Radical economics introduces a few ideas that serve as valuable thought experiments, even though none could be considered a serious policy proposal. The one closest to my expertise was a complete waste, so even though I’d like to give the book a higher rating, landed at 3 stars.
Property taxation marketplace – The premise is that we could use markets to self-enforce valuations on property tax, thus incentivizing property owners declare the actual value of each item they own. I was convinced, and like it as a means to make wealth taxes actually work.
Quadratic voting (marketplace) – everybody gets a pool of votes that they can use to express more nuanced choices than ‘yes’ or ’no’. Definitely an interesting idea.
Immigration marketplace – I agree with the premise but it seems like the authors were looking for a way to make immigration politically feasible (enable regular citizens to benefit) which didn’t seem as efficient from a marketplace incentive. What I appreciated more in this chapter was the implicit criticism of free capital markets having little to no benefit for average people.
Data marketplace – This seemed like a lame remix of Jaron Lanier’s better reasoned ideas from ‘Who Owns the Future?’. Also seemed to make fundamental mistakes regarding the intrinsic value of usage data. The idea was so bad it gave me pause about whether I should trust any of the other ideas put forward in the book.
Markets as distributed computing – actually the most interesting part of the book, it created a mental model where society is akin to a large computer server, and markets are simply the most effective protocol to transfer data. Will definitely use this idea going forward.