[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com hello I'm here today with Henry Farrell
I first learned of Henry through his blogging at Crooked Timber he has been a co-founder there uh but Henry in addition to that is a professor of political science at George Washington he has written two notable books the political economy of trust and more recently with Abraham Newman of privacy
and power he has popularized and developed the notion of weaponized interdependence and done in fact much much more in the popular sphere he is an incoming editor at Monkey cage blog at the Washington post and is written just about everywhere else you can imagine Henry welcome I'm delighted to be here
first question if we think about the Chinese company Huawei what can and should the United States government do to counter Huawei from controlling 5G Communications networks for its main allies well what the US government is currently doing is considering using its control of Supply networks in order to
try to uh block Huawei because Huawei relies sub stantially on chips which are made by companies like Qualcomm and so the United States has used the so-called entity list which is a means of effect effectively designating Huawei as a problematic company to put these Supply CH uh supply chain relationships which
Huawei needs under threat now it's not clear whether the us is going to deliver on this and this is one of I think the problems that the current Administration has which is that there's an implicit break between on the one hand people like Donald Trump who think primarily in
terms of trade and some very strange ideas about what victory in trade is and on the other hand people who are more concerned with the long-term security relationship who have viewed Huawei as a threat for a number of years so what I would suggest is probably going to
happen is that we're going to see some kind of a compromise where Trump is going to offer and indeed has suggested that he will offer some concessions on Huawei which is going to make people in the uh defense establishment very unhappy because they see Huawei as a long-term threat because they fear that
the 5G Network that has been constructed around the world could be used by Huawei to uh give China access to people's Communications in more or less the same way as the NSA was able to help the United States listen in on the world for a number of years sure but what should
we do so if you imagine Huawei controlling Germany's 5G Network that sounds pretty dire almost like letting the KGB run your phone system so I think we probably need to wake up to the fact that we're going to be in a world where there are going to be security vulnerabilities and there's more or less
not very much that we can do about it so the key questions I think about are here is there's different trade-offs so first of all you can think about the trade-offs of surveillance which I think is what most people think about with uh Huawei and there's a good reason why a
number of countries including us allies have decided to opt for Huawei because they figure they're already being listened into by the United States they're probably going to be listened into by China anyway so what matter does it make it probably doesn't make all that much difference uh and whichever
technology you're going to use there's probably going to be some way of penetrating it the more complicated more difficult question is whether or not Huawei or other kinds of technology companies like it could be linked into uh other forms of systems in ways which might pose an active security threat
which goes further than just listening and this is something that Bruce schneer for example has talked about in a wonderful book that came out about nine months ago called to kill every everyone click here where he more or less talks about the huge security risks which are as associated with the so-called
internet of things which turns out to be an internet of really really badly designed and badly secured things and when one thinks about the ways in which for example what kinds of consequences it might have if you have a breakdown of communications at the time that there is
a military attack that's the kind of thing that I think people really need to think carefully about so I would guess that the best way to think about this is to on the one hand accept the fact that there's going to be some level of surveillance that is happening that given current Technologies there's
always going to be some kind of a back door there to be exploited and on the other hand trying to make critical systems as secure and robust as possible and think as much as possible about things like multiple redundancies not necessarily uh economically efficient in terms of Market but nonetheless things
which will allow you to secure yourself and have possible backup systems in the case that something uh major is uh suddenly compromised so I think that's where we're moving towards is a the world which is much less going to be about trying to pair things down to the minimum in search of economic efficiency
and much more about robustness redundancy and trying to think carefully through the fact that we live in a fundamentally insecure world people are beginning to take advantage of it and we need to Gear Up in order to uh think better about this but if I call you now on my iPhone to your iPhone China can't
listen in right well uh that but we'd be giving them the whole key to all Communications well that depends uh we don't know whether China can or not listen in we don't know but we know that if it's Huawei 5G they can intercept any Communications they want by manipulating
Huawei which is not quite a state owned Enterprise but it's stay controlled as are most or maybe all major companies in China it just seems to not fulfill the fiduciary responsibilities of the United States government well that then I think the interesting question is whether or
not all of the other governments than the United States government have not been fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities by allowing systems which have been penetrated we know quite thoroughly by the NSA to the point that the NSA uh for a period basically recorded all of the phone calls going
back and forth within a particular country I believe it was Bermuda in order more or less to show that this could be done so sure so Miracle won't make an important call on our iPhone anymore but I would say that's the correct German response and the correct American response is to be equally or
even more skeptical of Huawei right which is not a democracy it's an autocracy it's from a country that's put over a million people in camps why should even consider letting them be the backbone of the free world's Communications Network well uh the uh I I think that the question is well there
