematical formula that will cause it to be the case that you perceive it as if everybody else does that. And you can think of matching as being a version of that. It’s like, “Oh, I contribute $1. Well, if everybody else contributed $1 when I contributed $1, then I wouldn’t have any incentive to free ride because it would just be like I was choosing the tax rate for the whole society.” Right? And so it turns out that if you just write down the general version of what I just described as a differential equation, you can then integrate that up and you get the liberal radicalism formula.

Robert Wiblin: So, yeah, a question I had about this, and I guess both … and quadratic voting as well, is it sounds like the mathematical derivation is not that complicated, although it might not be immediately obvious just from listening to this conversation. Why did it take so long for people to come up with these formulas? Are they just not … Have people just not been investigating this kind of line of research in general?

Glen Weyl: Well, what I would say is, have you ever read Einstein’s Principle of Special Relativity?

Robert Wiblin: I have not.

Glen Weyl: It doesn’t use anything beyond, basically, trigonometry.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. And yet …

Glen Weyl: Why did it take so long for people to come up with that?

Robert Wiblin: It’s kind of everything obvious in retrospect issue or …

Glen Weyl: Yeah, I mean sort of. I mean like … And, in fact, the deepest insights are usually mathematically the simplest. The slightly longer and more convoluted answer is that there was this … You know, Vickrey had these ideas. And the problem is people took them to serious … William Vickry was the guy who came up with the Vickrey Auction, which was the original seed that ends up leading to something like quadratic voting. But the problem is he had this very general solution, but which doesn’t really make any sense like in any practical case. And he pointed out that that was true. But everybody was so enamored of the fact that his was generally correct, that they didn’t try to find like versions of it that might actually make sense. They basically just said, “Oh, that’s correct in general,” and then either you were like Tyler and you’re like … just dismiss that whole thing and you’re like, “Ah, too abstract.” Or you were like, you know, Robin Hanson and you just said, “Let’s just do it! Let’s just do it!” You know? And like neither of those was really convincing.

Glen Weyl: So if you get something like quadratic voting or like what I … like liberal radicalism, you have to take, instead, the attitude that, “Yes, that’s the right goal. How do we find something that gets 99 percent of the answer in a way that might be practical and philosophically satisfying?” And so forth. And that requires a little bit less of just sort of the like optimizing mathematicians like, you know, obsession with just getting the perfect answer to things and a little bit more of some appreciation for that perspective, but also a broader way of thinking about things. And that does not seem to be in high supply among people who describe themselves as economists.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So backing up to liberal radicalism, specifically, it seems like with public goods there’s kind of two classic problems. One is that people are inclined to free ride on the contributions of other people. I mean humans in reality, but more psychologically complicated than that. But in the models, they don’t want to contribute to public goods basically at all because it’s all going to benefiting other people.

Robert Wiblin: And then you’ve got this other problem that, in fact, we don’t even know how much of the public good would be optimal to supply because it’s very hard to elicit people’s honest preferences about how much they would value it … a public good existing, more or less.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: So. Which one of these is liberal radicalism targeted at? Or is it both?

Glen Weyl: Yeah, I mean, Alex Tabarrok says that these things are different, but I don’t agree with that. I basically think they’re the same problem. But I think the fundamental problem is that the system of private property is just not the right system when you have situations like this. I think that’s the fundamental issue. And like the system of private property just doesn’t make sense when you have increasing returns things because it treats something whose value is really created by this sort of collective process as something that belongs to individuals. And then individuals are going to try to get as much of that collective thing as they can to take it away. And that’s basically the free rider problem, but it’s not really like an abstract problem. It’s a problem that comes out of the system of private property.

Robert Wiblin: If you had a public good that had declining rather than increasing returns, I guess … Or is it the nature of public goods that –

Glen Weyl: Then it wouldn’t be a public good. Because public good has the property right that if you supply it to n people, on a per person basis, it’s cheaper than supplying it to n over two people. Right. So that’s what makes it increasing returns.

Robert Wiblin: On a per person. I see. I see. So it becomes more and more efficient, the larger the population.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So I guess then you’re saying that it deals with both of these issues. It both gets people to reveal their honest preferences for how much they value public good and it then gives them a reason to personally contribute.

Glen Weyl: Well, yeah, I mean, another way of putting it is that eliminating private property is the source of the contributions. So the issue of people not contributing [crosstalk 01:14:54].

Robert Wiblin: But people might be a bit alarmed by this eradicating of private property. What do you mean by that?

Glen Weyl: Well, so liberal radicalism reveals the right amount of the public good that should be supplied, but it doesn’t actually supply most of the funds that are necessary.

Robert Wiblin: I see.

Glen Weyl: Those funds have to come from elsewhere.

Robert Wiblin: Taxes or something.

