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Taylor and Coop investigate Chapter 5 of Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death, Political Economy and Death. Symbolic Exchange & Death Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/podcast-co-coopercherry/sets/symbolic-exchange-and-death Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/muhh Twitter: @unconscioushh Instagram: @unconscioushh
In this episode, the IEA's Emily Carver, Kristian Niemietz and Marc Glendening sit down to discuss the threats posed to free speech by the encroachment of cultural leftism in our institutions. Emily Carver is the Institute of Economic Affairs' Head of Media, responsible for managing and growing the IEA's media output. Prior to joining the IEA in October 2019, Emily worked as Policy Adviser to a Conservative MP. Previously, she spent a year at public relations agency, Edelman. She has a degree in modern languages from Bristol University and an MSc in European Politics from the LSE. Dr Kristian Niemietz joined the IEA in 2008 as Poverty Research Fellow, becoming its Senior Research Fellow in 2013, Head of Health and Welfare in 2015 and Head of Political Economy in 2018. Kristian is also a Fellow of the Age Endeavour Fellowship. He studied Economics at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Universidad de Salamanca, graduating in 2007 as Diplom-Volkswirt. In 2013, he completed a PhD in Political Economy at King's College London. Marc Glendening is Head of Cultural Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Before that he worked for Policy Exchange focusing on freedom of speech related issues and the political implications of human rights law. In 2011 he co-founded as political director of the cross-party Democracy Movement, the People's Pledge. This campaigned for a referendum on the question of EU membership and included politicians and others with contrary views on Brexit. Support the IEA on Patreon, where we give you the opportunity to directly help us continue producing stimulating and educational online content, whilst subscribing to exclusive IEA perks, benefits and priority access to our content https://patreon.com/iealondon FOLLOW US: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/iealondon INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ieauk/ FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/ieauk WEBSITE - https://iea.org.uk/
Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg HIGHLIGHTS Collaborating with Humans without Human Data (DJ Strouse et al) (summarized by Rohin): We've previously seen that if you want to collaborate with humans in the video game Overcooked, it helps to train a deep RL agent against a human model (AN #70), so that the agent “expects” to be playing against humans (rather than e.g. copies of itself, as in self-play). We might call this a “human-aware” model. However, since a human-aware model must be trained against a model that imitates human gameplay, we need to collect human gameplay data for training. Could we instead train an agent that is robust enough to play with lots of different agents, including humans as a special case? This paper shows that this can be done with Fictitious Co-Play (FCP), in which we train our final agent against a population of self-play agents and their past checkpoints taken throughout training. Such agents get significantly higher rewards when collaborating with humans in Overcooked (relative to the human-aware approach in the previously linked paper). In their ablations, the authors find that it is particularly important to include past checkpoints in the population against which you train. They also test whether it helps to have the self-play agents have a variety or architectures, and find that it mostly does not make a difference (as long as you are using past checkpoints as well). Read more: Related paper: Maximum Entropy Population Based Training for Zero-Shot Human-AI Coordination Rohin's opinion: You could imagine two different philosophies on how to build AI systems -- the first option is to train them on the actual task of interest (for Overcooked, training agents to play against humans or human models), while the second option is to train a more robust agent on some more general task, that hopefully includes the actual task within it (the approach in this paper). Besides Overcooked, another example would be supervised learning on some natural language task (the first philosophy), as compared to pretraining on the Internet GPT-style and then prompting the model to solve your task of interest (the second philosophy). In some sense the quest for a single unified AGI system is itself a bet on the second philosophy -- first you build your AGI that can do all tasks, and then you point it at the specific task you want to do now. Historically, I think AI has focused primarily on the first philosophy, but recent years have shown the power of the second philosophy. However, I don't think the question is settled yet: one issue with the second philosophy is that it is often difficult to fully “aim” your system at the true task of interest, and as a result it doesn't perform as well as it “could have”. In Overcooked, the FCP agents will not learn specific quirks of human gameplay that could be exploited to improve efficiency (which the human-aware agent could do, at least in theory). In natural language, even if you prompt GPT-3 appropriately, there's still some chance it ends up rambling about something else entirely, or neglects to mention some information that it “knows” but that a human on the Internet would not have said. (See also this post (AN #141).) I should note that you can also have a hybrid approach, where you start by training a large model with the second philosophy, and then you finetune it on your task of interest as in the first philosophy, gaining the benefits of both. I'm generally interested in which approach will build more useful agents, as this seems quite relevant to forecasting the future of AI (which in turn affects lots of things including AI alignment plans). TECHNICAL AI ALIGNMENT LEARNING HUMAN INTENT Inverse Decision Modeling: Learning Interpretable Representations of Behavior (Daniel Jarrett, Alihan Hüyük et al) (summarized by Rohin): There's lots of work on learning preferences from demonstrations, which varies in how much structure they assume on the demonstrator: for example, we might consider them to be Boltzmann rational (AN #12) or risk sensitive, or we could try to learn their biases (AN #59). This paper proposes a framework to encompass all of these choices: the core idea is to model the demonstrator as choosing actions according to a planner; some parameters of this planner are fixed in advance to provide an assumption on the structure of the planner, while others are learned from data. This also allows them to separate beliefs, decision-making, and rewards, so that different structures can be imposed on each of them individually. The paper provides a mathematical treatment of both the forward problem (how to compute actions in the planner given the reward, think of algorithms like value iteration) and the backward problem (how to compute the reward given demonstrations, the typical inverse reinforcement learning setting). They demonstrate the framework on a medical dataset, where they introduce a planner with parameters for flexibility of decision-making, optimism of beliefs, and adaptivity of beliefs. In this case they specify the desired reward function and then run backward inference to conclude that, with respect to this reward function, clinicians appear to be significantly less optimistic when diagnosing dementia in female and elderly patients. Rohin's opinion: One thing to note about this paper is that it is an incredible work of scholarship; it fluently cites research across a variety of disciplines including AI safety, and provides a useful organizing framework for many such papers. If you need to do a literature review on inverse reinforcement learning, this paper is a good place to start. Human irrationality: both bad and good for reward inference (Lawrence Chan et al) (summarized by Rohin): Last summary, we saw a framework for inverse reinforcement learning with suboptimal demonstrators. This paper instead investigates the qualitative effects of performing inverse reinforcement learning with a suboptimal demonstrator. The authors modify different parts of the Bellman equation in order to create a suite of possible suboptimal demonstrators to study. They run experiments with exact inference on random MDPs and FrozenLake, and with approximate inference on a simple autonomous driving environment, and conclude: 1. Irrationalities can be helpful for reward inference, that is, if you infer a reward from demonstrations by an irrational demonstrator (where you know the irrationality), you often learn more about the reward than if you inferred a reward from optimal demonstrations (where you know they are optimal). Conceptually, this happens because optimal demonstrations only tell you about what the best behavior is, whereas most kinds of irrationality can also tell you about preferences between suboptimal behaviors. 2. If you fail to model irrationality, your performance can be very bad, that is, if you infer a reward from demonstrations by an irrational demonstrator, but you assume that the demonstrator was Boltzmann rational, you can perform quite badly. Rohin's opinion: One way this paper differs from my intuitions is that it finds that assuming Boltzmann rationality performs very poorly if the demonstrator is in fact systematically suboptimal. I would have instead guessed that Boltzmann rationality would do okay -- not as well as in the case where there is no misspecification, but only a little worse than that. (That's what I found in my paper (AN #59), and it makes intuitive sense to me.) Some hypotheses for what's going on, which the lead author agrees are at least part of the story: 1. When assuming Boltzmann rationality, you infer a distribution over reward functions that is “close” to the correct one in terms of incentivizing the right behavior, but differs in rewards assigned to suboptimal behavior. In this case, you might get a very bad log loss (the metric used in this paper), but still have a reasonable policy that is decent at acquiring true reward (the metric used in my paper). 2. The environments we're using may differ in some important way (for example, in the environment in my paper, it is primarily important to identify the goal, which might be much easier to do than inferring the right behavior or reward in the autonomous driving environment used in this paper). FORECASTING Forecasting progress in language models (Matthew Barnett) (summarized by Sudhanshu): This post aims to forecast when a "human-level language model" may be created. To build up to this, the author swiftly covers basic concepts from information theory and natural language processing such as entropy, N-gram models, modern LMs, and perplexity. Data for perplexity achieved from recent state-of-the-art models is collected and used to estimate - by linear regression - when we can expect to see future models score below certain entropy levels, approaching the hypothesised entropy for the English Language. These predictions range across the next 15 years, depending which dataset, method, and entropy level is being solved for; there's an attached python notebook with these details for curious readers to further investigate. Preemptly disjunctive, the author concludes "either current trends will break down soon, or human-level language models will likely arrive in the next decade or two." Sudhanshu's opinion: This quick read provides a natural, accessible analysis stemming from recent results, while staying self-aware (and informing readers) of potential improvements. The comments section too includes some interesting debates, e.g. about the Goodhart-ability of the Perplexity metric. I personally felt these estimates were broadly in line with my own intuitions. I would go so far as to say that with the confluence of improved generation capabilities across text, speech/audio, video, as well as multimodal consistency and integration, virtually any kind of content we see ~10 years from now will be algorithmically generated and indistinguishable from the work of human professionals. Rohin's opinion: I would generally adopt forecasts produced by this sort of method as my own, perhaps making them a bit longer as I expect the quickly growing compute trend to slow down. Note however that this is a forecast for human-level language models, not transformative AI; I would expect these to be quite different and would predict that transformative AI comes significantly later. MISCELLANEOUS (ALIGNMENT) Rohin Shah on the State of AGI Safety Research in 2021 (Lucas Perry and Rohin Shah) (summarized by Rohin): As in previous years (AN #54), on this FLI podcast I talk about the state of the field. Relative to previous years, this podcast is a bit more introductory, and focuses a bit more on what I find interesting rather than what the field as a whole would consider interesting. Read more: Transcript NEAR-TERM CONCERNS RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS User Tampering in Reinforcement Learning Recommender Systems (Charles Evans et al) (summarized by Zach): Large-scale recommender systems have emerged as a way to filter through large pools of content to identify and recommend content to users. However, these advances have led to social and ethical concerns over the use of recommender systems in applications. This paper focuses on the potential for social manipulability and polarization from the use of RL-based recommender systems. In particular, they present evidence that such