Why Radical Markets? Radical Heroes

1. A Brief Overview of
‘Radical Markets’
Focusing on the Five Sections
Jongseung Kim
deframing@gmail.com
2018. 11. 17

2. Outline
• Why Radical Markets?
• Property is Monopoly
• Radical Democracy
• Uniting the World’s Workers
• Dismembering the Octopus
• Data as Labor
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3. Why Radical Markets?
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• Why fundamental change is necessary?
- we believe that wealthy countries are at a moment of fundamental crisis that threatens the legitimacy
and stability of our values and institutions.
- Unless we can inspire a new generation with a productive vision for the future, we believe the coming
years hold great peril for wealthy societies.
- The Component of the Crisis : “Stagnequality” and “Crisis of the Liberal Order”
- Radical Heroes : Adam Smith, The Marquis de Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry
George, Léon Walras, Beatrice Webb, William Vickrey
- In Radical Markets, we revive this Radical tradition and show how it can address the crisis of the liberal
order.
- Each idea can be tested using small-scale experiments. The ideas also need to diffuse to the broader
public. People need to begin experiencing the ideas in their everyday lives.

4. Property is Monopoly
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• Imagine a world in which all major private wealth
(every factory, patent or plot of land) is constantly
for sale at a fair price and where most of the value
of this property is paid out equally to all citizens as
a social dividend.
• the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax
(COST) : Every citizen and especially corporation
would self-assess the value of assets they possess,
pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be
required to sell the assets to anyone willing to
purchase them at this self-assessed price.

5. Radical Democracy
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• Imagine a world where political minorities could
protect their most cherished interests at the ballot
box without relying on whims of judges and
compromises on sensitive issue could be hammered
out transparently in the public square.
• Quadratic Voting (QV) System : Every citizen
would receive an equal annual allotment of “voice
credits” that they could use to vote in a range of
collective decisions.
- Every citizen could choose how many votes, up or
down, she wants on any given issue or candidate.
- The costs of votes would be quadratic.

6. Uniting the World’s Workers
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• Imagine a world where wealthy countries hosted
one migrant for every native-born citizen and where
migration has overwhelming popular support.
• Visas between Individuals Program (VIP) : The
VIP would tie together the interests of the working
classes of rich and poor countries through
sponsorship of visas and sharing of the gains from
migration.
- The VIP would do more to reduce inequalities
across countries, in both material income and
political influence, than all development of poor
countries for the last thirty years.

7. Dismembering the Octopus
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• Imagine that, just by changing the structure of
corporate ownership and antitrust regulations,
wages started growing again, prices for all sorts of
goods fell and decent-paying jobs became available
to able-bodied worker.
• The institutional investors that control most public
corporations would have to choose one company to
invest in within each industry they invest, so they
could not hold (for example) both United Airlines
and American Airlines.
- The real value of diversification comes from
owning stock across industries.

8. Data as Labor
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• Imagine a world in which your personal data,
currently hoovered up by tech companies and
repurposed for their profit, were honored as your
dignified work and compensated as such.
• Data as Labor (DaL) : At present, because data
suppliers are not properly rewarded for their digital
contributions, they lack the incentive or freedom to
contribute the high-quality data that would most
empower technology or develop their personal
capacities to maximize their earnings and
contributions to the digital economy.

9. 9
– Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl
“If we aspire to prosperity and progress,
we must be willing to question old truths,
to get at the root of the matter, and to experiment with new ideas.”