are two questions here first there's the US question the domestic question which I think is been sorted out and the US has decided that Huawei is not going to be allowed to supply uh Goods to its uh telecommunications providers in fact Huawei has never played any significant
role in US telecommunications providers more or less uh Telos I remember being told by a lawyer what they did was they used to to uh they used to effectively take bids from Huawei in order to scare Erikson and noia and other companies into offering them better terms but with the presumption that they were never
going to uh use huawe because this would get them into too much uh trouble and security so the question for the US is straightforward the question for other countries is much less straightforward do they see uh China as being a fundamental threat uh do or do they just view this as being another nuisance
along with the fact that the NSA uh is listening into their uh phone calls and it's interesting to see that some countries including close allies such as the United Kingdom have been much much less uh forthright on the US side than one might expect roughly speaking I think one could say that there is a if
one wants to look at the ways in which countries have responded uh I think a lot of it has to do with their geopolitical or geostrategic exposure to China so that uh places like Australia and Japan have been far far more uh willing to listen to the US on these kinds of things than places like the
United Kingdom which see that there is a plausible threat from Huawei uh but I think that in the end of the day the balance between that and having cheap telecommunications infrastructure is such that they're willing to uh allow Huawei to provide at least some parts of
the uh machineries that they are looking to have subcontracted out how and when will European nations be able to bypass Swift as a payments Network that's a very good and very interesting question because Swift is as it as it stands at the moment is not Comm l a European organization it is a nonprofit
organization a nonprofit Consortium which is based in Belgium so uh there are ways in which I think if the European Union were to get serious in this it would probably be less about trying to create an alternative system to Swift than trying to bring Swift uh more under its own command so at the
moment Swift is nominally European but in fact has a lot of influence from the United States the United States has uh provided many of its senior uh decision makers including people like Lenny shrank uh and it has also provided a a large number of board members so the
European path forward I think if the if Europe wanted to try and minimize its exposure would be to start to impose a much clearer and more substantial mandate upon Swift to effectively Force Swift under circumstances where the UN United States tells it to do one thing and Europe tells it to do another it
would that as Swift would effectively have much stronger reasons than it does at the moment to comply with with the European threats now the problem with that from Europe's point of view is that that involves creating a much much heavier institutional paraphernalia at the EU level which is going to be uh
something that is going to be problematic for a number of the member states who don't like to see the European commission and European institutions taking up that level of power but at the same time there is I think a much much clearer case being made and if one looks for example at the
comments that have been made in the runup to the new Comm Mission it's very very clear from Joseph barl and other people that they are looking to really create the European Union as an economic power in a way that hasn't been true in the past and to the extent that member
states begin to buy into that kind of agenda they probably are going to have to buy into much much heavier regulatory clout at the EU level including the kinds of things that could be used to bring Swift to heal but take say uh New York is a banking center so maybe half of Deutsche bank's business is in New
York assume the US often cares about foreign policy issues more than Europe does and we have a potential first mover Advantage if we choose to use it so if we say to European companies Banks whatever well if you do business with the US Financial system you must adhere to some long list of restrictions that
may be as simple as Iranian sanctions what does the equilibrium actually look like where they can just say no you know we're going to go ahead and trade with Iran isn't that really quite distant given the importance of New York as a banking center well the way I would put push back against that a bit is to not
assume what you're assuming which is to say that under many circumstances it is going to be true that the United States is going to care about this stuff much more than uh the European Union is and Iran I think is a great case of that uh the uh EU trade with Iran it's not
insignificant but it isn't anything enormous either but there are other things which Europe is much much more worried about and in particular what they are worried about is Russia so I think that the counter example to what you say is assume for example that we have a 20 20 election in which Donald
Trump uh is ignominiously defeated what we are going to see uh then plausibly is a situation where a presidency and a congress even if the Republicans still have the majority in the Senate they're going to be uh loaded for bear they are going to go after Russia with sanctions of one sort or another many of those
sanctions are plausibly going to implicate the European Union and so when one looks at the policy debate in the EU at the moment I think a lot of that policy debate is gearing up for perceived likely fights with the United States over the relationship between Europe and the Russian economy because
of course Europe depends much more heavily on Russia for energy and has a wide variety of other economic relations with the uh with uh Russia uh and so I think that's the situation in which Europe would care much more substantially than the United States or would care as substantially as the
United States and would be prepared to push back hard so those are the circumstances under which there has been a recent uh paper by the European Council on Foreign ations which has talked about ways in which uh Europe could deter uh United States actions and one of the uh one of the actions that is
