E. Glen Weyl has come up with radical ideas using digital technology and market forces to return freedom and democracy to a world where politics and wealth are dominated by a small number of people.

In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Weyl, 35, a political economist working for Microsoft Corp. and founder of RadicalxChange, a foundation proposing new ideas for democracy and the economy, was asked what other changes are needed during the novel coronavirus pandemic when authority has become concentrated in the hands of even fewer people.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Asahi: To move away from the consolidation of wealth and power in fewer people, you have proposed doing away with private property, sharing that property and auctioning the right to use the property. Amid the pandemic, how effective is the mental attitude of radically redesigning the market?

Weyl: The most successful countries in the world in addressing COVID-19 were those that most heavily use RadicalxChange ideas: Estonia and Taiwan.

RadicalxChange style mechanism design ideas were used in mask rationing and in contact tracing in Taiwan. Taiwan has had the fewest deaths per capita and the mildest economic outcome of any country in the world.

Taiwan’s digital minister, Audrey Tang, is on the RadicalxChange board. The ethos of participatory digital democracy in the country was critical to achieving the trust in technology, built from civil society bottom up, needed to make the response legitimate.

Estonia lacked Taiwan and Japan’s experience with SARS, so did worse as did all European countries, but was the strongest in Europe and shares many of the features of Taiwan.

‘TRUMP IS NOT THE PROBLEM’

Q: The United States has to be considered a failure in dealing with COVID-19 since it not only has the most cases and fatalities, but the economic damage has also been pronounced. What was the fundamental mistake made by the Trump administration?

Weyl: I don’t think the blame rests exclusively, perhaps not even primarily, with the Trump administration.

Many of the mistakes were made by the “deep state” of bureaucrats at places like the Centers for Disease Control (and Protection) that Democrats often praise. They recommended against mask wearing for a time. They never made clear to the president the scale of testing required. They never made clear that repeated lockdowns would be needed without large scale testing, tracing and supported isolation.

They consistently misled the public and confused the decision-making of political leaders.

Q: But wasn’t Trump’s initial efforts to downplay the pandemic one cause of the problem?

Weyl: President Trump also evaded responsibility, politicized the issue and sowed division as he often does for his political advantage. But the fundamental problem we have in the United States is not President Trump, but rather the deep divisions that keep us from honestly communicating with each other across lines of difference.

This is why the CDC was so dishonest: because they distrusted political leaders and the public, and in the process they earned distrust back. We can only get past this if we acknowledge the real mistakes made on all sides.

STOCK PRICES SOAR AS JOB PICTURE TURNS SOUR

Q: The developed nations have always faced the problems of stagnation and inequality, what you have dubbed as “stagnequality.” Haven’t those problems worsened under the pandemic?

Weyl: Ernest Hemmingway once said that you usually go bankrupt gradually and then abruptly. This seems to be what is happening with prevailing globalized liberal democratic capitalism. For years, confidence among the public and especially younger generations in the political economic system of the West has been declining.

But with COVID-19, it has truly collapsed, with a Harris Poll finding that around 75 percent of Americans now believe our current form of capitalism is insufficient to support the greater good and work for ordinary Americans.

Q: As tens of millions of Americans lose their jobs, the consolidation of market power among a small number of individuals is advancing. What do you make of this?

Weyl: With the stock market, and especially the tech sector, reaching ever higher as unemployment remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression, it is little wonder we are seeing civil unrest over long-standing divisions across race and region burst into sometimes violent protests. I expect things will get worse before they get better, without approaching a fundamental rethinking of our social system.

The most natural alternative, both given the size and the social conflict between the countries, will be technocratic authoritarianism in the style of the Chinese Communist Party, though likely formatted for the West in terms of Silicon Valley algorithmic governance.

We can and must offer more human, pluralistic alternatives if we want to maintain our most sacred values.

LACK OF MUTUAL TRUST AMONG EXPERTS

Q: To soften the impact of the pandemic, the U.S. government has made unprecedented fiscal expenditures. It has even implemented measures called for by leftists, such as large unemployment benefits. What is your view of this?

Weyl: In some ways the efforts mustered by the world’s governments and central banks in the face of the economic side of the crisis have been extremely impressive and rapid. At the same time, they have shown more clearly than ever the impotence and increasing irrelevance of traditional policy tools, including those favored by the left.

Large stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, failed to address the core problem of the pandemic: controlling the disease using testing, tracing and supported isolation, mask wearing and restructuring of public spaces to make them sanitary in these conditions.

Q: But the objective of economic measures in the first place is not to prevent a spread of infections. Wouldn’t a more common-sense approach have been to implement measures to ensure infections are not spread while also using traditional measures to avoid an economic collapse?

