Democracy2: The Future of Collective Decisions

Standard democratic institutions fail to account for the intensity of preference, leading to classic flaws like the tyranny of the majority and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. In this talk I propose and defend Quadratic Voting (QV), an alternative mechanism that addresses these weaknesses. Individuals purchase votes from a clearing-house using some continuous currency, paying the square of the votes purchased on any issue. QV is not as tightly optimized to the narrow environments that motivate most existing economic alternatives to majority rule. However, unlike these previous proposals, it is simple and performs nearly perfectly across a wide range of environments. This has persuaded my collaborators and me of its promise in a range of commercial, social and political applications. To bring this message to the broad audience it has to reach to be adopted, we are publishing in popular media as well as legal and social science journals, and have formed a start-up venture, Collective Decision Engines, to develop software and culture around the idea.

Speaker Details

E. Glen Weyl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and in the College, an Associate Member of the Law School and a Member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He was 2007 undergraduate Valedictorian at Princeton University before receiving his PhD in Economics in 2008, also from Princeton, and spending three years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research focuses on price theory and welfare economics, as well as the intersection between economics and related fields such as law, philosophy and biology.

Date:
Speakers:
Glen Weyl
Affiliation:
University of Chicago