PERSON
E. Glen Weyl
American political economist (b. 1985), founder of the RadicalxChange foundation, co-author with Allen of 'How AI Fails Us,' and principal theorist of the plurality paradigm in AI and democracy.
Weyl's work combines mechanism design, political economy, and democratic theory in an effort to develop institutional alternatives to both pure markets and centralized states. His 2018 book Radical Markets (with Eric Posner) proposed mechanism design innovations—quadratic voting, common ownership self-assessed tax—intended to produce outcomes more democratic than existing market institutions while avoiding the concentrations of power that centralized planning produces. His 2024 book Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (with Audrey Tang) extends this work into the specific domain of AI and digital governance, developing the plurality paradigm as an alternative to centralized AI development.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Weyl's collaboration with Allen on 'How AI Fails Us' brought mechanism design and democratic theory into direct engagement with AI governance. The paper's critique of 'actually existing AI' drew on Weyl's prior work on the antidemocratic tendencies of market concentration and his work on alternative institutional designs that could produce more democratic outcomes.
Weyl's theoretical innovation is the concept of