BREAKDOWN: USV's Albert Wenger on the World After Capital

A blueprint for redesigning society as the world shifts from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.

May 18, 2020

Listen on:

Host

CoinDesk

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures as well as a prolific thinker and writer. His “World After Capital” is an evolving digital book project that looks at a set of megatrend shifts as the world moves between economic paradigms from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.

In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss:

Why attention is at the center of the new Knowledge Age
Why markets can’t price crucial needs such as pandemic preparedness
Why the new era will be defined by three categories of freedoms: economic freedom, information freedom and psychological freedom
Why universal basic income has an important role to play in economic freedom
How UBI could avoid political capture
Why technology is inherently deflationary
Why real estate, education and health care should be much cheaper than they are
Why community currencies could be a key innovation from the current crisis