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.


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73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated...

18 Marras 20191h 18min

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do ...

11 Marras 20191h 16min

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surprising that we don't understand the mind and how it w...

4 Marras 20191h 34min

70 | Katie Mack on How the Universe Will End

70 | Katie Mack on How the Universe Will End

Cosmologists are always talking excitedly about the Big Bang and all the cool stuff that happened in the 14 billion years between then and now. But what about the future? We don't know for sure, but w...

28 Loka 20191h 23min

69 | Cory Doctorow on Technology, Monopoly, and the Future of the Internet

69 | Cory Doctorow on Technology, Monopoly, and the Future of the Internet

Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should w...

21 Loka 20191h 17min

68 | Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Common Sense

68 | Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Common Sense

Artificial intelligence is better than humans at playing chess or go, but still has trouble holding a conversation or driving a car. A simple way to think about the discrepancy is through the lens of ...

14 Loka 20191h 22min

67 | Kate Jeffery on Entropy, Complexity, and Evolution

67 | Kate Jeffery on Entropy, Complexity, and Evolution

Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then, can we account for the appearance of complex syst...

7 Loka 20191h 12min

66 | Will Wilkinson on Partisan Polarization and the Urban/Rural Divide

66 | Will Wilkinson on Partisan Polarization and the Urban/Rural Divide

The idea of "red states" and "blue states" burst on the scene during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, and has a been a staple of political commentary ever since. But it's become increasingly clea...

30 Syys 20191h 52min

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