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.


Episoder(419)

226 | Johanna Hoffman on Speculative Futures of Cities

226 | Johanna Hoffman on Speculative Futures of Cities

Cities are incredibly important to modern life, and their importance is only growing. As Geoffrey West points out, the world is adding urban areas equivalent to the population of San Francisco once ev...

13 Feb 20231h 12min

AMA | February 2023

AMA | February 2023

Welcome to the February 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

6 Feb 20233h 7min

225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those delibe...

30 Jan 20231h 22min

224 | Edward Tufte on Data, Design, and Truth

224 | Edward Tufte on Data, Design, and Truth

So you have some information — how are you going to share it with and present it to the rest of the world? There has been a long history of organizing and displaying information without putting too mu...

23 Jan 20231h 16min

223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are

223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know th...

16 Jan 20231h 10min

222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World

222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World

Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it's only inspiration, not detailed guidance. S...

9 Jan 20231h 24min

221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human

221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that ...

2 Jan 20231h 20min

Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round off another year. Ironically, this year the theme ...

19 Des 202247min

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