In a democracy you have a bunch of people with different ideas. And so is that quite analogous, or just a little bit akin to the idea that in a democracy we have a population of institutional beliefs. We can imagine that when ther more complicated soltof complicated institutions, and then there is going a significant degree of variation among us in how we actually understand those institutions. You institute new variant beliefs can a spring up. But here i am, riding on my couseor free, but i am not capable of replicating those insights under any reasonable circumstances. So that's more or less the insight behind Thercoffin’s work.
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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