Henry Farrell: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, the world is maybe cooperating too much. Myself, my co-author are finding ourselves . . . We joke that we’re on a treadmill because stuff keeps on happening. People keep on asking us to write stuff. It’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s wonderful to see your ideas go out there into the world. But it also requires a lot of work to keep pedaling. Also — and I think this is the plausible fate of anybody who has an idea that takes off — you see the idea effectively escaping your control. So people are talking about weaponized interdependence with respect to a much wider and broader and diffuse range of phenomena than what we talked about. And that’s just the way that these things work. Second thing that I’m interested in is the informational content of democracy. Here, maybe the intuition is something like the following. We have a standard set of arguments that have been extremely influential among libertarians and, I think, more broadly in the world, which are derived from people like Hayek. We have this set of arguments which are beautifully expressed and which are very important arguments that Hayek makes about how markets work extraordinarily well to gather all of this diffuse information, this information which is simply unencodable, and to make it into something that can be useful through the price mechanism. The price mechanism takes all of this tacit knowledge and makes it actionable in important ways. The Hayek and the Mises story is, of course, one where they contrast this with state planning, and they argue very plausibly that if you look at central planning processes, that these central planning processes are never plausibly going to be able to compete with the market, at least for doing that kind of thing. I think that states can do lots of other things. They underestimate that, but that’s a different argument. What I also think is that democracy also has a set of techniques or tools for capturing information because — and again, this is going back in a certain way to what I was saying about the Gellner or the Popper view of society, which is more or less that we have all of these people with different understandings, different aims, different aspirations within society. And you want to do two things. First of all, you want to maintain peace among all of these quarreling people with their very different aims and aspirations. You want to try and figure out how you can stop them from going to war with each other. But secondly, there also is going to be a lot of information which is captured precisely in their disagreements, in their differences, in their different perspectives. om going to war with each other. But secondly, there also is going to be a lot of information which is captured precisely in their disagreements, in their differences, in their different perspectives. So my ideal for democracy is, as a machinery, to try and get as much information out of those differences as possible, to take things like partisanship — which is messy and rancorous and squalid much of the time — but to recognize that the clash of different ideas, the clash of perspectives also has a lot of information value and does things that markets can’t capture. So, trying to think through much more systematically, what are the modes under which democracy is better or worse at doing this? What are the kinds of institutions that allow democracy to do this better or worse? This is a major set of questions. Obviously, there are lots of other people who are doing good things on it, but if I think about the other work that I’m doing with people like Cosma Shalizi, who you are familiar with, with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg, these are the kinds of ideas that we are trying to get at. And also work with Bruce Schneier, which is thinking about the opposite side of this, which is that democracy is likely to be overwhelmed under circumstances where people disagree too much on basic facts, on basic information. And in what ways can you try to make democracy less vulnerable and more robust against various forms of informational attacks? Not only Russian-type attacks, but the kinds of attacks that domestic political actors seek to use in order to pursue their own short-term aims. Henry Farrell, thank you very much.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.