Seminar

Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

Date
Thu May 17th 2018, 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, Center for Computational Social Science, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Location
Sapp Center for Science Teaching and Learning

Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? In his new book co-authored with Eric Posner, Glen Weyl turns this thinking—and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against—on its head. Weyl reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone. He shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation.

Panelists

Glen Weyl is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England whose work aims to use technology and economics to find new ways to organize societies to reduce inequality, increase productivity and ease political tensions. He is visiting Yale University's economics department and Law School as a Senior Research Scholar. Glen’s research draws on insights from adjacent disciplines (e.g. law, computer science and philosophy) to radically expand the scope of market exchange.

Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her current research focuses on the design of auction-based marketplaces and the economics of the internet, primarily on online advertising and the economics of the news media. She has worked on several application areas, including timber auctions, internet search, online advertising, the news media, and virtual currency.

Margaret Levi is the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her recent work explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. She has also investigated the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law.