proposed there is that the European Union think about licensing requirements for us firms that want to operate in uh Europe such that if they cooperate with sanctions against European entities that Europe doesn't like that these licenses to uh operate would be withdrawn so
that's this kind of circumstance under which I could see actual at the very least uh posturing happening at a very very substantial scale between Europe and the United States and a perhaps actual low-level economic Warfare if the US steps in to try to push back against Europe uh what Europe regards as being
its core interests now we're chatting in early October and there are two huge stories today both about weaponized interdependence so the first is that the European Union seems to be insisting that Facebook takedown material posted on internets outside the European Union what's your view is that a good decision
or a bad decision well I try you know when I'm looking at this stuff I try to wear my hat uh well let let me let okay but I'm interviewing Henry F the person right okay so let me back up and let me say two things first of all if I'm to think about this as a political scientist under my political
science hat what I would say is that this is something which is inevitable and this is something which we're going to see more and more of which is that the internet for a long period there was a kind of an equilibrium in which United States managed to persuade everybody
that self-regulation and platforms looking after their own business was more or less okay for most purposes that equilibrium has broken down it has broken down in the US it has broken down in Europe and it has broken down in authoritarian Societies in particular so I think we're going to see more and more
efforts to try and use the uh platform companies effectively as means of extending means of extending uh reach into other jurisdictions and imposing Universal type restrictions on what they can or cannot do if I want to think about this as a uh individual what I would say is that the I'm not at all
happy with what the European Union is doing in specific here but I do think that there needs to be much greater regulation of platform companies and in the absence of United States I think that the European Union is the most plausible actor which has got the regulatory clout and the willingness to
do so in a manner which is at least somewhat uh compatible with uh broad liberal norms so uh my basic attitude would be to push back against a specific decision but to say that if the choices between the United States not regulating or perhaps regulating it perhaps that
will be different under a possible warrant Administration and uh authoritarian states that I would much prefer to have a robust European Union than any of the other actors that I can think of uh that have the clout and the ability to try and bring the platform companies to heal the second big story
from today is from the world of basketball so as you probably know Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Mory Tweets in favor of the Hong Kong protests it seems both the Rockets and the NBA force him to delete the tweet and basically retract a statement who's in the wrong here Daryl myy the Rockets
the NBA China everyone what do you think okay well again looking at this from my political science hat this kind of stuff has been happening for a long long time but not so much to the United States so there's a book by uh Blackwell and Harris which came out with the Council
on Foreign Relations a couple of years ago which looks at how China has been imposing this kind of pressure against a variety of smaller countries especially with respect to the Dalai Lama and when China says jump companies do tend to jump and of course we've seen Hollywood for the last number of years has been uh
quite sensitive to the Chinese market uh most recently as exemplified by the decision to remove the uh I think it was the Taiwanese flag from the remake of Top Gun uh from the back of Tom Cruz's jacket because this was perceived as being possibly provocative so I think that this is pretty standard
stuff and that this tells us something about the way that businesses operate you B and here you can see the way that businesses operate globally as having both great benefits and great weaknesses if one wants to think about the standard story about how interdependence at least under some circumstances creates peace
because businesses have a incentive to try and create peaceful and happy relations between nations in order to secure their Commerce I think that there's something to it although as my work with Abe on weaponized interdependent suggests there also are some clear limits to that as well but
the obverse of this is that business is obviously in the business of making profits and when there are clear political risks Associated to business doing certain kinds of things by and large businesses are not going to be especially courageous and I think that this is a uh this is particularly likely
to be true of big firms which I think are more likely to come under this kind of pressure and and one saw this already with regard to Hong Kong there have been that uh Airways chief executive who effectively got outed I I'm trying to remember the company but I can't I know
yeah yeah so I I think that this is in a sense if you want to Outsource a lot of our decision making about culture about the ways that things ought to be done to business this is what you're going to expect For Better or For Worse in a world of increasing weaponized interdependence exactly to where does
the power shift is it to the big Nations to the nasty Nations to the Nations willing to move First Nations or unions what's your general take on who is gaining in status and influence oh very very good question okay so I would say that what we're seeing at the moment is a transition from a world of one big
nation which is the United States which has had to a very great degree a near Monopoly on this stuff to a uh series of uh you know to a group of Nations including the United States but also including uh China European Union uh India perhaps uh although people don't pay much attention to it I would be
interested to know much much more about what India is doing in this in the space and also Russia with Russia playing less as a significant power that is able to exert much influence than as a spoiler trying to uh figure out ways to screw things up for everybody else so I think
that we are moving from a world of unipolarity to use the standard term that international relations Scholars use to a world of multipolarity and one of of the things that we can expect from that is that multipolarity tends to lead to a lot of danger of things screwing up and things going wrong and uh when one
