 Good morning, and welcome to the WEF, day two, I guess. Although I already have a little bit of WEF fatigue. I have to say I had a very full day yesterday. I'm Rana Faroohar. I'm a columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times. And I am so pleased to be here doing this one-on-one with economist Glenn Weil. He is the author of an amazing book, which you must run out and buy immediately if you don't have it, called Radical Markets. He's also the founder of the Radical Exchange Foundation. He has a day job at Microsoft, which he's not here to talk about, which is a whole other thing. But he runs, essentially, a movement in his spare time. I don't know how you do that. We're going to hear a little bit more about it. But I've been following your work now for a couple of years. And one of the challenges with Glenn is that there is so much in what you do. I mean, you've essentially written a book that questions almost every aspect of how we're running the economy today, thinking about how to make the kinds of radical shifts we need to make sure that the digital economy and the transitions that we're talking about in Davos this week are not a zero-sum game. We're going to tease out a lot of your ideas and look a little bit at the history. But first, I want to go to a comment that you made a couple of days ago when we were speaking. You said that you felt the economics profession, in general, had become corrupted. And one of the things that you're trying to do is put it back on track. We're in Davos. This is a place where we talk a lot about the ills of neoliberalism, as well as some of the benefits, of course. But tell us what you think has gone wrong with economics and how does radical exchange fit into trying to fix that? Well, you know, when I think about this question, I think about a man named Henry George. So Henry George is actually not very widely known these days. But he was the best-selling author in the English language for 30 years other than the Bible. And he ran for mayor of New York and actually beat Teddy Roosevelt, though he ended up coming in second. So Teddy Roosevelt came in third. And he got beaten by the machine Democrat. And the thing that was remarkable about Henry George is he was one of the great political economists of the 19th century. And at the same time, he was like the founder of the progressive movement. He brought the secret ballot to the United States. He was really the first sort of center-left politician to run for office in the United States. So there was a way of being an economist, a political economist, really, at the time that was engaged with the public that was about building movements that I think has really been lost as it's become a very technocratic, divorced, and inward-looking profession. That's a great point, actually. And there's been so much discussion, particularly since 2008, about how the economics profession needs to really come out of the ivory tower, get on the ground. And there are parts of it. Behavioral economics, people are going out in the field. But you're actually suggesting some much more radical shifts. And maybe we can start by talking a little bit about how you came to these ideas. Was there kind of a light bulb moment for you where you thought, I have to write a book about how to change the economics profession and reinvent democracy? Well, I actually owe a lot to Sumea Keynes, who's a reporter at The Economist, who really encouraged me to bring all the things that I've been working on for a decade before together into a broad answer. But really, it is roots in my growing up. I was a socialist activist until about the age of 12. I was actually on TV at 7, campaigning for Bill Clinton. So you started at what, 6? And then I actually became an INRAND lover and founded a national teenage Republican organization and went to the Bush inauguration in 2000. And I've sort of been trying to reconcile those things. Nobody can accuse you of being siloed in your political beliefs. Well, let's talk a little bit about politics since we're on that topic. One of the major challenges everywhere, particularly in the US where we both live, is this sort of bifurcation of politics and the fact that it's become so polarized. And also, the entire political process makes it difficult to capture nuance, to capture the multitude of things that both parties really care about. Talk about some of the ways, with the real life examples of politicians you're working with, that you think the radical market ideas could fix this. Yeah, so we've been developing an idea called quadratic voting. This is a new way of allowing people to express their preferences. Not just I'm in favor of this or against this, but this is really important to me. This is a sacred value to me. This is something I'm willing to compromise on. But not just allow elite politicians to do that, as they've always done in backroom deals, but to allow everyone in the public to actually express those things. And one of the most inspiring examples of this being applied is in Taiwan. There's a leader there named Audrey Tang, who's the digital minister, who's really managed to form consensus in the population and see off a lot of the issues with populism by precisely using these ways to allow citizens to give much more nuanced perspectives on what really matters to them and to build consensus using digital tools in a distributed way like this. Can you dig into that a little bit? Because to pull the lens back, one of the things that I've been writing a lot about is China and the surveillance economy there, the ways in which digital technologies are being used. You know, to increase productivity in a lot of senses, but also to mine data, to surveil a population. This is something that is becoming a major, sort of not just