Noblsha Democracy

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No bulsha democracy is a research program that i've been doing with two colleagues of mine, hugo mercier and melissa schwartzburg. The idea behind it is to build up from insights that cognive psychologists have developed about when group problem solving works or doesn't. But equally, one could imagine a very similar research programm working downwards from some of the work that statistical physicists and others have been doing on contagion over large scale networks. And again, to try and put this kind insight into a feeback loop between exploration of theoretical possibilities, and trying to figure out what works practically and what doesn't.

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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