recommender systems have an instrumental goal to engage in user tampering by polarizing users early on in an attempt to make later predictions easier. To formalize the problem the authors introduce a causal model. Essentially, they note that predicting user preferences requires an exogenous variable, a non-observable variable, that models click-through rates. They then introduce a notion of instrumental goal that models the general behavior of RL-based algorithms over a set of potential tasks. The authors argue that such algorithms will have an instrumental goal to influence the exogenous/preference variables whenever user opinions are malleable. This ultimately introduces a risk for preference manipulation. The author's hypothesis is tested using a simple media recommendation problem. They model the exogenous variable as either leftist, centrist, or right-wing. User preferences are malleable in the sense that a user shown content from an opposing side will polarize their initial preferences. In experiments, the authors show that a standard Q-learning algorithm will learn to tamper with user preferences which increases polarization in both leftist and right-wing populations. Moreover, even though the agent makes use of tampering it fails to outperform a crude baseline policy that avoids tampering. Zach's opinion: This article is interesting because it formalizes and experimentally demonstrates an intuitive concern many have regarding recommender systems. I also found the formalization of instrumental goals to be of independent interest. The most surprising result was that the agents who exploit tampering are not particularly more effective than policies that avoid tampering. This suggests that the instrumental incentive is not really pointing at what is actually optimal which I found to be an illuminating distinction. NEWS OpenAI hiring Software Engineer, Alignment (summarized by Rohin): Exactly what it sounds like: OpenAI is hiring a software engineer to work with the Alignment team. BERI hiring ML Software Engineer (Sawyer Bernath) (summarized by Rohin): BERI is hiring a remote ML Engineer as part of their collaboration with the Autonomous Learning Lab at UMass Amherst. The goal is to create a software library that enables easy deployment of the ALL's Seldonian algorithm framework for safe and aligned AI. AI Safety Needs Great Engineers (Andy Jones) (summarized by Rohin): If the previous two roles weren't enough to convince you, this post explicitly argues that a lot of AI safety work is bottlenecked on good engineers, and encourages people to apply to such roles. AI Safety Camp Virtual 2022 (summarized by Rohin): Applications are open for this remote research program, where people from various disciplines come together to research an open problem under the mentorship of an established AI-alignment researcher. Deadline to apply is December 1st. Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning schedule (summarized by Rohin): The date for the PERLS workshop (AN #159) at NeurIPS has been set for December 14, and the schedule and speaker list are now available on the website. FEEDBACK I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me, Rohin Shah by replying to this email. PODCAST An audio podcast version of the Alignment Newsletter is available. This podcast is an audio version of the newsletter, recorded by Robert Miles (http://robertskmiles.com). Subscribe here:
When we think of infrastructure, roads and bridges are among the first things that come to mind. But over the past decade, massive investments in warehouse-scale data centers constitute a new kind of infrastructure build up. And that cloud computing infrastructure might be the beginning of a new economic revolution. My guest today is Mark Mills, […]
Santiago Tobón talks about why gangs govern particular areas, and what to do about it. “Gang Rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance” by Christopher Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, Benjamin Lessing, and Santiago Tobón. *** Probable Causation is part of Doleac Initiatives, a 501(c)(3) corporation. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution. Thank you for supporting our work! *** OTHER RESEARCH WE DISCUSS IN THIS EPISODE: “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” by Charles Tilly. “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development” by Mancur Olson. “Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History” by Douglas C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. “The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System” by David Skarbek. “The Political Economy of Organized Crime: Providing Protection When the State Does Not” by Stergios Skaperdas. “Gangs as Primitive States” by Stergios Skaperdas and Constantinos Syropoulos. “Gangs of Medellín: How Organized Crime is Organized” by Christopher Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, Benjamin Lessing, and Santiago Tobón. (Working paper.) “Market Structure and Extortion: Evidence from 50,000 Extortion Payments” by Zach Y. Brown, Eduardo Montero, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi. (Working Paper.) “Gangs, Labor Mobility, and Development: The Role of Extortion in El Salvador” by Nikita Melnikov, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi.
In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Dr. Andrew Waxman to discuss the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "As if Looking Backwards Through a Telescope". Andrew Waxman is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines Environmental and Urban Economics, among other subjects. This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.
In this episode, Prakhar Misra (@PrakharMisra) is back on Puliyabaazi to discuss the political economy of the 1991 reforms. We discussed the dominant economic and political narratives since independence up to the 1991 reform. Prakhar is currently working on the Indian political economy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Prakhar is a part of The 1991 Project that documents essays, data visualizations, oral histories, podcasts, and policy papers demystifying the Indian economy and the 1991 reforms.For more:Puliyabaazi #101 with Shruti RajagopalanThe 1991 Project -- the project portal. Read Prakhar & Shreyas' essay here.The M document -- A paper for internal discussion in government prepared by Montek S Ahluwalia, Special Secretary to the Prime Minister, in May 1990IndiaBefore91.in -- Stories of Life under the License RajArvind Panagariya's book India: The Emerging GiantMontek Singh Ahluwalia's book Backstage: The Story behind India's High Growth YearsJairam Ramesh's book To the Brink and BackPuliyabaazi is on these platforms:Twitter: https://twitter.com/puliyabaaziInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app.
De-extincted woolly mammoths, genetically engineered livestock, and transgenic crops: Are biologists opening a Pandora’s box that will lead to the further destruction of the natural world? In this episode of “Political Economy,” Beth Shapiro joins the podcast to discuss that question, explain the latest discoveries in synthetic biology, and explore the possibility of bio-engineered conservation. Beth is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book is Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature.
De-extincted woolly mammoths, genetically engineered livestock, and transgenic crops: Are biologists opening a Pandora’s box that will lead to the further destruction of the natural world? In this episode of “Political Economy,” Beth Shapiro joins the podcast to discuss that question, explain the latest discoveries in synthetic biology, and explore the possibility of bio-engineered conservation. […]
A panel discussion with Warren Mosler (MMT founder), Achim Truger (German Council of Economic Advisers), Philippa Sigl-Glöckner (Dezernat Zukunft) and Paul Sheard (Harvard Kennedy School) from the 2nd International European Modern Monetary Theory Conference. Recorded September 14, 2021. Please help sustain this podcast! Patrons get early access to all episodes and patron-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/MMTpodcast For an intro to MMT: Listen to our first three episodes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41742417 All our episodes in chronological order: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43111643 Video of this event: https://youtu.be/oz9wU5VWGUQ All our episodes with Warren Mosler: https://www.patreon.com/posts/42918786 Our episode 116 featuring Dirk Ehnts interviewing Warren Mosler: https://www.patreon.com/posts/56979140 An explanation of the NAIRU (Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) and the alternative MMT approach, the NAIBER (non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIBER Maximizing Price Stability in a Monetary Economy by Warren Mosler & Damiano B. Silipo: https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_864.pdf Brexit Is A Wake-Up Call To The EU, But So Far It Is Not Being Answered by Paul Sheard: https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/brexit-is-a-wake-up-call-to-the-eu-but-so-far-it-is-not-being-answered-by-paul-sheard/ Philippa Sigl-Glöckner's Organisation, Dezernat Zukunft: https://www.dezernatzukunft.org/ Our episode 47 with Pavlina Tcherneva explaining the Job Guarantee: https://www.patreon.com/posts/36034543 A list of MMT-informed campaigns and organisations worldwide: https://www.patreon.com/posts/47900757 We are working towards full transcripts, but in the meantime, closed captions for all episodes are available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEp_nGVTuMfBun2wiG-c0Ew/videos Show notes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/58778703
Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that gave the vendors who sold in them an influence far beyond the running of their stalls. As they fed the capital's population and fought to protect their own livelihoods, vendors' daily interactions with customers, suppliers and local government shaped the city's public sphere and expanded the scope of popular politics. Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City (Stanford University Press, 2021) argues for the centrality of Mexico City's public markets to the political economy of the city from the restoration of the Republic in 1867 to the heyday of the so-called "Mexican miracle" and the PRI in the 1960s. As the sites of vendors' dealings with workers, suppliers, government officials, and politicians, the multiple conflicts that beset them repeatedly tested the institutional capacity of the state. Through a close reading of the archives and an analysis of vendors' intersecting economic and political lives, Ingrid Bleynat considers the dynamics, as well as the limits, of capitalist development in Mexico. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that gave the vendors who sold in them an influence far beyond the running of their stalls. As they fed the capital's population and fought to protect their own livelihoods, vendors' daily interactions with customers, suppliers and local government shaped the city's public sphere and expanded the scope of popular politics. Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City (Stanford University Press, 2021) argues for the centrality of Mexico City's public markets to the political economy of the city from the restoration of the Republic in 1867 to the heyday of the so-called "Mexican miracle" and the PRI in the 1960s. As the sites of vendors' dealings with workers, suppliers, government officials, and politicians, the multiple conflicts that beset them repeatedly tested the institutional capacity of the state. Through a close reading of the archives and an analysis of vendors' intersecting economic and political lives, Ingrid Bleynat considers the dynamics, as well as the limits, of capitalist development in Mexico. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that gave the vendors who sold in them an influence far beyond the running of their stalls. As they fed the capital's population and fought to protect their own livelihoods, vendors' daily interactions with customers, suppliers and local government shaped the city's public sphere and expanded the scope of popular politics. Vendors' Capitalism: A Political Economy of Public Markets in Mexico City (Stanford University Press, 2021) argues for the centrality of Mexico City's public markets to the political economy of the city from the restoration of the Republic in 1867 to the heyday of the so-called "Mexican miracle" and the PRI in the 1960s. As the sites of vendors' dealings with workers, suppliers, government officials, and politicians, the multiple conflicts that beset them repeatedly tested the institutional capacity of the state. Through a close reading of the archives and an analysis of vendors' intersecting economic and political lives, Ingrid Bleynat considers the dynamics, as well as the limits, of capitalist development in Mexico. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies
On the heels of a summer of billionaire space flights and William Shatner’s recent rocket trip, some Americans are echoing old arguments about the wastefulness of space exploration. Alongside this controversy, massive declines in launch costs and a burgeoning space economy have renewed interest in manned missions to the Moon and Mars. In today’s episode of “Political Economy,” John Logsdon discusses NASA’s history since the Moon landing, billionaires in space, and the path forward for continued exploration. John is the founder and Professor Emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of several books on the space program, including, most recently, Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier.