economic issue in the sense that there's a capital labor divide there, and I wanna come back to that and dig into some of your ideas around this, but also human rights issue. So can you talk about how you see the difference between the way Taiwan is using digital technologies versus the way China is using them? I mean, I think AI is really built around this human replacement autonomous systems, technocratic elite, planning everything with all the data coming into them is sort of a vision. Top-down. Yeah, and Taiwan and the things we're trying to build really have an opposite perspective where we actually try to build through a variety of different social and information technologies, ways of people sort of determining their own future in emergent pluralistic collectives, including things called data coalitions which maybe we'll talk more about later, ways of people managing their data from the bottom up, but also democratic participation mechanisms such as quadratic voting, such as what are called wiki surveys which are ways of masses of people having conversations together with each other guided by AI that help form consensus. Can you slow that down for a minute? Tell us about how a wiki conversation can capture in a way that is not sort of completely all over the place, a broad variety of views and then funnel it to the politicians in a way that actually helps the demos a lot. Yeah, so this is not actually one of the technologies that we at Radical Exchange came up with but it's one that we were very enthusiastic about it. The idea is that people on an issue, let's say like regulating Uber could propose their own positions and then statistical techniques or you could call them artificial intelligence are used to cluster those positions together. And so you then get a sense for what are the types of beliefs in the population but then people can earn rewards for actually finding new positions that attract the most diverse support where diversity is defined by those initial positions. And so the notion is that we actually guide the conversation using a combination of statistics and human direct engagement towards consensus and what's amazing is that Audrey and the GovZero movement in Taiwan have managed to use this to actually form consensus on a bunch of these really divisive topics together with quadratic voting and other techniques and data coalitions. And they've got a participatory governance platform on which 10 million of the 23 million people in Taiwan are actually participating. So we're so worried about all these dystopian things but there are alternatives. There are ways to use technology to actually be a foundation for building a pluralistic democratic society. Well, that's so important because right now it seems that there's a debate. There's a big debate about regulating tech which there's gonna be a lot at Davos this week about that. The debate is often framed as, well, you have to just, the cat's out of the bag, big tech is what it is, surveillance is what it is. We have these giant platforms that are polarizing people and we can sort of tweak it at the margins but we can't really change anything fundamentally. What you're saying is that you can actually flip this whole model in some ways on its head and quadratic voting is such an interesting example of that. Maybe you could in a very real world way break down how that's working in Taiwan and also some of the examples elsewhere in the US. Yeah, I'll turn to, because I've been focusing so much on Taiwan, don't wanna think this is only a Taiwan thing because in Colorado, the Democrats who are in the majority in the state legislature use this technique of quadratic voting to prioritize their budget this year. And the way that that worked is that every legislator received a certain number of tokens or credits that they were able to put on the issues that were most important to them. And if they really care about one issue, they could put more credits on that and fewer on others. But it becomes increasingly expensive to put weight on a particular issue. So the first vote costs one credit, the second vote costs an additional three credits, the third and additional five, so that everyone has an incentive to allocate things in proportion to how important the issue is to them. And this ended up being a huge success in Colorado. They're gonna be doing it again this year. They ended up actually just passing last week the budget that came out of this and the top priority was actually legislation to help equalize pay for women in the public sector. That's so interesting. And what's the political makeup in that area? I mean, was this a case in which red and blue could really come together? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think Colorado is a perfect example of a state where really the governor has helped form a lot of consensus between Democrats and Republicans in this state. And we're working almost equally with the center right as we are with the center left. So one of our closest collaborators, probably our closest collaborators actually a very popular conservative politician from Calgary in Canada. And we're also working with the Christian Democratic Union in Germany. So we believe both that these ideas directly can be ways of forming consensus, but also that because they touch on both the concern with markets, which are very important to us and the concern with democracy, which is very important to the left, we think that these can also be a way of talking about things that can bring together the best of both sides and unify people. When you go and talk to politicians around the world, how do you start the conversation or is it a pull? I mean, do you find that people are reaching out to you? Well, it really depends on the context. I think one thing