Mechanism design as political technology · a distributed research program
New market & democratic mechanisms — quadratic voting, partial-common-ownership — engineered for a fairer, more pluralist future.
RadicalxChange (RxC) is a hybrid intellectual movement and nonprofit foundation launched in 2018 by economist E. Glen Weyl, in the immediate wake of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, co-written with University of Chicago legal scholar Eric Posner. Its founding gambit is to treat the exhausted capitalism-versus-socialism argument not as an ideological choice but as an engineering problem.
Design better allocation and voting mechanisms — quadratic voting, quadratic funding, Harberger (common-ownership self-assessed) property taxes, data-as-labor compacts, radically open immigration sponsorship — and power, wealth, and voice redistribute themselves without abolishing markets. Equal parts economics seminar, crypto-governance laboratory, and civic-reform NGO, RxC runs through globally distributed online chapters, an annual flagship conference, and dense traffic with the Ethereum ecosystem, where Weyl and Vitalik Buterin's quadratic funding formula became the allocation engine behind Gitcoin Grants.
It functions less as a school with one settled doctrine than as a distributed research program in mechanism design as political technology — whose center of gravity has since drifted toward Weyl's broader Plurality project with Audrey Tang.
Motifs — the shareable, testable mechanisms
Voice priced by the square of intensity. Buy conviction, not majorities.
Self-assess, self-tax, stay sellable. Property held on a leash to the commons.
Allocation engineered for efficiency and equality at once.
Economic theory turned into institutional source code.
Every voter gets a budget of voice credits. Each additional vote on one issue costs the square of the votes cast — so a lone zealot pays dearly, while the mildly-preferring many are cheaply heard. Intensity becomes legible without letting money simply buy the outcome.
funding = ( Σ √cᵢ )²
Quadratic funding: many small gifts outweigh a few large ones — the matching engine behind Gitcoin Grants.
Memetic forces
Mechanisms that transcend market-vs-state drew economists, technologists, and reformers alike.
A world hungry for new governance gave the ideas real deployments — and funding.
A bold text gave a scattered set of ideas the gravity of a movement.
Cleverly redesigned market mechanisms can deliver both efficiency and equality — transcending the old choice between free markets and central control.
A think-tank-like movement of economists, technologists, and activists propagating specific mechanisms through a book, a foundation, conferences, and pilots.
A movement organized around a toolkit of novel mechanisms — turning economic theory into a shareable, testable program for institutional reform.
RxC popularized quadratic voting and funding and reframed mechanism design as a tool of democratic reform. Its mechanisms have escaped the seminar room into real pilots — government, crypto, and participatory budgeting — even as the movement itself stays deliberately small.
Mediums
Archetypes
Status · Living
Its mechanisms have escaped into real pilots — govtech, crypto, participatory budgeting — even as the movement itself stays small.
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