E. Glen Weyl

Overview

E. Glen Weyl (born 1985) is an American economist who leads the Plural Technology Collaboratory at Microsoft Research and has previously held positions at the University of Chicago and the Harvard Society of Fellows.[1][2] He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2008, having graduated valedictorian of his Princeton undergraduate class the year before.[2]

Weyl is best known as co-author, with legal scholar Eric Posner, of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (2018), a program of market-design reforms whose lead proposal — the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, popularly known as the Harberger tax — generalizes the Georgist logic of taxing self-assessed land value to property and quasi-property more broadly.[3] The book is dedicated "to the memory of William S. Vickrey," and Weyl builds its Georgist chapter around what the authors call the "Vickrey Commons": a thought experiment in which all property is held in common and use rights are continuously auctioned, funding public goods and a social dividend — a design the authors credit as sharing George's core defect of discouraging investment, since possessions held only by continuous outbidding give no one an incentive to improve them.[3] The COST design that resolves that defect sets its self-assessment tax rate at roughly the market's turnover rate rather than at George's full-rent rate, and the book estimates a COST regime would raise roughly 20% of national income while paying out a social dividend on the order of $5,300 per person.[3] He also helped develop quadratic voting and quadratic funding, mechanisms for aggregating preference intensities and allocating public resources — respectively Chapter 2 of Radical Markets and a later research program — and co-developed the data-as-labor proposal (Chapter 5) to treat user-generated data as compensable work rather than a free platform byproduct.[2][3]

RadicalxChange

Weyl founded the RadicalxChange Foundation, a nonprofit and movement organization promoting the mechanism-design reforms set out in Radical Markets — including Harberger taxation, quadratic voting, and data-dignity proposals — carrying Georgist-adjacent rent-capture ideas into technology, cryptocurrency, and governance-reform communities alongside figures such as Vitalik Buterin, who separately endorsed the book's proposals for digital-asset reform.[3][4]

Reception in Crypto and Tech Circles

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's 2018 essay reviewing Radical Markets was, per the wiki's own account of it, "pivotal in spreading land-value and self-assessment ideas through cryptocurrency and tech communities" — carrying Weyl's COST proposal into a domain neither he nor Posner originally targeted.[5] Buterin's endorsement was not unqualified: he distinguished the land case, where he judged the Harberger-tax trade-off favorable, from ordinary consumer property, where he argued a universal self-assessment tax would fail on "mental transaction costs" — the cognitive burden of continuously pricing everything one owns, and the risk of "accidentally" losing possessions to a mis-set value.[5] That split mirrors the land/capital distinction George himself drew and Posner and Weyl's COST deliberately erases — Buterin's caveat effectively re-draws it from the demand side, endorsing Harberger taxation more readily where Weyl's own design applies it least conservatively.

See Also

• Radical Markets — the book and reform program Weyl co-authored
• Posner & Weyl, Radical Markets (book page) — full chapter-by-chapter summary, data table, and departures-from-George analysis
• Harberger Tax (COST) — the self-assessment mechanism Weyl helped popularize
• Vitalik Buterin: On Radical Markets — a parallel figure who carried these ideas into crypto circles
• Eric Posner — Weyl's co-author
• Single Tax — the Georgist precedent Weyl's COST proposal generalizes

Sources

1. E. Glen Weyl, Microsoft Research profile page — used to confirm current affiliation (Microsoft Research, Plural Technology Collaboratory). microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/glenweyl/
2. "Glen Weyl," Wikipedia — used for biographical facts (birth year/place, Princeton Ph.D. and valedictorian undergraduate, Harvard Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, quadratic voting/funding). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Weyl
3. Eric Posner & E. Glen Weyl (2018), Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, Princeton University Press — used for the COST/Harberger-tax proposal and its explicit framing as a generalization of George's single-tax logic. See wiki page.
4. RadicalxChange Foundation board page, "E. Glen Weyl" — used to confirm his founding role. radicalxchange.org/board/e.-glen-weyl/
5. Vitalik Buterin (2018), "On Radical Markets" — used for the Buterin reception detail, the "mental transaction costs" critique, and the direct quotations in "Reception in Crypto and Tech Circles" (A-claims quoted verbatim). See wiki summary. vitalik.eth.limo