On the heels of a summer of billionaire space flights and William Shatner’s recent rocket trip, some Americans are echoing old arguments about the wastefulness of space exploration. Alongside this controversy, massive declines in launch costs and a burgeoning space economy have renewed interest in manned missions to the Moon and Mars. In today’s episode of “Political […]
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge, 2021), edited by Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, offers the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of key issues in Central Asian Studies. The 30 chapters by leading and emerging scholars summarise major findings in the field and highlight long-term trends, recent observations, and future developments in the region. The handbook features case studies of all five Central Asian republics and is organised thematically in seven sections: History, Politics, Geography, International Relations. Political Economy, Society and Culture, Religion. An essential cross-disciplinary reference work, the handbook offers an accessible and easy to understand guide to the core issues permeating the region to enable readers to grasp the fundamental challenges, transformations and themes in contemporary Central Asia. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students of the region and those working in the field of Area Studies, History, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations. Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In this episode, Prof. Scott Gehlbach of the University of Chicago speaks to Nicolas Wittstock about Chicago's new PhD program in Political Economy.
Olivia Enos interviews Victor Shih, Ph.D., on the UCSD 21st Century China Center China Data Lab’s CCP Elites portal. Dr. Shih is an Associate Professor of Political Economy and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the UC San Diego. Click here to view more of the China Data Lab’s research […]
Olivia Enos interviews Victor Shih, Ph.D., on the UCSD 21st Century China Center China Data Lab's CCP Elites portal. Dr. Shih is an Associate Professor of Political Economy and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the UC San Diego. Click here to view more of the China Data Lab's research and projects.Click here to read Heritage Visiting Fellow Michael Cunningham's commentary on China's new rules that aim to strengthen the government's ideological oversight of the entertainment sector. Keep an eye out for Michael's commentary on the CCP's 6th Plenum!Check out The Heritage Foundation's annual China Transparency Report, highlighting the work of experts all across the world who are dedicated to helping us better understand the aims and activities of the CCP, as well as the China Transparency Project website. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Dr. Nelson Lichtenstein to discuss the history of work and labor organization in the United States. Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled "Soon to be But Not Yet" Nelson Lichtenstein is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, which he founded in 2004 to train a new generation of labor intellectuals. A historian of labor, political economy, and ideology, he is the author or editor of 16 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. His most recent books are Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy (2016); The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left's Founding Manifesto (2015); The ILO From Geneva to the Pacific Rim (2015); A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor (2013); The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012); The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009); and American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006). Lichtenstein is currently writing a history of economic thought and policymaking in the administration of Bill Clinton. With Gary Gerstle and Alice O'Connor he has edited Beyond the New Deal Order: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession. He writes for Dissent, Jacobin, New Labor Forum, and American Prospect. Lichtenstein recently published an article in Dissent: "Is This A Strike Wave," (October 25, 2021). This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Karoline Pfeil and Morgan Honaker.
World’s Fairs hosted in American cities, like Chicago in 1893 and New York in 1964, are remembered as odes to progress. The United States showcased its prowess on the world’s stage and exhibitions awed visitors with the latest technological marvels. But America hasn’t hosted a World’s Fair in nearly 40 years. In this episode, Charles Pappas […]
The shortage of HGV drivers has been hitting the headlines, but other sectors are affected by a lack of staff too, from care homes to restaurants. This despite wages going up, and the end of the furlough scheme. What's going on? Could it be that power is shifting away from employers to workers, for perhaps the first time since the 1970s? Since the 2008 financial crisis public opinion has increasingly been unfavourable towards globalisation, immigration and big corporations. This has been reflected in a shift away from an assumed pro-business stance among the mainstream political parties too. Philip Coggan speaks to a range of experts to find out what's been happening, whether workers really will gain more power, and what that might mean for the economy. Guests: Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick Dame DeAnne Julius, Distinguished Fellow for Global Economy and Finance, Chatham House Kate Bell, Head of Rights, International, Social and Economics at the Trades Union Congress Rob Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Policy at King's College, London Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality Shereen Hussein, Professor of Health and Social Care Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Gerwyn Davies, Public Policy Adviser and Senior Market Analyst at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development Producer: Arlene Gregorius Sound: Gareth Jones
On this episode of Live with Littlewood, IEA Director General Mark Littlewood was joined by: Mike Graham - Presenter, TalkRadio Dehenna Davison - Member of Parliament, Bishop Auckland Kristian Niemietz - Head of Political Economy, IEA Eamonn Ives - Head of Energy and Environment, Centre for Policy Studies They discussed: 1.Budget 2021: Is this government addicted to splashing taxpayer cash? 2. The Great British Rake-Off: Are the public finances in a more parlous state than we thought? 3. COPping out: Without China or Russia, is it time to reset our expectations for COP26? Support the IEA on Patreon, where we give you the opportunity to directly help us continue producing stimulating and educational online content, whilst subscribing to exclusive IEA perks, benefits and priority access to our content https://patreon.com/iealondon FOLLOW US: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/iealondon INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ieauk/ FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/ieauk WEBSITE - https://iea.org.uk/
Counter-University Classroom - Class 7: Cronyism and the Administrative StateIn this episode... A panel from our 2021 Future of American Political Economy Conference on Cronyism and the Administrative State. This panel was moderated by Richard Reinsch and features Julius Krein, Julia Norgaard, Josh Hammer, and Don Devine. This conference brought together thinkers from many perspectives on the right to debate the future of Political Economy in America. Links: The Future of American Political Economy on YouTubeBecome a part of ISI:Download the ISI App for AppleDownload the ISI App for AndroidBecome a MemberSupport ISIUpcoming ISI Events
We start with more news from Maine: There's lithium in them thar hills! Will Elon Musk coup the governor? Stay tuned, and find out more here. We ask whether it's possible to extract these important minerals outside the demands of capital and profit, and to do it in a way that doesn't wreck the environment or the bodies of the people who will have to do this labor. We have no answers, just want to know! Then, back to 2312. We talk a lot about the political economies of the various powers in the solar system, as the various plotlines and threads seem to start coming together and getting clearer in this chunk of chapters. How does the gift economy of the Vulcanoids and the Saturn League work? Why does the mute compulsion of economic relations still obtain on Venus? What is to be done with Earth? What's the difference between charity and a gift economy? Is charity always aggressive? What kind of revolution are Swan and Wahram driving at? We'll find out next time! Swan in the Vulcanoids – 35:00 Lists (11) – 54:10 Wahram on Venus - 55:07 Extracts (13) – 1:09:10 Kiran in Vinmara – 1:10:35 Extracts (14) – 1:15:50 Here's a recent Jacobin piece on the hierarchy of needs, and here's the text Hilary mentions at the beginning, A World Without Money: Communism. Thanks for listening! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail on the Anchor.fm app Rate and review us on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars/message
The Biden administration is pushing forward its legislative agenda with the Build Back Better program, and Democrats have a number of tax proposals to pay for it. Looking to the largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans, congressional Democrats are constrained by President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. But […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted supply chains and disrupted the US economy. Production levels are back on track, but the labor force participation rate has remained stagnant since the summer of 2020. And millions of Americans are quitting their jobs in a labor market that was already facing a shortage of workers. What’s going on with this “Great Resignation”? And should we brace ourselves for continued inflation as supply line problems drag on and Congress pumps trillions into the economy? To answer those questions and more, I’m joined today by Michael Strain. Mike is the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy and the Director of Economic Policy Studies at AEI.
