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