that I found that's remarkable is that if you actually get down to a concrete issue, the solutions we're proposing are not ideological. They're really just improvements on the existing technologies we have. And it's very easy for many politicians to see that once you get down to a specific issue. Now, so much as you noted in our political debate is polarized in a way that everyone wants to just categorize things on one side or another, especially when they're very bold ideas. But if you really get down to the mechanics of it on things like campaign finance, which we have a solution for ways of voting, which we have an approach to, ways of governing data, I think that it's just pretty clear that these other solutions really aren't working. We're going around in circles. And when you really have a concrete design, it pretty clearly addresses many of the key values of both sides. And that's how we've been able to make progress. Before we move on to markets and data governance, data as labor, which is something that is a really fascinating idea, talk a little bit about campaign finance reform and what would be your solution there. I've become a little bit obsessed about this issue, actually, because there's another economist that you may know of, Thomas Philippon, who's done some work looking at how the lack of money or the fact that there is less money in politics in Europe has actually made markets, in some ways, freer and more efficient. And the money in the States is what's driving a lot of the problems that we're seeing. So what is the solution? I think actually a really great example of this is Canada. So Canada, is there money in politics? Is there not? It's complicated, because actually the state gives a lot of money, but it doesn't give it in a direct grant-based way. Instead, it uses it as a matching fund. And this is also happening in New York City. So in New York, you get a six-for-one match up to $100 if the candidate that you're giving to has already received 999 other supporters. So that's a basic principle that I think many of these matching systems, which are some of the more successful campaign finance systems have, is they match more small contributions to popular candidates. But then you could say six-for-one, $100. All these are arbitrary numbers. So the question is, is there a principled basis that we can come up with for matching individual contributions to encourage that sort of citizen participation that actually has a basis in economic theory? And it turns out there is a rule that you can derive from economic theory. And I did it in a paper with Vitalik Buterin, who founded Ethereum, the biggest blockchain, and a fabulous young economist who's actually also one of the more renowned poets in the world. So he hits it. So we like these people who come from different perspectives. Yeah, that's something that's very interesting about your movement, actually, that they're, I mean, they're artists, they're politicians, they're economists, they're anthropologists. It's a really diverse group. And it's interesting because in some ways it's hard as a journalist to write about and capture because it's very decentralized. Yeah, so maybe it's not one thing. Maybe it's multiple because all these people have different perspectives. We talk about wanting to try to write Marvel comic universe meets the Communist Manifesto. That is, we wanna have something. Who would buy that? I would buy that. Well, but the thing is it wouldn't just be one thing. That's the whole point, that's the amazing thing about the Marvel comic universe. It's all these different movies. It's all these different characters. It's all these different entry points. And I think that's what we need if we wanna have a pluralistic political movement is not one document like radical markets or whatever, but a plurality of different ways of approaching the same goals. I didn't let you finish your thought about Ethereum. Well, anyway, so we just, we did this paper. And this shows that there's a particular formula that is actually an optimal way to do this thing of matching more smaller contributions to more popular candidates. It's got a wonky formula, which is that the candidate should receive the square of the sum of the square roots contributed to it. But actually, it's just a sort of elegant way of getting at exactly what these other things are driving at. And it's something that has been hugely successful for funding open source software. There's now been almost a million dollars given to open source software using this. But we're also working to use this to fund media. So rather than just giving all the money to a national broadcaster, you could use this as a way to encourage minority communities to build their own media. And it's natural for campaign financing as well. So for many of these areas, I think we can come up with models that really go beyond this capitalist socialist divide rather than have the government allocate things or this very unfair process of just, you know, the rich dominating everything. We can have ways of using public funds to make markets work better. Yeah, it's wonderful that you're bringing such creativity to this. Let me talk a little bit about the market element in your book. Something I've written a lot about is the fact that as we shift to a digital economy, a lot of the research shows that unless we get some creative thinking, some of the frameworks right, that shift from kind of tangibles to intangibles could put on steroids. The problem of capital being so far above labor that we've seen the last 40 years, which is one of the reasons we have the politics we do, which is one of the reasons you're doing the work that you are. So talk a little bit about how you think about that problem and some of the solutions that you're