looks at how the US has done this over the last number of years it has managed to prosecute its interests reasonably well while not pushing other countries too far until the Trump Administration that's not true anymore and I think that as other countries come in many of which
are less sophisticated about thinking about what kinds of things they can or cannot do without messing up things for their other uh for the for other countries or for their own companies we're going to see far far me uh more mistakes being made and this is especially true because nobody really
understands what the networks are that they're trying to weaponize so that there was one very interesting example of this uh which happened with the United States in fact when it went after Oleg derap pasca who is one of the Russian oligarchs and derap pasca had a uh big interest he effectively had
control of the Russian aluminum industry and so the uh us Treasury Department ofac uh sanctioned derap pasca but didn't realize that when it was sanctioning derap pasa's companies it was going to mess up the entire West European car manufacturing industry which relies upon specific Aluminum
Products that only derap pascus companies can uh create so this create led to this very very complicated ballet dance in which uh the uh treasury sought to both extend the sanctions and to specify them in ways that would allow uh for the unwinding at least the nominal un winding of Dera pasa's formal control
of the company so as to create a uh exit strategy but one can see that as we're going to have more and more countries trying to do this stuff and as they are doing so in a competitive way rather than one country trying as a unipolar power to impose it on everyone else that
the possibilities of mistakes being made and mistakes leading to escalation and uh minor trade Wars blowing up into substantial spats and even outright economic Warfare I think that that possibility is going to get much much worse arguably dominant firms are easier to regulate and since you seem to favor
some kinds of additional regulation on the major tech companies does this mean uh we're too worried about Monopoly that we actually want to keep around a few dominant firms and that if we split them up into many small parts there would be more chaos or more fake news or more
privacy violations if some parts of what they do are bad and you get more competition in the bad don't we just want to put in gdpr barriers to entry not quite public U ities but keep them big and fat and happy and somewhat not so Dynamic yes or no well it depends on what you value so I think but what you
value yeah well let let me let me put the tradeoff this to you this way I think if you value security if they highlight that is on security then the answer is you probably want to keep big companies around because uh you're going to need you're you're going to want to impose broad standards you're going to
want to create collective security goods and the only actors that can really do that in a substantial way are big big businesses of one sort or another if alternatively you value things like privacy and other kinds of Rights then I think you probably want to move towards
a equilibrium in which there are far far fewer big firms so that's where I see the fight being played out I see the fight being played out between people who value security and people who value privacy I think they po they point in somewhat different directions and where
are you on that Spectrum so I am well it depends on the time of the the day and I I I I find myself it is 222 okay well uh 2:22 p.m. or whether the months of an norn it I I I guess I guess that this is something that I've actually been struggling with and thinking about because there's another interesting
aspect to this as well which is if one thinks for example about a possible Warren Administration which I think is quite plausible at the moment as the uh as the most plausible candidate perhaps at the moment on the Democratic side although who the hell knows then I think that what we're going to see is we're
going to see the Warren Administration trying to pursue a much more energetic IC foreign policy uh agenda uh especially on economic policy than we have seen for a number of years and I think that this is especially going to be true in places like tax evasion the Warren Administration is going to begin
to leverage some of these powers that uh that have been used for uh other purposes primarily for security purposes it is going to leverage these against uh Swiss banks against other countries which are not willing to uh jump up to the uh need to uh try and push back against final Financial flows and so on
and from my perspective I think that would be awesome uh that said I also think that the problem and this is getting away from the question of corporate power to the question of unipolarity which is perhaps the question I've been more interested in and I've been more trying to think about
uh the the other side of that of course is that unipolarity and the US willingness to use its power in order to uh Crush all opposition has been used in a variety of problematic ways over the last few years so sometimes sometimes I see myself I'm interested in trying to provide advice to uh businesses about
how to push back against this so Abe and I have a piece that will be uh uh that is under editing at the moment for the Harvard Business Review where we are providing uh a sense for businesses as to what the landscape is that they're going to face sometimes I think that it
would be uh very good to see a uh big powerful government beginning to pursue the wholesale reform of the International Financial system which I think has become problematic for democracy in a variety of ways and uh quite frankly which side of that debate I'm going to end up on over the longer
term is going to depend on who the particular actors are on the particular on the two sides and which seems to me to be uh most compatible with a broad small L liberal understanding of you know of the good life and the good Society Facebook's proposed Supreme Court how is that going to work out are
you optimistic pessimistic will it happen I'm very pessimistic why so this is a piece that uh Margaret Levy who's written on the uh theory of the state and uh and Tim O'Reilly and I wrote about 18 months ago where we more or less what we did was we took a standard
set of arguments from from uh political economy and in particular Norse and wine Gast so Norse and wi Gast I'm sure you're familiar with and many of your uh listeners will be familiar with they have this great article on tying the king's hands where they argue that the Glorious Revolution this uh crucial
