Glen Weyl


Eric Glen Weyl is an economist and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and author of the book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society with co-author Eric Posner.
Weyl is co-creator of quadratic voting, a collective decision-making procedure that enables determination of how strongly voters feel about an issue, rather than simply ascertaining whether they are in favor of it or opposed to it.

Early life

Weyl was born in San Francisco, and grew up in Palo Alto, California. He is Jewish. His family favored the Democratic Party, but Weyl grew towards free market principles after being introduced to the works of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.

Education and career

Weyl graduated Choate Rosemary Hall preparatory high school in 2003, where he won the Douglass North award for economics and the William Gardner and Mary Atwater Choate Award for outstanding male scholar. He went on to attend Princeton University, where four years later, he had completed all his coursework and exams for a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics, as well as being selected as class of 2007 valedictorian.
After his PhD, Weyl spent three years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and another three years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago before joining Microsoft Research as an economist and Principal Researcher. He also teaches a course at Yale University, "Designing the Digital Economy," that blends economics and computer science in much the way that digital economists blend them at tech companies.

Publications

Weyl's book, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, written with Eric Posner, proposes radical market-based solutions to solve current social problems such as economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability, which the authors believe are based on monopoly power. The book proposes requiring all property owners to name the price they would sell that property at, then taxing them based on that value. This would both ensure that all property be used in the most efficient way, and would provide a large social dividend to society. The book would have tech companies that gather personal data pay its users for that data. For democratic government, it recommends quadratic voting, giving each voter a vote budget that can be spent more heavily on issues they care more about.

Personal life

Weyl married Alisha Caroline Holland in 2010. They met in 2003 during their first year at Princeton, where Holland was winner of the Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize. Holland works at Princeton as an Associate Professor of Politics.