148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism

148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism

Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that the bottom-up and experimental nature of democracy actually makes for better problem-solving in the political arena than other systems. Political theorist Henry Farrell (in collaboration with statistician Cosma Shalizi) has made exactly that case. We discuss the general idea of solving social problems, and compare different kinds of macro-institutions — markets, hierarchies, and democracies — to ask whether democracies aren't merely politically just, but also an efficient way of generating good ideas.

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Henry Farrell received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. He is currently the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics & Technology. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-leader of the Moral Economy of Technology initiative at Stanford University. He is a co-founder of Crooked Timber blog, as well as the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.


Jaksot(416)

200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

200 | Solo: The Philosophy of the Multiverse

The 200th episode of Mindscape! Thanks to everyone for sticking around for this long. To celebrate, a solo episode discussing a set of issues naturally arising at the intersection of philosophy and ph...

6 Kesä 20222h 14min

199 | Elizabeth Cohen on Time and Other Political Values

199 | Elizabeth Cohen on Time and Other Political Values

Time is everywhere, pervading each aspect of intellectual inquiry — from physics to philosophy to biology to psychology, and all the way up to politics. Considerations of time help govern a nation's s...

30 Touko 20221h 12min

198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology

198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology

The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn't left many pieces of direct evidence concerning what actually happened. One set of cl...

23 Touko 20221h 25min

197 | Catherine Brinkley on the Science of Cities

197 | Catherine Brinkley on the Science of Cities

The concept of the city is a crucial one for human civilization: people living in proximity, bringing in resources from outside, separated from the labors of subsistence so they can engage in the trad...

16 Touko 20221h 8min

AMA | May 2022

AMA | May 2022

Welcome to the May 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questio...

12 Touko 20223h 36min

196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect

196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect

To say that event A causes event B is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worlds where A didn't happen but everything else was the same, B would not h...

9 Touko 20221h 16min

195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn't invented jet engines. What are the diff...

2 Touko 20221h 18min

194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates

194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates

Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemurs, and others besides ourselves, are our closest r...

25 Huhti 20221h 8min

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