Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

Abstract

Radical Markets is an important book that projects a radical transformation of society through the application of mechanism design.Posner and Weyl's premise is that 'markets are, and for the medium term remain, the best way of arranging a society' (p.xvi).However, they show that many of society's most important markets are either monopolised or missing entirely.According to the authors, this has led to a range of the problems that many societies are increasingly facing, such as inequality, political polarisation and the rise of anti-democratic movements, resentments against minorities, in particular migrants, and low rates of investment and innovation.P&W's proposed remedy is to defeat market power and to create well-functioning, competitive markets in crucial realms of society in which they have hitherto been missing.Accordingly, each chapter is a proposal for a radical reorganisation of an important area of the social world.Chapters 1 and 2 present the most wide-ranging reorganisations that concern the economic system and democracy, respectively, while chapters 3 to 5 concern labour migration, institutional investment, and data.In the following, I shall give a synopsis of the chapters, followed by a few remarks on the idea of 'mechanism design as a force for social transformation' (p.ix).