What we’re about
We are the Chicago chapter of the RadicalxChange movement.
Mission Statement
RadicalxChange convenes a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs and scholars committed to using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build widely-shared prosperity, heal global political divides and build a richer and more cooperative social life.
As advocates of radical social change, the RadicalxChange community challenges long-established social institutions such as private property, one-person-one-vote and the primacy of the individual on the one hand and the nation state on the other.
To achieve this change the community seeks to increase public knowledge about the emancipatory potential of insights from the field of mechanism design, in dialog with a range of other academic fields such as computer science, philosophy and history, the communicative imagination of artists, the pragmatic ingenuity of entrepreneurs and the idealism of activists for social justice.
Core Values
• Open: RadicalxChange is open. It seeks to facilitate a free exchange of ideas in an environment of thoughtful discourse.
• Egalitarian: Many of the ideas at RadicalxChange are animated by a belief that hyper-concentrations of wealth are not natural or efficient, and that a more genuinely competitive market system would result in a broader distribution of wealth.
• Dignity: Every person’s well-being (financial or otherwise) is a good in itself. We want our work to reflect and express this.
• Social Innovation: At RadicalxChange we embrace the challenge of overturning stale categories and assumptions! We believe that thoughtful, collaborative innovation can help build better social institutions.
Governance Principles
• Diversity: To build a truly broad-based and effective community, we include the insights and perspectives of a wide range of social interests, political backgrounds, identity groups and vocational expertise. Leaders at all levels of RadicalxChange strive to actively include people within their remit who differ from them along all these dimensions but share the mission.
• Decentralization: RadicalxChange is fundamentally anti-authoritarian in outlook and seeks to be the change it wishes to promote. Leaders at all levels of RadicalxChange strive to push decision-making authority outward to the extent possible, recognizing the substantial informal authority they hold as leaders and seeking primarily to include and draw upon members of the community wherever possible rather than aggregating decision-making authority in their own hands.
• Responsibility: RadicalxChange leaders are chosen for their expertise in their respective areas of responsibility and take responsibility for ensuring engagement, quality decision-making, fair representation of their domain externally and the consistency of internal participation and governance with other RadicalxChange principles.
• Social Justice Mission: RadicalxChange is primarily devoted to achieving its social justice mission, rather than achieving the private goals of any member. RadicalxChange should not become a source of personal enrichment for any individual to the exclusion of the community.
• Respect: RadicalxChange community members treat each other as epistemic and social equals and should aim to empathize with the intellectual and personal perspective each member of the community brings to the table.
Experimenting with ideas on how to decentralize power in a system.
Creating complex adaptive systems to disrupt governments and corporations that no longer serve the greater good.
Incentivizing the maximum output from individuals by providing opportunity.
Developing sustainable and viable solutions to build compassionate capitalism and incentivized communism.