Glen Weyl: And so the question is … Well, yeah, you could call them taxes. I don’t really like even that term. I mean the point is like things shouldn’t be private property. Like most things shouldn’t be private property because most of the value associated with them doesn’t actually come from things that one individual did. It came from a social process that created that value. Like you think about what do you value? You value an apartment. But do you value an apartment anywhere? If I put it in the middle of like a desert, would you value the apartment? No. You value the apartment in a community. So most of that value actually belongs to the community, not to you, the apartment owner. Right? And so it’s just not logical. It just doesn’t cohere to like think of most of stuff as being private property. Unless … You know, like in the middle of the desert, maybe that could be private property. That’s fine. But, you know, in a civilization that doesn’t really make any sense.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So, unfortunately, we skipped over the first chapter of the book, which might make that a little bit clearer.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Maybe we’ll get to talk about that more. Maybe we’ll have time. Otherwise I’ll stick up links to other people who can explain your view on private property a bit more.

Robert Wiblin: But, yeah, we’ve been being quite abstract here. Yeah, maybe could we go through kind of a worked example of how this in practice would like allow us to provide a specific public good. And like imagine one person kind of contributed more or less in this framework and what their incentives are.

Glen Weyl: Yeah. So the idea is, you know, suppose we’re all giving money, again, to a political candidate to campaign for elective office. If I give one more dollar … imagine we’re all homogeneous. There’s like 100 people that are contributing to this person. Under this mechanism, what happens is if I contribute $1, the mechanism matches $99. Now, that shows you why you need money from the outside in order to do that matching. Right?

Robert Wiblin: I love [crosstalk 01:16:55].

Glen Weyl: The notion is then that we will all choose a level such that if we could each choose to like tax each other for it, we would choose that level rather than a level which is just derived from like what I individually want to contribute.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So it seems like kind of the larger the population of people who are affected by this or who are contributing some amount, the more of other people’s kind of resources that I can then command by giving a little bit more of my own money to this thing. And, indeed, the amount could be like vast, right?

Glen Weyl: Right. Because then it’s less and less your private … Well, the thing is it’s less and less your private project then, and it belongs more and more to other people. So you shouldn’t be able to command other people’s resources for something that’s just selfish. But for something that’s a collective product, and that doesn’t just belong to you, you should be able to draw on resources to fund something like that.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, so let’s say that we were … all Americans are using this to figure out how much to supply the public good of the military that defends the US. So you’ve got like, I guess, 200 million or something, adults who might be participating in this and they’re all deciding how much to privately give. If I give an extra dollar, like how much more then do other people have to pay through some like matching amount or some like taxing amount? It could be huge, right?

Glen Weyl: If everyone is giving $1, then the answer is, yeah, some huge amount. And if you’re really, really tiny in the whole population, like so you’re actually giving a tiny amount, you’re increasing your contribution by a small amount really increases everyone’s by a large amount. So this is one thing I said before, which is that this sort of mechanism could like over-solve public good problems. Because the thing is like right now we have all these things of like making you nationalistic and making you have to like have all these loyalties to imagine communities that we get to get people to like not free ride. But one way to think about this is like you wouldn’t want to immediately do this in its full force for, you know, the whole world because like there already are solidarities like that. But those become less necessary. These fictions, these imagined communities, become less necessary under this mechanism because even just like a rational thinking through of the issues would lead you to the right decision.

Glen Weyl: So I actually view that as in the longterm an advantage, though, in the short term it requires you to apply caution in, you know, doing these things. Because, I mean, it’s sort of like saying if you’re wearing a bunch of heavy coats because it’s really cold outside and you come into … Like you don’t want to immediately have someone put you into a sauna, but it still might be nice to have a sauna available to you, you know what I mean? And so that’s like how I think about these things, you know. It’s like they could solve the problem too much because we have other adaptations to deal with the problem. But it seems like what you can do if someone has coats is like have them in a relatively cool room first and then they started taking off their coats, and then they step into the sauna. You know what I mean? And so I think we can do that with these types of mechanisms as well. And how to get that exactly right? It’s going to take a lot of experimentation and learning. But it seems to me like a huge advance that we now have a solution to the actual problem we were trying to solve rather than this fake solution that capitalism was to a problem that we weren’t trying to solve, which was this issue of dealing with decreasing returns.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So just walk people through this a little bit more slowly. Let’s say that we’re all trying to decide, yeah, how large the US military be, and everyone has to contribute their private funding and then we’re going to like match it out of, I guess some other source of funding, tax revenues like the one that we do now, but you’re imagining a different future where money is raised differently.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Now, the case in which the amount that I personally contribute then … and then if everyone does the same then it like leads to the optimal total amount is if I think purely selfishly, if I give an extra dollar, if I contribute an extra dollar to this, does the benefit that I get from the extra dollar that I’m giving, and then all the matched funding, I exceed the cost to me personally. So I have to be like perfectly selfishly just trading off only the benefits and costs to myself.

Glen Weyl: Right.

Robert Wiblin: So the normal thing is like I give a dollar to mandatory … I derived practically no benefit. I derive like one three hundred millionth out of the benefit of the extra protection that the military provides. But in this, because everyone else, or because like there’s so much extra match funding coming from elsewhere, I’m incentivized to give the correct amount because I give $1 and, in fact, like one two hundred millionths, roughly, of the benefit then.

Glen Weyl: Right.

