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It contains elements (in particular, the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax) that are connected to the now largely out-of-favour market socialist tradition. The Radical Markets project could be broadly classified as liberal. Weyl himself has referred to the project as a kind of synthesis between socialist and libertarian sympathies. The authors thus attempt at reformulating the lost coalition of liberal radicalism by setting out proposals that are at once market-oriented, radical and egalitarian.Ĥ The book certainly reads like an amalgam of different ideologies. Yet, the authors argue, these authors, from Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham through John Stuart Mill to the early marginalists (such as Jevons and Walras), and to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, all belong to a tradition that can be characterized as both liberal and radical. Some of the radical forerunners Posner and Weyl cite have served as inspiration for the 20 th century “right” (libertarianism, classical liberalism or “neoliberalism”) while others more often inspired the left. The book self-consciously builds on this tradition, but it does so by bringing the tools of modern microeconomics to tackle these same problems. Likewise, the lot of the poor has been a key preoccupation of the classical political economists and the so-called philosophical radicals of the 19 th century. Adam Smith thought that one of the advantages of a market society over the preceding feudal system is that it makes poor members of the society better off. One of the heroes of the book is the late William Vickrey, but the radicalism that the authors build on goes back to the 18 th century. Posner and Weyl present “open auctions” as an ideal leading to both efficient allocation of resources and social emancipation. Posner and Weyl partially run against this tide by arguing that markets are not fundamentally a source of inequality, inequity and exploitation, quite to the contrary: they can be used to harness progressive or radical social goals.ģ The proposals presented in the book rely to a great extent on results in mechanism design and market design, in particular, auction theory. “Market fundamentalism” and “neoliberalism” are widely used epithets to criticize market-based solutions to social problems. 1 This 2018 book by Eric Posner, a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and Glen Weyl, senior principal researcher at Microsoft, delivers on its promise, which is to rethink and reformulate the key institutions of what we might call the liberal order, that is, capitalism and democracy, along market-oriented but at the same time, radical (in the sense of proposing large changes in social arrangements and also as a reference to the 19 th century radical movements) and egalitarian lines.Ģ Markets are often the subject of much criticism and vitriol.