Weyl: A lot of what got us into trouble in the United States was that economists focused on stimulus assuming the disease would follow a terrible course (as it did), and public health authorities focused on doing what they could to control the disease assuming they would get few resources and effective support from governments and fiscal authorities (which turned out to be the case).

As a result, each side’s prediction turned out to be fulfilled but only because the two failed to communicate and coordinate on what should have been done: a massive reorientation of the economy to provide the tools we needed for disease suppression.

Q: In that sense, weren’t there major differences depending on what different nations did?

Weyl: Countries that did these things have recovered and saved lives, many without much stimulus; countries that failed have used stimuluses many orders of magnitude greater than the small expenditure necessary to address the disease and have not spared their economy and saved lives. Instead, they have inflated the stock market and redistributed wealth upward.

WILL ROBOTS MAKE HUMANS VALUELESS?

Q: How do you view the policies taken by many nations of directly extending government payments to the public, providing in a sense a form of basic income?

Weyl: Many rightly think COVID is a preview of a what a digitally driven future economy could look like, and if the effects we saw are what measures like universal basic income (UBI) would do in that world, we should be very afraid of the future that many in the technology world are advocating.

We have to learn better ways to more effectively provide the public goods we all need to live together.

Q: There is a strong relationship between progress in technology, such as artificial intelligence and automation on the one hand, and basic income on the other. Hasn’t there been a stronger call for basic income measures amid the pandemic?

Weyl: I am not opposed to an occasional use of UBI as it has been used for years as a policy tool. But I think the whole discourse around it is deeply wrong and confused.

Q: What do you mean?

Weyl: First, to the extent that machines are going to “take our jobs” it is because we have set up the digital economy in such a way that it ignores and demeans the contributions of most people, and the discussion around the inevitability of people becoming of no economic value just reinforces this. Thus the discourse around UBI is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Second, UBI is based on the idea of “giving directly” so that the recipient can choose what to spend the money on “freely.” But this is a mirage. People do not directly consume money. They consume goods and services that money buys.

Scandinavia uses a range of local and broader public goods to allow this, not cash transfers. There are countries in the world that have actually achieved the goal of giving people the freedom to live their lives without fear of market fluctuations destroying them. UBI is historically extremely ignorant.

Q: So you do not believe it is an opportunity for people to take back their power?

Weyl: Unless you believe we live in some fantasy perfect market economy, UBI does not really address the fundamental issue, which is that there are exploitative monopolies that are taking advantage of people and making the economy operate sclerotically. It may even make it worse as it depends on imposing taxes on those monopolies, which makes them even less efficient.

Q: You are scheduled to take part online in the Asahi World Forum 2020 planned for October. What do you plan to talk about regarding capitalism and democracy in a post-corona world?

Weyl: Capitalism is premised on the idea that most of what we need to achieve we can achieve separately, coordinated only by a standard market process. COVID showed us that we need much more diverse and complex forms of collective action for the type of advances capitalism needs all to work.

If we want markets and open societies to survive this crisis, we must fundamentally rethink them so they can provide these types of collective goods through democratic mechanisms, accountable to those they hold power over, rather than by monopolistic corporations.

At the same time, the nation state, with boundaries and electorates that have not changed in decades or centuries in some cases, is far too rigid to respond to the problems we face, something we also saw as trade and travel collapsed during COVID.

We must find new mechanisms that combine the flexibility of international markets with the democracy of nation states or we will soon lose out to those who want to centrally plan our future.

(This interview was conducted by Takashi Ebuchi in New York.)

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Glen Weyl was born in San Francisco in 1985. He is a political economist and social technologist working out of the office of Microsoft’s chief technology officer. He graduated at the top of his class at Princeton University and obtained his doctorate in one year. He has taught at the University of Chicago. A Japanese translation of “Radical Markets,” co-written with Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor, was published in late 2019.

The Asahi World Forum will be held online between Oct. 11 and 15. The main theme is “Five Days for a New Future.” There will be more than 20 sessions, including panel discussions, on topics ranging from the U.S. presidential election to climate change and the U.N.’s sustainable development goals.

The sessions will be livestreamed from a studio at The Asahi Shimbun’s Tokyo Head Office. Panelists from abroad will join in through a videoconferencing system. The sessions will be interactive, allowing participants to ask questions or make comments. An English channel to promote further discussions will be available for the session at 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 12 on radically changing capitalism and democracy, the session at noon on Oct. 13 on working toward a circular economy and the session at 4 p.m. on Oct. 14 on authoritarianism in the 21st century.

Registration in English can be made at (http://t.asahi.com/awfen).