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted supply chains and disrupted the US economy. Production levels are back on track, but the labor force participation rate has remained stagnant since the summer of 2020. And millions of Americans are quitting their jobs in a labor market that was already facing a shortage of workers. What’s going on […]
Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlights that a global elite benefit from marketised global justice whilst those who tend to be the 'faces' of global injustice - particularly victims of conflict - are instrumentalised and ultimately commodified. The book is an invitation to critically consider the predominance of market values in global justice, suggesting an 'occupying' of global justice as an avenue for drawing out social values. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science
Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlights that a global elite benefit from marketised global justice whilst those who tend to be the 'faces' of global injustice - particularly victims of conflict - are instrumentalised and ultimately commodified. The book is an invitation to critically consider the predominance of market values in global justice, suggesting an 'occupying' of global justice as an avenue for drawing out social values. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlights that a global elite benefit from marketised global justice whilst those who tend to be the 'faces' of global injustice - particularly victims of conflict - are instrumentalised and ultimately commodified. The book is an invitation to critically consider the predominance of market values in global justice, suggesting an 'occupying' of global justice as an avenue for drawing out social values. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlights that a global elite benefit from marketised global justice whilst those who tend to be the 'faces' of global injustice - particularly victims of conflict - are instrumentalised and ultimately commodified. The book is an invitation to critically consider the predominance of market values in global justice, suggesting an 'occupying' of global justice as an avenue for drawing out social values. Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
In this episode, Prof. Tony Gill of the University of Washington speaks to Nicolas Wittstock about gifting. While some have suggested that gifting is economically inefficient - Prof. Gill argues that this view misses the important social functions that rituals like gifting play. In fact, Prof. Gill argues that these social rituals have important economic implications as well.
Timothée Parrique joins us for a record third appearance on The Steady Stater! Following previous discussions exploring the social limits to growth and the European degrowth movement, Tim and Brian discuss the final part of his dissertation "The Political Economy of Degrowth,” which focuses on policy design. That includes property, work, money and more: don't miss it!
Last week, the IEA released a new book authored by Dr Jamie Whyte, former Research Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs. In his book, Why Free Speech Matters, Jamie issued a rally cry, saying that those who prize free speech must once again defend it. In this week's podcast, IEA Communications & Marketing Assistant Kieran Neild-Ali was joined by Jamie in the IEA studio to discuss his work. He was also joined by Dr Kristian Niemietz, Head of Political Economy at the IEA, who himself is interested in cultural issues related to freedom of speech. Read the full book here. Support the IEA on Patreon, where we give you the opportunity to directly help us continue producing stimulating and educational online content, whilst subscribing to exclusive IEA perks, benefits and priority access to our content https://www.patreon.com/iealondon FOLLOW US: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/iealondon INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ieauk/ FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/ieauk WEBSITE - https://iea.org.uk/
According to the US Department of Labor, there were a near-record 10.4 million job openings in August. Costs are spiking, supply chains are broken, and Congress wants to spend more money to fix the problem. AEI scholar Michael Strain joined the show to discuss what is keeping people out of the workforce, the effects of enhanced unemployment benefits on the economy's supply and demand, and the future of the American economy. Michael Strain is the Director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at AEI. Before joining AEI, he worked in the Center for Economic Studies at the US Census Bureau. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/FINAL-Transcript-WTH-Ep.-122-Strain-10.21.21-1.pdf?x91208 (Download the transcript here. )
''Rule of law'' is the generally accepted description for how well a political system conforms to formal rules - rather than functioning through the whims of the most powerful social or political agents. For a society to be described as one functioning under rule of law - there must be rules and those rules must be equally applied to everyone in the society. Let us call this Letter of the Law. These rules are usually expressed through the constitution of a country and enforced through the courts. But simply having rules and enforcing them does not suffice in the making of the rule of law - and it is an incomplete (however accurate) conception of it. Some rules can be drafted in bad faith or with the express purpose of protecting the interest of the political elites responsible for governance. This is why many scholars have argued that the rule of law can only be said to exist in a state that functions under rules designed to protect the civil liberties (individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc.) of the people living within its territory. Let us call this the Character or Spirit of the Law. The character of the law understood as the fulfilment of constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties is the most common standard by which governance is judged to conform or deviate from the rule of law. For example, countries that routinely violate the rights of citizens in whatever form cannot be said to be governed by the rule of law, even if it has a written constitution. Consideration of the character of the law is the context to understanding the work of my guest on this episode, Paul Gowder.He is a professor of law at NorthWestern university with a broad research interest and expertise. Paul departs from this common derivation of the character of the law as rooted in liberty - and argued that for the rule of law to be broadly applicable in different societies (not dependent on the political institutions and ethical ideals of any specific society) with varying cultures and traditions of governance, it must be rooted in Equality. To understand Paul's argument, I will briefly state two important aspects that set the tone for our conversation - this should not be taken as an exhaustive summary of his work and I encourage you to check out his website and book. The first is that the rule of law as a principle regulates the actions of the state (government), and it is not to be conflated with other rules that regulate the actions of citizens. This is such an important point because one of the most egregious expressions of the law is when a government uses it to oppress citizens. Secondly, Paul outlines three components of the rule of law based on equality as 1) regularity - the government can only use coercion when it is acting in ''good faith'' and under ''reasonable interpretation'' of rules that already exist and are specific to the circumstances. 2) publicity - the law has to be accessible to everyone without barriers (''officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, ...failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public"). 3) generality - the law must be equally applicable to all. Putting all these elements together gives us a rule of law regime where everyone is equal before the law, and the state does not wantonly abuse citizens or single out particular groups for systematic abuse.I enjoyed this conversation very much, and I want to thank Paul for talking to me. Thank you guys too for always listening, and for the other ways you support this project.TRANSCRIPTTobi; I greatly enjoyed your work on the rule of law. I've read your papers, I've read your book, and I like it very much. I think it's a great public service if I can say that because for a lot of time, I am interested in economic development and that is mostly the issue that this podcast talks about. And what you see in that particular conversation is there hasn't really been that much compatibility between the question of the rule of law or the laws that should regulate the actions of the state, and its strategy for economic development. Most of the time, you often see even some justification, I should say, to trample on rights in as much as you get development, you get high-income growth for it. And what I found in your work is, this does not have to be so. So what was your eureka moment in coming up with your concept, we are going to unpack a lot of the details very soon, but what motivated you to write this work or to embark on this project?Paul; Yeah, I think for me, part of the issue that really drives a lot of how I think about the rule of law and you know, reasons behind some of this work is really a difference between the way that those of us who think about human freedom and human equality, right? I think of it as philosophers, right. So they're philosophers and philosophers think about the ability of people to live autonomous lives, to sort of stand tall against their government, to live lives of respect, and freedom and equality. And that's one conversation. And so we see people, like, you know, Ronald Dworkin, thinking about what the rule of law can deliver to human beings in that sense. And then, you know, there's this entire development community, you know, the World Bank, lots of the US foreign policy, all of the rest of those groups of people and groups of ideas, talk about the rule of law a lot and work to measure the rule of law and invest immense amounts of money in promoting what they call the rule of law across the world. But mostly, it seems to be protecting property rights for multinational investment. And I mean, that makes some kind of sense, if you think that what the rule of law is for is economic development, is increasing the GDP of a country and integrating it into favourable international networks of trade. But if you think that it's about human flourishing, then you get a completely different idea of what the rule of law can be, and should be. And so this sort of really striking disjuncture between the two conversations has driven a lot of my work, especially recently, and especially reflecting even on the United States, I think that we can see how domestic rule of law struggles - which we absolutely have, I mean, look at the Trump administration, frankly, as revolving around this conflict between focusing on economics and focusing on human rights and human wellbeing.Tobi; It's interesting the polarization you're talking about. And one way that I also see it play out is [that] analyst or other stakeholders who participate in the process of nation-building in Africa, in Nigeria… a lot of us that care about development and would like to see our countries grow and develop and become rich, are often at opposite ends with other people in the civil society who are advocating for human rights, who are advocating for gender equality, who are advocating for so many other social justice issues. And it always seems like there's no meeting ground, you know, between those set of views, and I believe it does not have to be so. So one thing I'm going to draw you into quite early is one of the distinctions you made in so many of your papers and even your book is the difference between the conception of the rule of law that you are proposing versus the generally accepted notion of the rule of law based on individual liberty in the classical liberal tradition. I also think that's part of the problem, because talking about individual liberty comes with this heavy ideological connotation, and giving so many things that have happened in Africa with colonialism and so many other things, nobody wants any of that, you know. So you are proposing a conception of the rule of law that is based on equality. Tell me, how does that contrast with this popularly accepted notion of the rule of law [which is] based on individual liberty?Paul; So I think the way to think about it is to start with the notion of the long term stability of a rule of law system. And so here is one thing that I propose as a fact about legal orders. Ultimately, any kind of stable legal order that can control the powerful, that is, that can say to a top-level political leader, or a powerful multinational corporation, or whomever, no, you can't do this, this violates the law and make that statement stick depends on widespread collective mobilization, if only as a threat, right. And so it's kind of an analytic proposition about the nature of power, right? If you've got a top-level political leader who's in command of an army, and they want to do something illegal, it's going to require very broad-based opposition, and hence very broad-based commitment to the idea of leaders that follow the law in order to prevent the person in charge of an army from just casually violating it whenever they want. Okay, accept that as true, what follows from that? Well, what follows from that is that the legal system has to actually be compatible with the basic interests of all. And what that tends to mean and I think this is true, both historically, and theoretically, is leaving aside the philosophical conceptual difference between liberty and equality, which I'm not sure is really all that important. Like I think, ultimately, liberty and equality as moral ideas tend to blur together when you really unpack them. But practically speaking, any stable legal order that can control the powerful has to be compatible with the interests of a broad-based group of the human beings who participate in that legal order. And what that entails is favouring a way of thinking about the rule of law that focuses on being able to recruit the interests of even the worst off. In other words, one that's focused on equality, one that's focused on protecting the interests of the less powerful rather than a laissez-faire libertarian conception of the rule of law that tends to be historically speaking, compatible with substantial amounts of economic inequality, hyper-focus on ideas - like property rights, that support the long-standing interests of those who happen to be at the top of the economy, often against the interests of those that happened to be at the bottom of the economy, right. That's simply not a legal order that is sustainable in the long run. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the way that this has played out in [the] United States history, in particular. I might have a book that's coming out in December that focuses on a historical account of the development of the rule of law, particularly in the United States. I mean, it's my own country. And so at some point, I had to get talked into writing that book. And we can see that in our history right at the get-go, you know, in the United States, at the very beginning, the rule of law dialogue tended to be focused on protecting the interests of wealthy elite property holders. And this actually played a major part, for example, in the United States' most grievous struggle, namely the struggle over slavery, because slaveholders really relied on this conception of the Rule of Law focusing on individual freedom and property rights to insist on a right to keep holding slaves against the more egalitarian idea that “hey, wait a minute, the enslaved have a right to be participants in the legal system as well.” And so we can see these two different conceptions of legality breaking the United States and breaking the idea of legal order in the United States right at the get-go. And we see this in country after country after country. You know, another example is Pinochet's Chile, which was the victim of [the] United States' economics focused rule of law promotion efforts that favoured the interests of property holders under this libertarian conception over the interests of ordinary citizens, democracy and mass interests. In other words, over the egalitarian conception, and again, you know, devolved into authoritarianism and chaos.Tobi; Yeah, nice bit of history there, but dialling all the way, if you'll indulge me... dialling all the way to the present, or maybe the recent past, of course; where I see another relevance and tension is development, and its geopolitical significance and the modernization projects that a lot of developed countries have done in so many poor and violent nations, you know, around the world. I mean, at the time when Africa decolonized, you know, a lot of the countries gravitated towards the communist bloc, socialism [and] that process was shunted, failed, you know, there was a wave of military coups all over the continent, and it was a really dark period.But what you see is that a lot of these countries, Nigeria, for example, democratized in 1999, a lot of other countries either before then or after followed suit. And what you see is, almost all of them go for American-style federal system, and American-style constitutional democracy, you know. And how that tradition evolved... I mean, there's a lot you can explain and unpack here... how that tradition evolved, we are told is the law has a responsibility to treat people as individuals. But you also find that these are societies where group identities are very, very strong, you know, and what you get are constitutions that are weakly enforced, impractical, and a society that is perpetually in struggle. I mean, you have a constitution, you have rules, and you have a government that openly disregards them, because the constitutional tradition is so divorced from how a lot of our societies evolve. And what I see you doing in your work is that if we divorce the rule of law from the ideal society, you know [like] some societies that we look up to, then we can come up with a set of practical propositions that the rule of law should fulfil, so walk me through how you resolve these tensions and your propositions?Paul; Well, so it's exactly what you just said, right? I mean, we have to focus on actual existing societies and the actual way that people organize their lives, right. And so here's the issue is, just like I said a minute ago, the rule of law fundamentally depends on people. And when I say people, I don't just mean elites. I don't just mean the wealthy, I don't just mean the people in charge of armies, and the people in charge of courthouses, right? Like the rule of law depends, number one, on people acting collectively to hold the powerful to the law. And number two, on people using the institutions that we say are associated with the rule of law. And so just as you describe, one sort of really common failure condition for international rule of law development efforts - and I don't think that this is a matter of sort of recipient countries admiring countries like the US, I think this is a matter of international organizations and countries like the US having in their heads a model of what the law looks like and sort of pressing it on recipient countries.But you know, when you build institutions that don't really resemble how the people in a country actually organize their social, political and legal lives, you shouldn't be surprised when nobody uses them. You shouldn't be surprised when they're ineffective. But I mean, I think that it's been fairly compared to a kind of second-generation colonialism in that sense where countries like the US and like Germany, attempt to export their legal institutions to other countries, without attending to the ways that the people in those countries already have social and legal resources to run their lives. And so I'll give you an example that's interesting from Afghanistan. So in Afghanistan, sort of post the 2000s invasion, and so forth, some researchers, mostly affiliated with the Carnegie Institution, found that the really effective rule of law innovations, the really effective interventions were ones that relied on existing social groups and existing structures of traditional authority. And so, you know, you could build a courthouse and like, ask a formal centralized state to do something, maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, maybe people would use it, maybe they wouldn't. But if you took local community leaders, local religious leaders, gave them training, and how to use the social capital they already have to help do things like adjudicate disputes, well, those would actually be effective, because they fit into the existing social organization that already exists. So I'll give you another example. I have a student who... I had… I just graduated an S.J.D student from Uganda who wrote a dissertation on corruption in Uganda. And one of the things that he advocated for I think, really sensibly was, “ okay, we've got this centralized government, but we've also got all of these traditional kingdoms, and the traditional kingdoms, they're actually a lot more legitimate in the sociological sense than the centralized government.People trust the traditional kingdoms, people rely on the traditional kingdoms for services, for integrating themselves into their society. And so one useful way of thinking about anti-corruption reforms is to try and empower the traditional kingdoms that already have legitimacy so that they can check the centralized government. And so that kind of work, I think, is where we have real potential to do global rule of law development without just creating carbon copies of the United States. Tobi; The process you describe, I will say, as promising as it may sound, what I want to ask you is how then do you ensure that a lot of these traditional institutions that can be empowered to provide reasonable checks to the power of the central government also fulfil the conditions of equality in their relation to the general public? Because even historically, a lot of these institutions are quite hierarchical...Paul; Oh, yeah... and I think in particular, women's rights are a big problem.Tobi; Yeah, yeah and there's a lot of abuses that go on locally, even within those communities, you know. We have traditional monarchies who exercise blanket rights over land ownership, over people's wives, over so many things, you know, so how then does this condition of equality transmit across the system?Paul; Yeah, no, I think that's the really hard question. I tell you right now that part of the answer is that those are not end-state processes. By this I mean that any realistic conception of how we can actually build effective rule of law institutions, but also genuinely incorporate everyone's interests in a society is going to accept that there's going to be a kind of dynamic tension between institutions.You know, sometimes we're going to have to use the centralized state to check traditional institutions. Sometimes we're going to have to use traditional institutions to check the centralized state. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize-winning political scientist and her sort of the Bloomington School of Political Economy, emphasized for many years this idea that they called Polycentrism. That is the idea that multiple, overlapping governance organizations that are sort of forced to negotiate with one another, and forced to learn from one another, and really integrate with one another in this sort of complex tension-filled kind of way, actually turns out to be a really effective method of achieving what we might call good governance. And part of the reason is because they give a lot of different people, in different levels of [the] organization, ways to challenge one another, ways to demand inclusion in this decision, and let somebody else handle that decision, and participate jointly in this other decision. And so I think that neither the centralized state alone, nor traditional institutions alone is going to be able to achieve these goals. But I think efforts to integrate them have some promise. And India has done a lot of work, you know, sort of mixed record of success, perhaps, but has done a lot of work in these lines. I think, for example, of many of the ways that India has tried to promote the growth of Panchayats, of local councils in decision making, including in law enforcement, but at the same time, has tried to do things like promote an even mandate, the inclusion of women, the inclusion of Scheduled Castes, you know, the inclusion of the traditionally subordinated in these decision making processes. And as I said, they haven't had complete success. But it's an example of a way that the centralized state can both support traditional institutions while pushing those institutions to be more egalitarian.Tobi; Let's delve into the three conditions that you identified in your work, which any rule of law state should fulfil. And that is regularity, publicity, and generality. Kindly unpack those three for me.Paul; Absolutely. So regularity is...we can think of it as just the basic rule of law idea, right? Like the government obeys the law. And so if you think about this notion of regularity, it's... do we have a situation where the powerful are actually bound by legal rules? Or do we have a situation where, you know, they just do whatever they want? And so I'd say that, you know, there's no state that even counts as a rule of law state in the basic level without satisfying that condition, at least to some reasonable degree. The idea of publicity really draws on a lot of what I've already been saying about the recruitment of broad participation in the law. That is, when I say publicity, what I mean is that in addition to just officials being bound by the law, ordinary people have to be able to make use of the law in at least two senses. One, they have to be able to make use of the law to defend themselves. I call this the individualistic side of publicity, right? Like if some police officer wants to lock you up, the decision on whether or not you violated the law has to respond to your advocacy, and your ability to defend yourself in some sense. And then there's also the collective side of this idea of publicity, which is that the community as a whole has to be able to collectively enforce the boundaries of the legal system. And you know, we'd talk a lot more about that, I think that's really the most important idea. And then the third idea of generality is really the heart of the egalitarian idea that we've been talking about, which is that the law has to actually treat people as equals. And one thing that I think is really important about the way that I think about these three principles is that they're actually really tightly integrated. By tightly integrated, I mean you're only going to get in real-world states, regularity (that is, officials bound by the law) if you have publicity (that is, if you have people who aren't officials who actually can participate in the legal system and can hold officials to the law). We need the people to hold the officials in line. You're only going to get publicity if you have generality. That is, the people are only going to be motivated to use the legal system and to defend the legal system if the legal system actually treats them as equals. And so you really need publicity to have stable regularity, you really need generality to have stable publicity.Tobi; Speaking of regularity, when you say what constrains the coercive power of the state is when it is authorised by good faith and reasonable interpretation of pre-existing reasonably specific rules. That