Robert Wiblin: So it all cancels out. The problem is that like someone who’s slightly ideologically driven or someone altruistic will then like over give and then it will end up oversupplying all these things. And, of course, you’re saying we’ve developed all these mechanisms like altruism and like giving people other like non-selfish reasons to contribute to these things in order to solve this coordination problem. But now that we’ve got that, it’s going to end up over … People end up over contributing in this mechanism and kind of break it. Yeah, are there any applications where you think because we don’t have like non-selfish reasons to contribute that this would work straight out of the box?

Glen Weyl: I think that the more that you’re dealing with cases where currently public goods are really under provided, this would work the best. Like I think one good example of that is just like anything where the people who you’re benefiting are very distant from you socially. So maybe like global public goods of various sorts or various environmental goods that don’t line up neatly with state boundaries like rivers that cut across countries or things like this.

Robert Wiblin: I guess you might worry that, yeah, like people who are ideologically globalist could end up exploiting this and then other people wouldn’t want to participate. Because, you know, I’ll be like, “Oh, well, I care about foreigners equally and this mechanism is designed on the assumption that I don’t care about them practically at all.” So then I get a whole lot of money and then command a whole lot of resources. I suppose that’s … Yeah, I suppose you could try to put the brakes on that even more by limiting people’s contributions or something.

Glen Weyl: The other thing is that this mechanism, actually, you can put a parameter on there that like tamps down its effects and that makes it cheaper as well, which in practice you’re going to have to do anyways in the near term. And that may not perfectly address this issue because like the extent to which people are altruistic may be heterogeneous, but on average it might do a pretty good job.

Robert Wiblin: So, presumably, there’s going to be like some kind of matching factor, some kind of … So that the funding that goes with the thing, it’s kind of proportional to this output of this … square of the sums of the roots. Does it matter? Does it matter what that factor is? Because it seems like if it’s very high, I want to contribute more. If it’s low, I don’t want to contribute so much, and so it’s quite sensitive.

Glen Weyl: Well, the optimal thing if everyone is perfectly selfish is one. It should be the full amount. But if people aren’t perfectly selfish, then you might want to tamp that down. But also just to make the … Like if you only have a certain amount of matching funds, you’re going to have to set that less than one anyway. And the guarantee is that if people are perfectly selfish and you set that number, let’s say to one tenth, then the underfunding factor, if people were perfectly selfish, is one tenth. But remember that the underfunding fact under just normal contributions with private property or whatever is one over n. So this is still like a dramatic improvement even if you don’t set it equal to one.

Robert Wiblin: So I guess we’ve got these other mechanisms for providing public goods now, like just tax revenue and then like the government funds research or something like that. I mean, so that’s good obvious problems with it.

Glen Weyl: Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I suppose this does as well. Like do you think that it would actually work better than these other [clodgy 01:24:21] solutions that we’ve come up with?

Glen Weyl: Well, I mean look, everything needs to be learned by experimentation, but my general view is it’s sort of like … If you kind of invent the right solution for a problem, it’s got to help you make progress towards solving that problem at some level. You know what I mean? I think. It’s sorta like, you know, if someone invents fusion, like that doesn’t immediately mean that you like replace all power on earth with fusion. In fact, it may take 100 years to get it working, but it certainly seems like a good thing to focus a lot of attention on.

Robert Wiblin: Like I said, it gives you like a Lodestar or something that’s theoretically optimal that you can then like approximate with more practical approaches.

Glen Weyl: Well, I mean, and the other thing is I don’t even think it’s just … Like I actually think this is really practical. I think the question is really just like, is it too powerful? And I think it’s very analogous to fusion. It’s like, “Yes, fusion could generate a lot of energy. The problem is it can also explode. So the question is can we contain that energy? But like it seems like it would be really dumb not to try to use that in some way. Now, maybe it turns out after a long time it really can’t be contained and we’re just stuck. But, you know, if you have a huge source of energy, it seems like it’s a pretty promising direction to work on, you know?

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So can you just weaken it a whole lot? Like I guess reducing the scale factor as a way of weakening it, right?

Glen Weyl: That’s the way to weaken it. Yeah.

Robert Wiblin: I see. Okay. That’s interesting. So I guess your hope would be that then like people’s altruism and the fact that like there’s this discount applied to it where it’s not one for one, that you’d hope that they would cancel out.

Glen Weyl: Well, I don’t think that’s a perfect solution because some people might be more altruistic than others and you might not get this rescaling right and whatever.

Glen Weyl: But again, as I said, it seems like I’d want to do a lot of work on like being confident that there’s no way to get that thing working before I would give up on it, given that it is actually the solution to the core problem of political economy. So like it’s like if you have one thing that’s like actually the solution to the core problem of political economy and then you’ve got like another system which is like a solution to something that we know is like an edge case and you’re like, “Okay, well we’re not sure how to get this other thing working perfectly. We haven’t even really tried it at all. And we’ve got this other thing that’s been working really poorly for years and it’s obvious theoretically why it should be working very poorly. And we’re going to focus all our attention on just maintaining that system rather than experimenting with this other one,” that just doesn’t seem like a v