If the dismal spectacle of the government shutdown has created any openness to changing how we elect leaders—and how they make decisions—a young economist at the University of Chicago is ready with a proposal.

The rather extreme notion, floated by E. Glen Weyl and amplified by his Chicago law-school colleague Eric Posner, would scrap one man, one vote in favor of a complex system of vote-purchasing. Yes, vote-purchasing. Under this system, called quadratic voting—which very much bears the market-oriented stamp of University of Chicago-style social science—citizens could cast one or more votes, but each vote would cost them an amount equal to the square of how many they were buying. So, one vote for a candidate would cost $1, two would cost $4, four would cost $16, and so on.

After the votes were tallied, the majority would win and the money would be evenly divided and returned to voters, serving as partial compensation for the people on the losing side.

Read more at Chronicle of Higher Education