Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas24 Mai 2021

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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Episoder(427)

10 | Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement

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8 | Carl Zimmer on Heredity, DNA, and Editing Genes

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6 Aug 20181h 31min

7 | Yascha Mounk on Threats to Liberal Democracy

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6 | Liv Boeree on Poker, Aliens, and Thinking in Probabilities

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23 Jul 20181h 10min

5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life

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16 Jul 20181h 23min

4 | Anthony Pinn on Humanism, Theology, and the Black Community

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12 Jul 20181h

3 | Alice Dreger on Sexuality, Truth, and Justice

The human mind loves nothing more than to build mental boxes -- categories -- and put things into them, then refuse to accept it when something doesn't fit. Nowhere is this more clear than in the idea...

11 Jul 20181h 20min