moment in British history why it was so incredibly important was that it effectively allowed the Monarch to make promises so that previously monarchs have been able to borrow money and then manage on their debts once Parliament is instituted the Monarch can't do that nearly so easily anymore and this
weakness turns out to be an incredible source of power for the British crown over the next couple of centuries it effectively allows it to borrow money and uh to borrow money freely because the lenders don't have to worry that the money is going to be confiscated and this turns out as people like John
Brewer have discussed in their uh discussion of the British fiscal state of the 18th and 19th century this turns out to be an enormous source of power projection now the problem is I think that if you look at Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook at the moment he does not have the power to tie his hands you know so
you have this very very strange corporate structure where uh Zuckerberg is effectively he a CEO he is in control of the board he has the majority of the shares that count and so this means I think that it's very very difficult for Zuckerberg or anyone within Facebook to
really credibly commit to tie their own hands in this kind of way doesn't he have the incentive to tie his own hands because the moment he deviates from the court people blame him for the decisions and what he possibly would like is simply for it to be someone else's responsibility so it's then incentive
compatible now oh well we've seen we've seen multiple instances in the past where Facebook has proposed all of these uh these Arrangements by which there would be uh referendums of their users and so on and where it effectively began to renate on this once it became clear
that this was inconvenient for Facebook's uh underlying business model so the question is uh I guess the question is it's I think that this is going to work up to the point where there are serious implications for Facebook's business model and past that point uh Zuckerberg is going to have a
very very strong incentive to renage and I think that there's a more General problem if we think about platform econ economies that platform companies I think have become too powerful to commit to uh you know to behave in good ways so if you look for example at Amazon if you look at Google all of these are not
they're not only businesses but they're also effectively micro economies in their own right they are both Market players and they are the marketplace itself for key aspects of the information economy and I think that makes it really really difficult for them to guarantee credibly to other
Market actors that they are not going to take advantage of the unique power the unique uh access to information access to ability to shape market conditions that they have and uh even if they want to it's it's going to be extremely difficult I would imagine for somebody like Jeff Bezos you know when he's got
all of these hungry young Executives who are trying to uh make money and whose future depends on their ability to make money to stop them from uh pushing the envelope and waves them that may undermine Amazon or Google's or indeed Facebook's uh Market position over the
longer run so I think that this is a much much more General problem and we know far less about the internal hierarchies of these companies and the internal political economies of these companies than we ought to but what we do know and here I think Tim O'Reilly's recent book is quite good in this gives
us some reason to suspect that they may have some real problems what should we do then with speech on Facebook if the Supreme Court idea is so flawed what's the better idea especially for a country that has a First Amendment that's a uh that's a problem that I've know I've
I've no maybe it's the best idea that there is right okay okay well but I guess the problem with Facebook is you you look at the business model there's just no way given Facebook's business model that it can credibly act uh you know even if you get away from the questions of political responsibility
and who ought face Facebook be responsible to there's no very good way for it to uh successfully police uh speech on its platform given the tools that it has uh machine learning can do wonderful things but machine learning I think simply is not going to ever be able to keep up with the uh multifarious
ways in which human beings can use language in order to communicate nasty and unpleasant things to each other so I guess the uh completely unsatisfactory answer I have to your question is I just don't think that one can come up with a satisfactory solution either in po political terms or in terms of
Effectiveness given the economy that we have at the moment to the problem of policing Free Speech you know first of all there is no Universal standards secondly even if there were Universal standards I don't think that we have the appropriate technical tools to be able to implement them when we've got
companies that have billions of users and thousands or tens of thousand thousands of employees but we can't regulate hn very well either right they post the very nastiest stuff you can imagine they're presumably a small company they don't have any kind of dominant position I've never even wanted
to visit but I've read about what's on there and we can't stop them either so it doesn't seem the problem is Facebook or the structure of the economy doesn't isn't it just the case we now have Technologies where everything that can be said will be said and we're not going
to stop that well I guess the question for me is the and again this is a a wideopen question because we simply don't have enough good Empirical research but what is the relationship in the broader ecology between companies like Anan and companies like Facebook so I suspect that companies like Anan will
be far far less successful if there weren't bigger much bigger platforms like uh fa Facebook that they could effectively grow upon so here the argument is something as follows if you think about achan and if you think about 4chan before it they were basically meme factories they were B basically these
places where these bored individuals hung out you so created these memes in a kind of process of frenzied darwinian Evolution where uh you desperately want to make sure that your uh whatever you had said was on the front page because otherwise it would disappear forever and
so you've got this survival of the fittest thing where incredibly valuable or incredibly effective memes go out and begin to populate the entire space but you need two things for that to work first of all you need a process of generation and secondly you need some kind of process of dissemination you you