sounds very specific. And it's also Scalonian in a way, but a lot of people might quibble a bit about what is reasonable, you know, it sounds vague, right? So how would you condition or define reasonable in this sense, and I know you talked about hubris when you were talking about publicity. But is there a minimum level of responsibility for reasonability on the part of the citizen in relation to a state?Paul; That's, in a lot of ways, the really hard philosophical question, because one of the things that we know about law is that it is inherently filled with disagreement, right? Like our experience of the legal system and of every state that actually has something like the rule of law is that people radically disagree about the legal propriety of actions of the government. And so in some sense, this idea of reasonableness is kind of a cop-out. But it's a cop-out that is absolutely necessary, because there's no, you know, what [Thomas] Nagel called a view from nowhere. There's no view from nowhere from which we can evaluate whether or not on a day to day basis, officials are actually complying with the law in some kind of correct sense. But again, I think, you know, as you said, to some extent, that implies that some of the responsibility for evaluating this reasonableness criterion falls down to day to day politics, falls down to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Like, my conception of the rule of law is kind of sneakily a deeply democratic conception, because it recognizes given the existence of uncertainty as to what the law actually requires of officials both on a case by case basis. And, broadly speaking, the only way that we're ever going to be able to say, Well, you know, officials are more or less operating within a reasonable conception of what their legal responsibilities are, is if we empower the public at large to make these judgments. If we have institutions like here in the US, our jury trials, if we have an underlying backstop of civil society and politics, that is actively scrutinizing and questioning official action.Tobi; So speaking of publicity, which is my favorite...I have to say...Paul; Mine too. You could probably tell. Tobi; Because I think that therein lies the power of the state to get away with abusive use of its legitimacy, or its power, so to speak. When you say that officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, and a failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public. So those two situations - hubris and terror, can you explain those to me a bit?Paul; Yeah. So these are really, sort of, moral philosophy ideas at heart, particularly hubris. The idea is there's a big difference, even if I have authority over you, between my exercising that authority in the form of commands and my exercising that authority in the form of a conversation that appeals to your reasoning capacity, right. So these days, I'm thinking about it in part with reference to... I'm going to go very philosophical with you here... but in reference to Kant's humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, sorry. But that is a sense in which if I'm making decisions about your conduct, and your life and, you know, affecting your fundamental interests, that when I express the reasons to you for those decisions, and when I genuinely listen to the reasons that you offer, and genuinely take those into account in my decision making process, I'm showing a kind of respect for you, which is consistent with the idea of a society of equals.As opposed to just hi, I'm wiser than you, and so my decision is, you know, you go this way, you violated the law, right? Are we a military commander? Or are we a judge? Both the military commander and the judge exercise authority, but they do so in very different ways. One is hierarchical, the other I would contend is not.Tobi; Still talking about publicity here, and why I love it so much is one important, should I say… a distinction you made quite early in your book is that the rule of law regulates the action of the state, in relation to its citizens.Paul; Yes.Tobi; Often and I would count myself among people who have been confused by that point as saying that the rule of law regulates the action of the society in general. I have never thought to make that distinction. And it's important because often you see that maybe when dealing with civil disobedience, or some kind of action that the government finds disruptive to its interests, or its preferences, the rule of law is often invoked as a way for governments to use sometimes without discretion, its enforcement powers, you know.So please explain further this distinction between the rule of law regulating the state-citizen relation versus the general law and order in the society. I mean, you get this from Trump, you get this from so many other people who say, Oh, we are a law and order society, I'm a rule of law candidate.Paul; Oh, yeah.Tobi; You cannot do this, you cannot do that. We cannot encourage the breakdown of law and order in the society. So, explain this difference to me.Paul; Absolutely, then this is probably the most controversial part of my account of the rule of law. I think everybody disagrees with this. I sort of want to start by talking about how I got to this view. And I think I really got to this view by reflecting on the civil rights movement in the United States in particular, right. Because, you know, what we would so often see, just as you say about all of these other contexts, is we would see officials, we would see judges - I mean, there are, you know, Supreme Court cases where supreme court justices that are normally relatively liberal and sympathetic, like, you know, Justice Hugo Black scolding Martin Luther King for engaging in civil disobedience on the idea that it threatens the rule of law. It turns out, and this is something that I go into in the book that's coming out in December... it turns out that King actually had a sophisticated theory of when it was appropriate to engage in civil disobedience and when it wasn't. But for me, reflecting on that conflict in particular, and reflecting on the fact that the same people who were scolding peaceful lunch-counter-sit-ins for threatening the rule of law and, you know, causing society to descend into chaos and undermining property rights and all the rest of that nonsense, were also standing by and watching as southern governors sent police in to beat and gas and fire hose and set dogs on peaceful protests in this sort of completely new set of like, totally unbounded explosions of state violence. And so it seems to me sort of intuitively, like these can't be the same problem, right, like ordinary citizens, doing sit-ins, even if they're illegal, even if we might have some reason to criticize them, it can't be the same reason that we have to criticize Bull Connor for having the cops beat people. And part of the reason that that's the case, and this is what I call the Hobbesian property in the introduction to the rule of law in the real world...part of the reason is just the reality of what states are, right? Like, protesters don't have tanks and police dogs, and fire hoses, right? Protesters typically don't have armies. If they do, then we're in a civil war situation, not a rule of law situation, the state does have all of those things. And so one of the features of the state that makes it the most appropriate site for this talk about the rule of law is this the state has, I mean, most modern states have, at least on a case by case basis, overwhelming power. And so we have distinct moral reasons to control overwhelming power than we do to control a little bit of legal disobedience, right, like overwhelming power is overwhelming. It's something that has a different moral importance for its control. Then the second idea is at the same time what I call the [...] property... is the state makes claims about its use of power, right? Like ordinary people, when they obey the law or violate the law, they don't necessarily do so with reference to a set of ideas that they're propagating about their relationship to other people. Whereas when modern states send troops in to beat people up, in a way what they're doing is they're saying that they're doing so in all of our names, right, particularly, but not exclusively in democratic governments. There's a way in which the state represents itself as acting on behalf of the political community at large. And so it makes sense to have a distinctive normative principle to regulate that kind of power.Tobi; I know you sort of sidestepped this in the book, and maybe it doesn't really fit with your overall argument. But I'm going to push you on that topic a bit. So how does the rule of law state as a matter of institutional design then handles... I know you said that there are separate principles that can be developed for guiding citizen actions, you know...Paul; Yes. Tobi; I mean, let's be clear that you are not saying that people are free to act however they want.Paul; I'm not advocating anarchy.Tobi; Exactly. So how does the rule of law state then handle citizens disagreements or conflicting interests around issues of social order? And I'll give you an example. I mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation what happened in Nigeria in October 2020. There's a unit of the police force that was created to handle violent crimes. Needless to say that they went way beyond their remit and became a very notoriously abusive unit of the police force. Picking up people randomly, lock them up, extort them for money. And there was a situation where a young man was murdered, and his car stolen by this same unit of the police force and young people all over the country, from Lagos to Port Harcourt to Abuja, everywhere, felt we've had enough, right, and everybody came out in protest. It was very, very peaceful, I'd say, until other interests, you know, infiltrated that action. Paul; Right. Tobi; But what I noticed quite early in that process was that even within the spirits of that protests, there were disagreements between citizens - protesters blocking roads, you know, versus people who feel well, your protest should not stop me from going to work, you know, and so many other actions by the protesters that other people with, maybe not conflicting interests, but who have other opinions about strategy or process feel well, this is not right. This is not how to do this. This is not how you do this, you know, and I see that that sort of provided the loophole, I should say, for the government to then move in and take a ruthlessly violent action. You know, there was a popular tollgate in Lagos in the richest neighbourhood in Lagos that was blocked for 10 days by the protesters. And I mean, after this, the army basically moved in and shot people to death. Today, you still see people who would say, Oh, well, that's tragic. But should these people have been blocking other people from going about their daily business? So how does the rule of law regulate issues of social order vis-a-vis conflict of interest?Paul; So I think this is actually a point in favour of my stark distinction between state action and social action as appropriate for thinking about the rule of law. Because when you say that the state used...what I still fundamentally think of as like minor civil disobedience...so, like blocking some roads, big deal! Protesters block roads all the time, right, like protesters have blocked roads throughout human history, you know, like, sometimes it goes big, right? Like they love blocking roads in the French Revolution. But oftentimes, it's just blocking... so I blocked roads.I participated in, you know, some protests in the early 2000s. I participated in blocking roads in DC, right, like, fundamentally "big deal!" is the answer that the state ought to give. And so by saying to each other and to the government, when we talk about the rule of law, we mean, the state's power has to be controlled by the law, I think that gives us a language to say... even though people are engaging in illegal things, the state still has to follow legal process in dealing with it, right.The state still has to use only the level of force allowed by the law to arrest people. The state can't just send in the army to shoot people. And the principle that we appeal to is this principle of the rule of law. Yeah, maintaining the distinction between lawbreaking by ordinary people and law-breaking by the state helps us understand why the state shouldn't be allowed to just send in troops whenever people engage in a little bit of minor lawbreaking and protests.Tobi; So how does the law... I mean, we are entering a bit of a different territory, how does the law in your conception handles what... well, maybe these are fancy definitions, but what some people will call extraordinary circumstances. Like protests with political interests? Maybe protesters that are funded and motivated to unseat an incumbent government? Or in terrorism, you know, where you often have situations where there are no laws on paper to deal with these sort of extraordinary situations, you know, and they can be extremely violent, they can be extremely strange, they're usually things that so many societies are not equipped to handle. So how should the rule of law regulate the action of the state in such extraordinary circumstances?Paul; Yeah, so this is the deep problem of the rule of law, you know, this is why people still read Carl Schmitt, right, because Carl Schmitt's whole account of executive power basically is, hey, wait a minute emergencies happen, and when emergencies happen, liberal legal ideas like the rule of law dropout, and so fundamentally, you just have like raw sovereignty. And that means that the state just kind of does what it must. Right. So here's what I feel about Schmitt. One is, maybe sometimes that's true, right? And again, I think about the US context, because I'm an American and you know, I have my own history, right? And so in the US context, I