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Quadratic voting is a unique voting system where individuals are allocated voice credits that they can use to express their preferences by voting on different issues. The cost of each vote is calculated by the square of the number of votes, ensuring a proportional representation of one's preferences. This system has been applied in various areas such as regulatory compliance, decision-making for global public goods like climate change, and even in internal organizational processes.
One potential concern raised against quadratic voting is the fear of inequality and the possibility that some individuals may dominate the decision-making process. However, the quadratic formula used in this voting system serves as a dampener to mitigate such issues. While there may be varying power dynamics within the voting process, the system aims to optimize outcomes for all participants, ensuring a balance between individual preferences and collective decision-making.
Critics have questioned the completeness of notions of formal efficiency when evaluating political processes like quadratic voting, suggesting the need for broader considerations beyond optimizing outcomes. Challenges in the implementation of quadratic voting may arise in dealing with a fixed polity and ensuring credibility in the decision-making process. The system's effectiveness in shaping durable consensus for future policies and encouraging more reasonable preferences remains a key area for evaluation and improvement.
Quadratic voting emphasizes the need for more informed and meaningful citizen engagement in voting to foster better decision-making. By allowing individuals to cast votes based on their knowledge and preferences, quadratic voting aims to overcome the limitations of traditional voting systems. It advocates for valuing knowledge and expertise to improve the quality of decisions and promote a fairer democratic process.
Quadratic voting highlights the potential for empowering local communities to make decisions aligned with their specific knowledge and interests. By enabling individuals to allocate their voice credits based on issues they are well-informed about, the relative influence of local communities, especially on economic matters, could increase significantly. This approach reduces the influence of wealth and advertising, allowing for clearer signals from society.
While quadratic voting presents innovative solutions to enhance democratic processes, challenges such as minority interest group influence and potential exploitation require careful consideration. The need to prevent collusion, address fixed costs in decision-making, and ensure equitable participation in public good provision are critical aspects that need to be addressed to fully implement and benefit from quadratic voting systems.
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The episode critiques certain trends within the effective altruism movement, highlighting instances where approaches focused solely on monetary contributions were deemed misleading and potentially harmful. It advocates for a more informed and nuanced perspective that considers broader social impacts and structural reforms.
Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valuable local information spread across all of society about what people want and how to make it.
But when it comes to politics and voting - which also aim to aggregate the preferences and knowledge found in millions of individuals - the enthusiasm for finding clever institutional designs often turns to skepticism.
Today's guest, freewheeling economist Glen Weyl, won't have it, and is on a warpath to reform liberal democratic institutions in order to save them. Just last year he wrote Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with Eric Posner, but has already moved on, saying "in the 6 months since the book came out I've made more intellectual progress than in the whole 10 years before that."
Weyl believes we desperately need more efficient, equitable and decentralised ways to organise society, that take advantage of what each person knows, and his research agenda has already been making breakthroughs.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript
Despite a history in the best economics departments in the world - Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago - he is too worried for the future to sit in his office writing papers. Instead he has left the academy to try to inspire a social movement, RadicalxChange, with a vision of social reform as expansive as his own.
You can sign up for their conference in Detroit in March here
Economist Alex Tabarrok called his latest proposal, known as 'liberal radicalism', "a quantum leap in public-goods mechanism-design" - we explain how it works in the show. But the proposal, however good in theory, might struggle in the real world because it requires large subsidies, and compensates for people's selfishness so effectively that it might even be an overcorrection.
An earlier mechanism - 'quadratic voting' (QV) - would allow people to express the relative strength of their preferences in the democratic process. No longer would 51 people who support a proposal, but barely care about the issue, outvote 49 incredibly passionate opponents, predictably making society worse in the process. We explain exactly how in the episode.
Weyl points to studies showing that people are more likely to vote strongly not only about issues they *care* more about, but issues they *know* more about. He expects that allowing people to specialise and indicate when they know what they're talking about will create a democracy that does more to aggregate careful judgement, rather than just passionate ignorance.
But these and indeed all of Weyl's ideas have faced criticism. Some say the risk of unintended consequences is too great, or that they solve the wrong problem. Others see these proposals as unproven, impractical, or just another example of an intellectual engaged in grand social planning. I raise these concerns to see how he responds.
As big a topic as all of that is, this extended conversation also goes into the blockchain, problems with the effective altruism community and how auctions could replace private property. Don't miss it.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type '80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.
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