need other platforms which have far greater reach which can then allow for these memes to propagate uh through the uh atmosphere and so I suspect that if we were in a world in which everything was at the scale of Anan rather than every rather than having a mixture of companies at the scale of Anan and
companies at the scale of Facebook that the uh likelihood of this stuff spreading and becoming epidemic across the entire community of Internet users would be far far less obviously we would have other problems then but I think that the problems that we'd face would
be a very very different set of problems from the problems that we face in the current um in the current environment right now what'sapp is end to end encrypted and it's either very hard or impossible to crack that should the law insist on a back door in the united states in the United States okay not
Denmark so I'm okay I'm I'm actually I I've got a lot of friends who are on the other side on this I think that it is okay to have this as long as there is clear legal process around it and I think that is a question so there are kangaroo Courts for NSA surveillance right Snowden has pointed out basically
that they'll approve whatever request comes in uh that has changed to some degree so if you look at fisa now fisa is a very very different Beast than it was in the past and more or less the problem with FIS as I understand it was that effective is a court in which only one side was able to present its
evidence and now you have effective public Advocates you have a number of people who act as advocates of the general public interest and who are read into the the secrecy surrounding it but are not representative of the interests of the security community and so my understanding is that fisa is still
perhaps problematic from a civil liberties perspective but it is far far less problematic than it used to be so I think that it is possible to do this kind of stuff it takes careful institutional design and in general uh I think that it is okay to have some legal access to uh uh heavily encrypted uh
heavily encrypted information uh the problems of course are going to be a you know as you say that uh this is likely to be something which is going to be swept up in the security State and B that really implement this properly we're going to have to see the creation
of some kind of a system probably among uh Advanced industrial democracies in Western Europe the United States Japan uh South Korea and a number a small number of other countries where there is uh some set of shared standards and shared agreements around us so we're beginning to see the battles uh starting
over that with uh agreements between the United States and uh between the United States and United Kingdom over access to electronic evidence uh I worry that we're going that this discussion is going to be dominated by the security side of the house but to the extent that privacy uh privacy Advocates privacy
officials are able to get into this debate as well I think that one could plausibly come up with something which is uh which is going to be uh reasonably respectful of CI civil liberties why does Twitter seem to be relatively leftwing politically I don't mean the company I mean the service the the
service so first thing I I'm I'm taking the statement on facei because I actually haven't seen any research on this uh there must be somebody who's researched on sort of broad leftwing versus right-wing views on Twitter using NLP or something similar uh I haven't seen that research uh to the extent that
it is true I think that per you know if one wanted to come up with a kind of a half-baked social science theory which might or might not be correct it might be because the valences of the service are much more about so they're quasy solidaristic about creating affirmations
of shared values of shared communities uh in ways that plausibly uh work for but but then I then then arguing against myself you know so I would immediately think well the same thing ought to be true of a variety of conservative communities so I when I look at my Twitter my Twitter is certainly much
more left wing but that is yeah yeah yeah that's that that that's a function and maybe you know I wonder again if there's research on this and if there and if there's not research I wonder to what extent this P perception is a function of the truncation if it's just perception rather than reality to what
extent is the perception the results of the truncation of a big chunk of the right out of the conversation because uh if you think about the conversation that we're involved in it's a conversation which you might call small l liberal that is people who are on either side of
the aisle but who are plausibly committed to a kind of a kind of popper or gner way of thinking about the world in which you want to have in which you want to have debate on both sides of the aisle because this is how you advance advance argument Advance your understanding of society uh but on the
right side of that there has been a truncation where a lot of people I think have peeled off and where uh Donald Trump has had I think some very very substantial consequen quences for uh debate uh I don't follow many people who are uh Avid followers of Donald Trump
and I follow them more or less in a more or less a you know sort of a a clinical way rather than a these are people who are going to have interesting and unexpected things to say to me kind of way so I wonder whether or not that perception is much more a result of the fact that if you are a certain kind of
libertarian the people you want to talk to are going to be far more on the left side of the uh aisle right now than they would have been five or six years ago the more Mar G thesis is that with the internet we see everything better and more clearly and there's more transparency and we become jaded and
cynical because the elites are not so wonderful and everyone seems more dogmatic on Twitter perhaps than they are in real life and thus we grow disillusioned with politics agree or disagree well I think that a lot of it also has to do with the form of Twitter that it was 140 characters and then 280
characters uh there has been some research which suggests that the increase in the character limit has actually had con quences for the uh you know for perceptions of real argument happening as opposed to people just uh setting out stances so I think that there is certainly something to be said
for the uh for the increased you know the increased dogmatism that is when you see the other side and what the other side actually says that there can be a a tendency towards polarization but I also see a lot of very interesting conversations happening on Twitter that uh I would you know that I would never
