Public Lecture by Glen Weyl

Date: 

Thursday, September 27, 2018, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall

Glen Weyl Blue poster

Title: Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just SocietyDescription: Many blame free markets for rising inequalities and social divisions.  Radical Markets turns this conventional wisdom on its head, arguing that dramatically expanded markets can be an emancipatory egalitarian force, but only if we have the courage to challenge fundamental social institutions that stand in the way of truly free competition.  Challenging everything from private property to one-person-one-vote, Radical Markets lays out a bold vision that embraces technological change and diversity as engines of widely shared prosperity.

E. Glen Weyl is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton. Trained as an economist, Glen has published his research in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. However, his work spans the breadth of political economy in the nineteenth century sense and he publishes in conventional fields including law, computer science and philosophy. Beyond his academic research, Glen has actively engaged in making social change in a variety of directions, co-founding a start-up and a labor union and working with policymakers, politicians across the political spectrum and business leaders, all to implement ideas summarized in his recent book with Eric Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.