Glen Weyl on the Epistemology of Economics

E. Glen Weyl serves as an economist and technologist at Microsoft, where he provides insights about the future of technology, geopolitics, and macroeconomics to the CTO. He is also the Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, an international movement focused on political economy and social technology, and co-author of the book Radical Markets. This conversation focuses on Weyl’s critique of modern economics, heterodox views on Artificial Intelligence, and his experience building the RadicalxChange movement. This interview was conducted, transcribed, and edited by Soham Mehta.

The Gadfly: Could you give us a primer on the RadicalxChange movement? Broadly, what are the central problems of political economy that RxC seeks to address, and what are the organizing principles of the community?

Glen Weyl: Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is allow our ability to organize, communicate, and cooperate to advance as far as our technologies have. Let me start from a conceptual perspective and then turn to an operational level. I think the fundamental problem RxC is addressing is that the ways we are organizing ourselves have not advanced nearly as much as our tools have. As Einstein once put it, “What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life carefree and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances. As it is, the hard-bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child.” Communications technologies have gone from writing, to telegraphs, to telephones, which make the experience of communicating with someone at a distance more and more similar to being with someone in person. However, our political institutions haven’t updated simultaneously, and are consequently incredibly thin representations of the robust relationships technology enables. A fundamental goal of RxC is to have a technological approach to our social institutions so that they advance as far as our technologies have, so we aren’t destroyed by our own tools.

One of the core problems RxC addresses is the challenge increasing

returns poses to classical economics. The fact is that classical economic theory, what you learn in basic economics about market efficiency, only works if there are decreasing returns. The more and more you add to workers and production the less incrementally workers produce. In that context, if you pay out to everyone their incremental contribution it will add up to less than the total since everyone’s average product is greater than their marginal product. Therefore, you have private firms that are producing efficiently, that are paying everyone their marginal product, yet they make a profit. However, in cases where there are increasing returns like in cities, networks, and everything that creates value for civilizations, you would have a loss if you tried to pay everyone their incremental value since each worker’s marginal contribution is greater than their average product. So, the profits of capitalism are inconsistent with efficiency. Yet, increasing returns produce everything capitalism is is proud of, from cities to complex social organizations, despite being inconsistent with the logic of capitalism. RxC tries to design institutions that work in these contexts where human sociality and cooperation is important and ruled out by standard economics. Because our ideas fundamentally revise our basic institutions, they can’t be treated as policies implemented from the top down. Instead, our ideas should be treated as technologies. People don’t use smartphones and computers in the ways that they do because they are being directed by someone on high. These behaviors emerged organically because people experimented with these technologies and spread virally. We believe in these new social institutions because they’re so different and have to emerge from people’s involvement with them, people experimenting with them, people making them a part of their imagination and lives. That only happens through the humanities, arts, and activist groups, rather than through some process of technocratic policy-making. Glen Weyl on the Epistemology of Economics

Glen Weyl on the Epistemology of Economics

Therefore, RxC is a social movement of artists, creators, activists, and entrepreneurs rather than a standard economics department that analyzes policies and makes expert recommendations to policymakers.

RadicalxChange and Radical Markets use “radical” in a very specific way, referencing the tradition of political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. You claim that modern economics has fundamentally changed since this period, “transitioning from a field of social visionaries to one of specialized technocrats,” despite the growing prominence of economists in governments and universities. How do you believe that academia and the modern scientific and quantitative approaches in economics have affected the discipline’s legitimacy and ability to shape policy? How does RxC diverge from the modern technocratic consensus in economics?

Now, there are a lot of great things that have been accomplished in quantitative, formal academic approaches. Of course, disciplines have to exist, but they have to be pluralistic. But if economists come to think they should be directly making policy, that the political process itself is a problem, and forget that policies are products that ultimately serve the public, that’s when they’ve lost.

Computer scientists understand this; they know their discipline is ultimately judged if they produce technologies regular people find interesting. Economists need to understand that their audience isn’t an elite set of other policy thinkers. Rather, they have to generate things that are meaningful 25

and can be evaluated by the public. But economics has gotten lost in modern technocratic practices and I think we need a way to arrive at a perspective where we can employ math to the extent that it allows us to find useful things for people. We can’t expect to do the math and think that is the only relevant argument that carries the day. The argument has to be one that appeals to the public and math is just a way to find that.

To the extent we’ve succeeded in diverging from orthodox economics, it’s because we’ve brought together very different types of people and forced them to work on real projects together. We take the sociological perspective as seriously as the economic perspective. Including the non-academic perspective, such as the technologist, the artist, the religious conservative in rural Oklahoma equally seriously has been an intellectual source for us. Being forced to confront all these views allows us to generate new ideas.