think, again, about, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, right.Like Abraham Lincoln broke all kinds of laws in the Civil War. Like today, we'd call some of the things that he did basically assuming dictatorial power in some respects. I mean, he did that in the greatest emergency that the country had ever faced and has ever faced since then. And he did it in a civil war. And sometimes that happens, and I think practically speaking, legal institutions have a habit of not standing in the way in truly dire situations like that. But, and here's why I want to push back against Carl Schmitt... but what a legal order can then do is after the emergency has passed...number one, the legal order can be a source of pressure for demanding and accounting of when the emergency has passed, right. And so again, I think of the United States War on Terror, you know, we still have people in United States' custody imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.September 11 2001, was almost 20 years ago. It's actually 20 years ago and a month, and we still have people locked up in Guantanamo Bay. That's insane. That's completely unjustifiable. And one of the jobs of the legal system is to pressure the executive to say, okay, buddy, is the emergency over yet? No, really, we think that the emergency is over yet. I want reasons, right, publicity again, I want an explanation from you of why you think the emergency is still ongoing. And the legal system can force the executive to be accountable for the claim that the emergency is still ongoing. That's number one. Number two is that law tends to be really good at retroactively, sort of, retrofitting things into legal order, right. And so again, I think about the Civil War. You know, after the US Civil War, lots of civil wars, sorry. American-centric person trying to fight against it. But after the US Civil War, you know, the courts took a pause. And then we have a lot of cases where they took a lot of the things that Lincoln did, they said, okay, some of them at least were illegal, some of them were legal, but only under very specific circumstances. And so they actually built legal doctrine that took into account the emergency that Lincoln faced, and then later wars, such as in the Second World War, the courts took the lessons from the experience in the American Civil War, and used that to impose more constraints. So to bring it about that the emergency actions that Franklin Roosevelt took in the Second World War weren't completely sui generis, sort of like right acts of sovereignty, but were regulated by legal rules created during the Civil War, and after the Civil War. And again, they weren't perfect, right? You know, during the Second World War, the United States interned Japanese Americans, you know, again, sort of completely lawless, completely unjustifiable, but you know, it's an ongoing process. The point is that the legal system is always... the law is always reactive in emergencies. But the reactive character of the law can nonetheless be used as a way to control and channel sovereign power, even in these sort of Schmittian emergency situations.Tobi; So two related questions, your work is interdisciplinary, because you try to blend a lot of social science into legal philosophy. But speaking of legal order and your primary profession, I mean.. for the sake of the audience parties into a lot of other cool stuff, I'm going to be putting up his website in the show notes. But speaking of legal order, and the legal profession, why is so much of the legal profession fascinated with what I would say the rule by law, as opposed to the rule of law. A lot of what you get from lawyers, even some law professors in some situations is [that] the law is the law, and you have to obey it. And even if you are going to question it, however unjustified it may seem, you still have to follow some processes that maybe for ordinary citizens are not so accessible or extremely costly, you know, which I think violate regularity, right, the way you talk about it retrospective legislation, and so many other things. So why is the legal profession so fascinated with the law, as opposed to justification for the law?Paul; Yeah, I think that question kind of answers itself, right. It's unfortunate... I mean, it's sort of natural but it's unfortunate that the people who most influence our dialogue about the way that we, you know, live in [the] society together with a state, namely by organizing ourselves with law happen to be people who are the specialists who find it easiest, right? And so I think the simple answer is right on this one, at least in countries like the United States, I'm not sure how true this is in other countries. But in the United States, the domination of legal discourse by lawyers necessarily means that the sort of real practical, real-world ways in which ordinary people find interacting with anything legal to be difficult, oppressive, or both just aren't in view, right? This is hard for them to understand.But I think in the US, one of the distortions that we've had is that we have an extremely hierarchical legal profession, right. So we have very elite law schools, and those very elite law schools - one of which I teach at - tend to predominantly produce lawyers who primarily work for wealthy corporations and sort of secondarily work for the government. Those lawyers tend to be the ones that end up at the top of the judiciary, that end up in influential positions in academia, that end up, you know, in Congress. The lawyers that, you know, see poor people, see people of subordinated minority groups and see the very different kinds of interactions with the legal system that people who are worse off have, that see the way that the law presents itself, not as a thing that you can use autonomously to structure your own life. But as a kind of external imposition, that sort of shows up and occasionally inflicts harm on you. Those lawyers aren't the ones who end up in our corridors of power. And it's very unfortunate, it's a consequence of the hierarchical nature of, at least in the US, our legal profession. And I suspect it's similar in these other countries as well.Tobi; In your opinion, what's the... dare I say the sacrosanct and objective - those are rigid conditions sorry - expression of the rule of law? The current general conception of the rule accedes to the primacy of the Constitution, right. I've often found that problematic because in some countries you find constitutional provisions that are egregious, and in other cases, you find lawyers going into court to challenge certain actions that they deem unjust, or that are truly unjust on the basis of the same constitution. Right. So what do you think is the most practical expression of the rule of law? Is it written laws? Is it the opinion of the judges? Is it how officials hold themselves accountable? What's the answer?Paul; So I think I'm gonna like sort of twist this a little bit and interpret that question is like, how do you know the extent to which the rule of law exists in a particular place? And my answer is, can ordinary people look officials in the eye, right, you know... if you're walking down the street, and you see a police officer, you know, are you afraid? Or can you walk past them and confidently know you're doing nothing wrong so there's nothing really effectively but they can do to you, right? If you're called in to deal with some kind of bureaucratic problem, like the tax office, can you trust that you exist in a relationship of respect? You know, can you trust that when you show them, actually here are my receipts, I really did have that expense, that that's going to be taken seriously? You know, if people, everybody, feels like they can stand tall, and look government officials in the eye, then to that extent, I think that the rule of law exists in a society.Tobi; Final question, what's the coolest idea you're working on right now?Paul; Oh, gosh. So like I said, I've got two books under contract right now. The first book is a history/theoretical constitutional law account of the development and existing state of the rule of law in the United States. The second book, which I'm more excited about, because it's the one that I plan to write this year, but it's also a lot harder, is I'm trying to take some of the governance design ideas that we see from the notion of rule of law development, and others such as governance development things and apply them to Private Internet platforms, right? Like, basically to Facebook. Um, I was actually involved in some of the work, not at a super high level, but I was involved in some of the work in designing or doing the research for designing Facebook's oversight board. And I'm kind of trying to expand on some of those ideas and think about, you know, if we really believe that private companies, especially in these internet platforms are doing governance right now, can we take lessons from how the rest of the world and how actual governments and actual states have developed techniques of governing behaviour in highly networked, large scale super-diverse environments and use those lessons in the private context? Maybe we can maybe we can't I'm not sure yet. Hopefully, by the time I finish the book, I'll know.Tobi; That's interesting. And I'll ask you this, a similar, I'll say a related situation is currently happening in Nigeria right now, where the President's Twitter handle or username, tweeted something that sounded like a thinly veiled threat to a particular ethnic group. And lots of people who disagreed with that tweet reported the tweet, and Twitter ended up deleting the tweet in question, which high-level officials in Nigeria found extremely offensive, and going as far as to assert their sovereign rights over Twitter and say, well, it may be your platform, but it is our country and we are banning you. How would you adjudicate such a situation? I mean, there's the question of banning Donald Trump from the platform and so many other things that have come up.Paul; Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right? So there are no easy answers to these kinds of problems. I think, ultimately, what we have to do is we have to build more legitimate ways to make these decisions. I mean, here are two things that we cannot do, right?Number one is we can't just let government officials, especially when, you know, as with the Donald Trump example, and so many others, the government officials are the ones who are engaging in the terrible conduct make these decisions. Number two is we also just can't let a bunch of people sitting in the Bay Area in California make those decisions. Like, ultimately, this is on, you know, property in some abstracted sense of like the shareholders of these companies. But we cannot simply allow a bunch of people in San Francisco, in Menlo Park, and you know, Cupertino and Mountain View, and all of those other little tech industry cities that have no understanding of local context to make the final decisions here. And so what we need to do is we need to build more robust institutions to include both global and local and affected countries, grassroots participation, in making these decisions. And I'm trying to sort of sketch out what the design for those might look like. But, you know, talk to me in about a year. And hopefully, I'll have a book for you that will actually have a sketch.Tobi; You bet I'm going to hold you to that. So, a year from now. So still on the question of ideas, because the show is about ideas. What's the one idea you'd like to see spread everywhere?Paul; Oh, gosh, you should have warned me in advance... that... I'm going to go back to what I said at the very beginning about the rule of law. Like I think that the rule of law depends on people, right? Like there is no such thing as the rule of law without a society and a legal system that genuinely is equal and advantageous to ordinary people enough to be the kind of thing that people actually support. Like ordinary people... if you cannot recruit the support of ordinary people for your legal political and social system, you cannot have the rule of law. That's true whether you're a developing country, that's true whether you're the United States, right. Like I think, you know, part of the reason that we got Donald Trump in the United States, I think, is because our legal system and with it our economy, and all the rest are so unequal in this country, that ordinary voters in the United States didn't see any reason to preserve it. Right and so when this lunatic and I mean, I'm just going to be quite frank here and say Donald Trump is a complete lunatic, right... when this lunatic is running for office who shows total disregard for existing institutions, like complete willingness to casually break the law. An electorate that actually was full of people who felt (themselves) treated respectfully and protected and supported by our legal and political institutions would have sent that guy packing in a heartbeat. But because the American people don't have that experience right now, I think that's what made us vulnerable to somebody like Donald Trump.Tobi; Thank you so much, Paul. It's been so fascinating talking to you.Paul; Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm happy to come back in a year when I've got the platform thing done.Tobi; Yeah, I'm so looking forward to that. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe
The word “order” evokes images of top-down structure and planning. Yet, in the absence of central control, economies almost seem to operate like machines — a concept economists call “emergent order.” How do systems of order emerge? And how can we benefit from the unplanned organization they create? Today, Neil Chilson joins “Political Economy” to explain the concept of emergent order and describe how it can inform everything from leadership to policymaking. Neil is a senior research fellow for technology and innovation at the Charles Koch Institute and the author of Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World.