been exposed to uh before and over time maybe I've mellowed I've become much nicer I've become much more deliberate in not getting involved in confrontations or fights on Twitter myself because uh I just don't have time in my life and uh as a result I found it a much much more pleasant experience to
you know get to know people and uh not feel that when they say something that you think is uh idiotic or reprehensible that you necessarily have to argue with them because uh maybe tomorrow or the next day they'll say something that's more interesting and that brings you
back into feeling of communion wisdom shall we try some overrated versus underrated sure go ahead Bitcoin I think overrated why so I think that Bitcoin if you think about Bitcoin it is it is it it purports to be a a technological hack it's really I think uh an effort at a sociological hack and
I don't think it's particularly worked I think that we're going to see the uh underlying Technologies being adopted to the extent that they are useful for um for uh you know for for better financial services but I think that the the uh ideology of Bitcoin the idea that you
could effectively like some kind of like the uh villain and Rapunzel that you could create this uh machine for sewing value out of uh for sewing value out of rubbish you know so basically because that's what Bitcoin is it's turning wasted computer Cycles into something that people view as being a thing of
value I think I think that it's succeeded among a significant enough community that it's going to uh survive be around for a while I don't think it's ever going to take off beyond that Community the Slovenian theorist zek I don't have any very strong opinions I have never actually read Z I think that
means you think he's overrated then analytic Marxism analytic Marxism I think is well I think it's underrated I think it's going to come back now when I say analytic Marxism uh let me be specific about that I think that there's a lot of marks which I think is a flat out wrong and the analytic Marxist
project itself I think drove itself into a hole if you look at people like ster uh the other people who were strongly committed to it I think that they U that they you know eventually ended up uh figuring out that there wasn't if you wanted to make sense of marks you you're
going to come to the conclusion that eventually there wasn't much point there wasn't much sense to be made of it but nonetheless I think the basic underlying uh the the underlying idea which is that if you bring together rationalist perspectives with a direct concern with power relations and a desire to
understand power Rel in the Marxist and the viian uh way that this is something which is coming to the for again and I think which is something which is extremely valuable so somebody else who I think is uh underrated in this uh in this context is maner olssen and uh so for example I think if you want to
understand where Elizabeth Warren is going I think you want to go back to maner olsson's book on the rise and decline of Nations because I think what Elizabeth Warren is pursuing is very much an elonian view of how markets work uh that uh drag and dross and Corruption
builds up and that in order to allow markets to achieve their full potential you need to uh you know you you basically need to cleanse them at a certain point so I see Warren as being somebody who has very much taken on the uh law and economics training and you see I think big marks of that in her
thinking but who has turned it in a very different ideological Direction the economic future of bolognia Italy I've not been there in about 20 uh 20 odd years so uh I my sense is that the it's it's it's that the kinds of manufacturing community that I uh studied back then is still surviving but
I don't think it's thriving in nearly the same way uh but I really don't know enough to uh say I've not been there does Italy have any way out of its current box high levels of debt zero per capita income growth for now what 18 years doesn't it all have to end badly or is there a magic Escape it's a really
good question so the standard story of uh Italy according to people like Carlo trilia was that it was public weakness and private strength so more or less the idea was that you had this ridiculously over elaborated State structure regulations which made it extremely hard
to get things done and you had this incredibly Dynamic private sector that managed to survive and to thrive despite this and to produce to uh markets elsewhere now the question is I think for Italy that its big strengths was in manufacturing it was not in uh it was not not in computer science so it's or
in any of the new uh data related economy and so I think Italy's problem is that it is more than anything else it is stuck at in a previous cycle and it is it except in certain areas such as luxury eyewear uh which are not going to be to power in economy it has a very it's going to have a very great
difficulty in clambering out uh the interesting question I think is to what extent is the Chinese States kind of like Italy r large so you can see the same kinds of problems with this uh massive bloated state sector in China these big companies which are closely and intimately related with the state
you have these small private companies which have been incredibly powerful incredibly Dynamic incredibly successful I wonder whether China may suffer from a version of the Italian disease two or three decades from now and perhaps even more starkly because of the lack of democracy because uh you know because it
it it really I think is only possible to maintain that private dynamism for a period of time uh while the uh public economy doesn't provide for the uh you know does not provide the appropriate uh public goods uh sooner or later I think it just becomes impossible to maintain
the Irish musical group My Bloody Valentine overrated or underrated uh well I think this is something that we will agree uh I don't think it is possible to under eight uh my uh or two over eight rather my My Bloody Valentine uh they're they're just incredible and what's their best work so I I I I think
that the uh for me the uh track on the end of loveless soon is I think uh one of the uh most Sublime achievements I'm also very fond of uh Kevin chill's uh mbv archestra mix of the Primal scream song If they move killum I think that was released it was released first of all as a bside and then as a uh then on
the their next album I think it's like this kind of this this crazy sunra meets all sorts of strange guitar Distortion uh music I think it's very very good uh I'm I I think that they really are one of the essential groups and the uh that album which they released three or four