bringing. Yeah, I mean, I think that Davos is the perfect place to talk about this, because it's always had this emphasis on stakeholder approaches to capitalism. And I think that that's gonna become increasingly important because these increasing returns, network effect type industries tend to create firms that on the one hand are very efficient, but on the other hand have huge amounts of power over their consumers, their suppliers, their workers, the journalists that feed into them, the authors that feed into them. And I think fundamentally what we need to do is we need to build a new model of approaching antitrust and regulation, which is based neither on the state regulating things nor on just breaking up processes which are much more efficient if they cross borders, if they include all these people, but instead forcing the companies to formally represent the stakeholders that they have power over, either by giving those stakeholders countervailing power to form cooperatives against them or by including them on the board or other mechanisms like this. And this is the foundation of some of the ideas we have about data governance, but I think it applies much more broadly because digital technologies are spreading throughout the economy. They're creating these huge concentrations of power and the right solution to that is not breaking things up. The idea behind antitrust was to deal with the problem of corporate monarchy. But we didn't deal with monarchy is at least most productively by chopping up the rulers. We dealt with it by forcing. Some countries. Yeah, well, not the most productive, that's right. But rather making them accountable to the people that they ruled, right? And so that I think has to be the best approach going forward. Before I go on, I wanna ask, do we have the ability to take questions in this session? Or do we have mics around? Yes, we do, okay. I wanna just, I've got a number of questions, but I wanna open it up and we've got about 11 minutes left and just give folks a chance if you wanna to raise your hand and ask Glenn a question. Or if you're still thinking, think about your question, hold it and I'll give you a chance again in just a moment. Oh, we have one here. How do you deal with the impact of the digital divide? You mean the lack of availability? That's right. I mean, yours is very much premised on the idea that practically everybody has a digital access and competence. Yeah, no, I think that that's a great question. I think a critical path towards implementing a lot of these things has to be to find ways for them to fit, for example, into mobile, not smartphones, but basic feature phone technology. I don't think we've made great progress on that. I think it's a really important question. We're doing a lot of work in places like Uganda and so forth and that's a major challenge that we're gonna face there. I don't have an immediate answer to that question. However, I think it's really important. Question back here. Hi, I'm just wondering how you deal with people's the availability of time and how that biases towards different things because we're supposed to manage our data, we're supposed to be interlocuting with these Wiki pages, et cetera, et cetera. And it seems that there's a lot of demands on our time and that will bias towards certain people using these forums more than others. Yeah, no, I think that that's a great question. I mean, I think one of the main goals of something like quadratic voting and really data coalitions and collective organisations is to allow within the sphere of politics some of the division of labour that we have within the market so allowing people to focus on the things that are most important to them that they're most knowledgeable about. There's a lot of research and political science showing that within any class or demographic group, there's a part of the population within that group which has a much clearer sense of the interests of that group but it's hard for them to express that to focus on that area and quadratic voting and these collective organisations around data allow for that sort of self-selection of leadership but in an egalitarian way, not in a way that's sort of top-down and allegedly meritocratic but not actually representative. So that's kind of the approach. One more question over here. Yeah, thank you very much. Very interesting presentation, thank you for that. My question is about the example of voting in Colorado. So have you made an assessment how different the outcome of voting was by using your methodology in comparison what it could have been using a normal procedure or existing procedure. So in other words, what would be the impact of your technology or your idea to the real outcome of the voting? Yeah, so there've been a number of analyses. There's one done by Democracy Earth which ran the process in Colorado about the Colorado process itself. There's also a bunch of quite interesting academic research about using quadratic voting for polling as opposed to the usual method of strongly agree, strongly disagree, et cetera. What these tend to indicate is that you get a lot more nuance in people's opinions and a lot more consensus building out of allowing people in this sort of subtle way to show exactly what they support and what they don't. In a lot of standard methods, either you're on the winning side or the losing side, whereas here sort of everyone is able to be kind of on the winning side for the things most important to them and a little bit supportive of other things that win. And it gives like I think a much richer sense of ownership to the participants in what eventually emerges than processes where you sort of win or you lose. If I can add on to that because I actually had the chance to speak to a couple of the politicians who