Vitalik Buterin on Radical Markets

The inventor of Ethereum has much of interest to say about Radical Markets. An excerpt:

Radical Markets…could be best described as an interesting new way of looking at the subject that is sometimes called “political economy” – tackling the big questions of how markets and politics and society intersect. The general philosophy of the book, as I interpret it, can be expressed as follows. Markets are great, and price mechanisms are an awesome way of guiding the use of resources in society and bringing together many participants’ objectives and information into a coherent whole. However, markets are socially constructed because they depend on property rights that are socially constructed, and there are many different ways that markets and property rights can be constructed, some of which are unexplored and potentially far better than what we have today. Contra doctrinaire libertarians, freedom is a high-dimensional design space…All in all, I am optimistic that the various behavioral kinks around implementing “radical markets” in practice could be worked out with the help of good defaults and personal AIs…I particularly welcome the use of the blockchain and crypto space as a testing ground…Could decentralized institutions like these be used to solve the key defining challenges of the twenty first century: promoting beneficial scientific progress, developing informational public goods, reducing global wealth inequality, and the big meta-problem behind fake news, government-driven and corporate-driven social media censorship, and regulation of cryptocurrency products: how do we do quality assurance in an open society? All in all, I highly recommend Radical Markets…to anyone interested in these kinds of issues, and look forward to seeing the discussion that the book generates.