We want to be a diversity of opinions and voices and values out there in the media, but we should also be able to say we would like the factual information to be true as much as it can be. And right now, the incentive structure is not necessarily aligned in that way. How scalable is that mechanism to stopa major media corporations from just spreading false facts out there into the world? But i ant one idea, and yours. This is, i am not a policy person, and a bruce is in different ways, but this is not his area of policy. It could be taken to imply a greater level of a, of assumed responsibility for them actually getting stuff right.
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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