worked with you. The thing that struck me, one of them told me that in a typical budgetary process, they would start with maybe 46 different items that they would then have to duke it out over. Through using this process, they very quickly went down to sort of 12 and then came up with three. And then it was just the ability to quickly get to consensus and sort of get in surgically to what people could really agree on. That was something that really struck me. I think the goal of all these types of technologies and as we go forward, I think that they'll continue to get better and we're working on that is really, if you think about our informal social relations, what we have with people under what's called our Dunbar number. That's like 140 people that you can maintain really strong relationships with. We use all sorts of rich signaling, communication, et cetera to form social meaning priorities in those contexts. But that's very slow and complicated and we can't sustain it with a large number of people. What we're really trying to do is in the same way that the telephone was better than the telegraph at conveying in-person communication across long distances, we're trying to make it possible across social distance to have more of the richness that we have in our sort of more intimate relationships conveyed in our political and economic lives. Sort of simplifying complexity without losing the depth that you're trying to get. There was a question over here and then we'll make a couple final points. So I wanted to ask how much you've worked with or where you see the place of citizens assemblies and sort of offline processes in this. It strikes me that some of the questions that have been asked about time so that the Canadian, there's a Canadian proposal to have a certain number of years so that it's like jury service, representative samples who sort of feed into processes. The Irish example where this sort of process kind of broke the log jam on abortion legislation. Do you see this as a complementary tool? Do you think they're weaker? Where do you see that in there? Well, so I like the spirit of those types of conversations. I'm concerned about the issue of time that the other questioner asked about in particular. I think a problem with sortition like randomly choosing people to participate in these things is that it limits the scope for the people who really have focused a lot of attention or thought a lot about issues to select into leadership on those issues, which I think is actually a desirable feature. Now a lot of people would say, well, that's just special interest and it can become that way if you don't have rules in place that sort of balance the power as quadratic voting tries to do. But I tend to think that there are better ways than pure randomness that we can find for selecting people to participate in those types of deliberations. Hannah Arendt talks a lot about this notion of sort of a bottom-up citizen self-selection process. And I think if we can structure that in the right way, it's probably even better than random choice, so. Just in a few minutes we have left, I wanna ask you a couple of other things. You are an economist, but you came out of the tech sector and you're one of a- I wouldn't even call myself an economist anymore, I'm not sure I own that name. Okay, all right, what title would you give? Political economist and social technologist is my Microsoft name. Okay, all right, I like that. Well, I mean, you're one of the essentially activists that is coming out of the industry now and this is becoming a thing that workers themselves in the tech space are actually in some ways agitating and creating more change than maybe even then regulators. Where is that going, do you think? What's that process gonna look like in three to five years? Well, I mean, in some ways it's surprising and in other ways it's like exactly what always happens in these things. You think of John Maynard Keynes and it was like the essence of the establishment, right? And yet he was crucial to the process of reform. So I think it's incredibly important that we have the pressure from outside because none of the things that we're saying could be heard if we didn't have that pressure. On the other hand, I think some of the people who are in that milieu end up playing a lot of roles and trying to navigate a way to actually deal with those competing and often incoherent demands that we get from the outside because it actually requires innovations to try to reconcile them and often people with some exposure to those things are well placed to help generate those innovations. I think that there's a good shot that if we continue to build relationships with a variety of different social sectors as you mentioned that we'll have a shot of really making a lot of these things pretty widespread. Let me ask you in the final minute and a half or so that we have your big disruptor. How would you disrupt Davos if you could? Well, how would you apply radical markets to what we're doing here? I was just thinking about this actually yesterday. I mean, I think my feeling is probably we need to, there needs to be thinking given how central this has become as a convening place, more about how it actually becomes accountable to the stakeholders that it's meant to represent and how the governance comes to in some sense represent a global democratic experiment. It could then, if it did that right, maybe show the way for how companies could do the same thing. Could we do quadratic voting at Davos? That's definitely a possible one. All right, let's mark that up on the agenda. Glenn, thank you for sharing your ideas. Everybody should buy this book. It's a great read. We did it on the plane home. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Rana. Okay, cheers.