The word “order” evokes images of top-down structure and planning. Yet, in the absence of central control, economies almost seem to operate like machines — a concept economists call “emergent order.” How do systems of order emerge? And how can we benefit from the unplanned organization they create? Today, Neil Chilson joins “Political Economy” to explain the concept of emergent order and describe how […]
Mass Psychosis & You https://youtu.be/b0x8meVJkMw 83,662 views Premiered Oct 12, 2021 Peak Prosperity 413K subscribers This video explains why people you know seem to have lost their ability to reason or even be reasonable. Mass Hysteria, or psychosis is a very routine and well-documented part of human history. It also describes well our current circumstances. Access to all of Chris's content, live webinars twice a month, and much much more is available to our paying members. Click this link for a special introductory offer: https://www.peakprosperity.com/produc... The key questions are (1) is it deliberate or accidental and (2) either way, what can you do to avoid the worst effects of it all? Links: COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... Dancing mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing... MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maa... Dr. Fauci, Movie Star https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/mo... ‘Fauci' Earnings Mystery: No Info on Box Office Take for Gushing Documentary About COVID Czar https://tennesseestar.com/2021/09/27/... JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: We should get rid of the debt ceiling https://youtu.be/Nq8jCzjkMHQ Access to all of Chris's content, live webinars twice a month, and much much more is available to our paying members. Click this link for a special introductory offer: https://www.peakprosperity.com/produc... Listen and subscribe to our podcast: ✅ Everywhere you get podcasts: just search and subscribe to "Peak Prosperity" Connect with us at: ✅ www.twitter.com/chrismartenson ✅ www.facebook.com/PeakProsperity.IG ✅ www.instagram.com/peak.prosperity ✅ https://www.linkedin.com/company/peak...
Mass Psychosis & You https://youtu.be/b0x8meVJkMw 83,662 views Premiered Oct 12, 2021 Peak Prosperity 413K subscribers This video explains why people you know seem to have lost their ability to reason or even be reasonable. Mass Hysteria, or psychosis is a very routine and well-documented part of human history. It also describes well our current circumstances. Access to all of Chris's content, live webinars twice a month, and much much more is available to our paying members. Click this link for a special introductory offer: https://www.peakprosperity.com/produc... The key questions are (1) is it deliberate or accidental and (2) either way, what can you do to avoid the worst effects of it all? Links: COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... Dancing mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing... MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maa... Dr. Fauci, Movie Star https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/mo... ‘Fauci' Earnings Mystery: No Info on Box Office Take for Gushing Documentary About COVID Czar https://tennesseestar.com/2021/09/27/... JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: We should get rid of the debt ceiling https://youtu.be/Nq8jCzjkMHQ Access to all of Chris's content, live webinars twice a month, and much much more is available to our paying members. Click this link for a special introductory offer: https://www.peakprosperity.com/produc... Listen and subscribe to our podcast: ✅ Everywhere you get podcasts: just search and subscribe to "Peak Prosperity" Connect with us at: ✅ www.twitter.com/chrismartenson ✅ www.facebook.com/PeakProsperity.IG ✅ www.instagram.com/peak.prosperity ✅ https://www.linkedin.com/company/peak...
In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Marshall Eddie Conway, former Black Panther, political prisoner, and Executive Producer of The Real News Network to discuss the anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the importance of the Panthers' internationalist politics to its broader political orientation, and the Panthers' place in a long history of resistance for Black people.In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Frederick Mills, Professor of Philosophy at Bowie State University and Co-Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs to discuss the illegal extradition of Alex Saab, a Venezuelan official, to the United States, how this fits into the US economic war on Venezuela, the state of the opposition and Juan Guaido, and resistance against Monroeism.In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Jia Hong from Nodutdol for Korean Community Development to discuss the Korean Netflix show Squid Game and its reflection of the history and society of the South Korea, the show's allusion to concentration camps and their historical use in the South Korea, the exploitation and discrimination defectors from the North Korea face in the South Korea, the superexploitation of migrant workers, and the reality behind the myth of South Korea as a shining bastion of democracy and capitalism.Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Dr. Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and author many books including “The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century” and most recently “The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering , and the Political Economy of Boxing” to discuss the death of Colin Powell and the disparsate treatment of Black immigrants and descendants of slaves in the Untied States that it exposes, the weaponization of memory and its manifestation as attacks on so-called critical race theory and its attempt to preserve the American foundation myths, how the US attempts to decouple the American economy from China has contributed to the supply chain and inflation crises, and US efforts to spread disinformation about China's involvement on the African continent.
In The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities (Ohio State UP, 2021), Ally Day offers a compelling critique of neoliberal medical practices in the US by coupling an analysis of HIV memoir with a critical examination of narrative medicine practice. Using insights from feminist disability studies and crip theory, Day argues that stories of illness and disability—such as HIV memoirs—operate within a political economy of stigma, which she defines as the formal and informal circulation of personal illness and disability narratives that benefits some while hindering others. On the one hand, this system decreases access to appropriate medical care for those with chronic conditions by producing narratives of personal illness that frame one's relationship to structural inequality as a result of personal failure. On the other hand, the political economy of stigma rewards those who procure such narratives and circulate them for public consumption. The political economy of stigma is theorized from three primary research sites: a reading group with women living with HIV, a reading group with AIDS service workers, and participant observation research and critical close reading of practices in narrative medicine. Ultimately, it is the women living with HIV who provide an alternative way to understand disability and illness narratives, a practice of differential reading that can challenge stigmatizing tropes and reconceptualize the creation, reception, and circulation of patient memoir. Dr. Ally Day is Associate Professor in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
In The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities (Ohio State UP, 2021), Ally Day offers a compelling critique of neoliberal medical practices in the US by coupling an analysis of HIV memoir with a critical examination of narrative medicine practice. Using insights from feminist disability studies and crip theory, Day argues that stories of illness and disability—such as HIV memoirs—operate within a political economy of stigma, which she defines as the formal and informal circulation of personal illness and disability narratives that benefits some while hindering others. On the one hand, this system decreases access to appropriate medical care for those with chronic conditions by producing narratives of personal illness that frame one's relationship to structural inequality as a result of personal failure. On the other hand, the political economy of stigma rewards those who procure such narratives and circulate them for public consumption. The political economy of stigma is theorized from three primary research sites: a reading group with women living with HIV, a reading group with AIDS service workers, and participant observation research and critical close reading of practices in narrative medicine. Ultimately, it is the women living with HIV who provide an alternative way to understand disability and illness narratives, a practice of differential reading that can challenge stigmatizing tropes and reconceptualize the creation, reception, and circulation of patient memoir. Dr. Ally Day is Associate Professor in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Futurists of the past dreamed of tapping into the heat of the Earth’s mantle to supply our energy needs, but today’s geothermal provides only a tiny fraction of the power we use. In today’s episode, we’ll be discussing what’s next for geothermal, its possible advantages over solar and wind power, and the obstacles it faces. […]
In the inaugural episode of Connections, Jadaliyya co-editor Mouin Rabbani interviewed Noam Chomsky on March 17th, 2021 to discuss U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East under Biden. The interview examines the Biden administration's Middle East policies, explores elements of continuity and change in US policy towards the region after the Trump years, and discusses what recent developments regarding Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia portend for the coming years.
PATREON BONUS - https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-political-57123129 For many, the phrase "ruling class" symbolizes jet-setting metropolitans. Historian Patrick Wyman argues that an entirely different and more banal group wield a level of power and cultural influence that is out of proportion with their identity. "American Gentry" by Patrick Wyman - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/
“Fusion power is the energy source of the future . . . and always will be,” skeptics joke. But a series of exciting breakthroughs have some experts convinced that we’re nearing a fusion revolution that could deliver abundant, clean energy for the future. My guest today is Arthur Turrell, and we’ll be discussing whether fusion power reactors are […]
This week, Grace Blakeley speaks to Geoff Mann, Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University and author of In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution and, with Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. They discuss capitalism, state power and climate breakdown, whether the pandemic has ended neoliberalism, and why democracy is so important to anti-capitalist struggle today.You can support our work on the show by becoming a Patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.
Americans love rags-to-riches stories, believing hard work and talent — not connections — should be rewarded. But meritocracy has come under scrutiny, with some questioning how well America lives up to its ideals, while others ask if they’re even worth striving for. In this episode, we’ll discuss whether meritocracy succeeds in pulling talent up from the […]
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