In your blog post “Why I am not a Market Radical,” you criticize social sciences for operating on “Atomistic Liberalism and Objectivist Naive Epistemology” (ALONE), the assumption that individuals have self-contained conceptions of well-being that can be modeled and optimized. I believe we can also see ALONE’s impact on the post-Enlightenment West, given the emphasis on individual freedom, autonomy, and agency in liberal politics and humanism. Could you explain to our readers what you believe is so dangerous about ALONE in understanding human nature, and what first principles RxC holds instead about human behavior?

First, I would just make a critique in its own terms of the ALONE worldview. This notion that people have some utility function (essentially a set of preferences, a ranking, over certain states of the world) that they go off and maximize is inconsistent with the most basic principles of computer science. For example, to even have a ranking for the courses you take next semester at Columbia would require more space than exists in your brain since there are so many possible combinations of courses you could take in your schedule.

So, obviously, no one actually has a utility function for which classes they want to take at Columbia.

Individuals have a vague notion of the future and then, collectively in conversation with other people, 26

come to some function. So rationality does occur, but it occurs collectively, rather than at the level of individual decision making.

Therefore, the basic conception which treats the individual and their desire as fundamental, rather than seeing them as an intersection of social forces, simply misses what it is to even be an individual. There is no human individual in the sense there is a presocial, atomized capital “I” individual. There are only members of many different social milieus that create who you are and what you want. Our social circles have a small intersection between them, and that is what defines you as an individual. This can be a powerful basis for replacing identity systems that say that you are reducible to being classified along a single factor, such as how a single national government-issued ID designates you as merely a member of a country. Instead, you are part of all sorts of social communities including that country. Utilizing the full richness of the communities we are part of is at the core of the spirit of the internet. It is a network of networks with people interacting with each other. We need protocols for identity that conform to the actual rich structure of human identity that the internet tried to get at but ended up unable to capture. And it’s this intersectional way of thinking about what constitutes identity that I think is core to the RxC vision of policy and what we need for individuals to thrive and what makes a successful society.

Your understanding of technology as something that enhances the human experience reminds me of a WIRED article you co-authored, where you suggest that AI is interdependent on humans and that all intelligence is hinged on the initial context it expands on. Could you explicate this human-centric vision of AI and describe how it can lead to richer human relationships?

The fundamental distinction is an ecological versus eschatological worldview. Eschatology claims that there is one thing and we are going to it and then everything will be perfect or end. Whereas, in ecology, we don’t get to one truth as things develop, but instead we get speciation. Things split and get more differentiated as time goes on. That is what I would call a pluralist view of technology. You can think about this in epistemology as well. There’s a certain view in the rationalist community where we have to remove bias and get to

the truth and strip away mistakes versus a view that says that no form of communication or understanding can ever understand more than a minuscule fraction of the incredibly complex universe. And, therefore, every attempt to do so is hundreds of orders of magnitude oversimplification.

Rather than thinking that we’re digging down into the earth to hit gold, we’re growing a tree out into the infinite void and this tree’s branches are splitting off and diversifying in every direction. All we can hope is to have something that ties it together so it doesn’t fall under its own

weight. Any structure we can hope to build can only model some tiny portion of human understanding. Any such structure will always be, to the extent it is coherent at all, incredibly thin.

This goes back to Jorge Luis Borges’s story On Exactitude and Science. In it, Borges describes someone who tries to make a very very precise map of a kingdom. Following generations find the map unsatisfactory and demand that the map becomes bigger and more precise until the map is larger than the kingdom and the kingdom is destroyed. There is no such thing as a map, and you can think of any intelligence as a map that is incredibly untrue to the underlying reality. Subway maps, topographical maps, political maps, and atlases all show you the different ways of slicing the underlying reality. And be-

cause intelligence is always an incredible reduction of reality, no intelligence can ever hope to be the intelligence or the solution. It can only hope to be something that is open to conversation with other kinds of intelligence. And that’s what is so wrong about AI as an ideology because it thinks of intelligence in this autonomous way, believing that there’s a point where we’ll have superseded people. There is no such point; every intelligence is just part of an ecology and is interdependent on and and benefits from the other elements of that ecology. It doesn’t matter if it’s human or artificial; what is important is the fundamental principle of speciation, ecology, diversity, pluralism rather than this eschatological notion that we’ve reached the Messiah, the intelligence, and all of the problems of the world are solved.