years ago I don't think was quite as good as they uh released back in their Heyday but it was still pretty damn good compared to what most of their contemporaries are doing for a 20-year Hiatus remarkable I would say yeah Finnegan's wake is it a readable book is it a good book I've never read it uh I
have a great uncle who features in ulyses but I've never read finigan wake what's the role of your great uncle in ulyses uh to appear as a drunk wind bag in the AOS chapter was he a Dr wind bag uh he was an interesting character I so he his real name was Hugh mcneel so he
appears as Professor McHugh in the aolis chapter he comes in he makes various remarks about the uh about about Greeks and Romans and the comparison to the Irish and the British more or less uh insinuating that the Greeks like the Irish are great Liars thieves tellers of stories and the Romans and the British
are great uh Builders of sewer systems and uh he was a lecturer in Classics as I recall at at the predecessor to University College Dublin uh had problems with gambling had problems with alcohol and ended up uh more or less uh being alienated from his family and dying alone in a boarding house uh
decades after so a rather sad story speaking of Ireland let's say I look at the last 30 35 years of Irish history and I say Ireland went from being very poor to being one of the wealthier European nations and this in essence just shows neoliberalism is correct and we don't need any more from the left
what would your response be I would say that a there is a certain amount of neoliberalism in there but maybe not in the uh quite the sense that you suggest well okay well there are two things first of all I would say in so far as there is anybody who's identified with neoliberalism in Ireland it is another
family member who is an uncle who is the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland Michael mcdu uh who I'm very fond of and who I have strong political disagreements with but I think that if one is to look at neoliberalism as a kind of a global power structure uh Plus possibly Ireland
managed to figure out very creatively very ingeniously ways to fit into that power structure that allowed for a massive uh massive inward investment so here specifically I think a lot of what Ireland has done over the last number of years is to figure out a combination of a regulatory play and a um and a
taxation play so it has been a relatively laxed place in uh in regulating uh various Financial activities in regulating platform economies and it has also uh been relatively willing to facilitate some uh very exotic tax Arrangements I think that the former of these still continues
and I think has managed to Kickstart a genuine uh Native industry which I think will uh continue to do very well I think that the latter part the taxation game is coming to an end and it's very clear that it's coming to an end people in the Central Bank have been making uh
statements about it more or less war warning the government that the uh fiscal implications uh to a cessation of Ireland's uh ability to finesse the uh Global tax system uh you know this is coming to an end and the Irish state is suddenly going to have a fiscal headache as a result which added to a possible uh
brexit headache could have uh some pretty significant implications Carl palan's book The Great transformation what was it if anything that he got wrong in there it's a brilliant book it's had massive influence on Danny rodri I think yourself many other people does it have a flaw it has many flaws so
I think it's a really I think it's a really interesting good book that everybody ought to read I also think that people ought to read shumpeter I think is the book on the right that uh people need to uh the capitalism social democ democracy book but what I would say that Pani is a very very well there
are two things that that that are fuzzy in it first of all is his uh is his uh ideal alternative which is based I think in a kind of notion a specifically specifically Christian notion of socialism that I think he deres from people like T which I think is very very hard to
create in the modern era so I think that there's a lot of pretty overt Nostalgia for a uh for a previous almost quasi medieval sense of organic connection between society and economy which I think simply cannot be reestablished under liberal conditions and the other thing that of course is very very vague
and wafty in uh PL is how it is that quote Society unquote reacts against the market reacts against these depredations of the marketplaces double movement that he talks about uh personally I tend not to believe in big uh abstractions such as society as explanations are social causes so I think that he captures
something real and I think if you want alternatively to say what palan gets right I think that there is something that can be said very plausibly about the ways in which many of the aspects of trump or alternatively of what we see happening with people like Orban and Kinski in uh centr Eastern Europe that
these can be explained as being reactions against uh overly harsh Market uh Market forces of one sort or another but the specific micro mechanics through which this happens are really really important and we still haven't really figured out what those micro mechanics are and I think trying to figure out how
to create a better Society is really going to force us to uh look at this much more specifically than a panian framework would allow allow us to do who or what will replace labor unions as the offsetting or special interest group to oppose capitalism or capitalists can we
really count on the urban professionals aren't they a bunch of spoiled brats I think labor unions are going to replace labor union so I think that we're going to have now that said this is a kind of a long-term bet which could of course turn out to be completely wrong but I
think that it's more or less impossible to imagine a world in which you have protection for a large large segments of the population that doesn't roughly resemble labor unions now this may be a very very different just as the platform economy involves a greater degree of disaggregation than standard work
practices one could imagine that uh one you know we're going to have to see labor unions being very very different in form but I think that they're important and it's also very interesting to see people like Asam moku and Robinson making a very important political case for labor unions saying
that if you're an economist you can't think about labor unions as being a first best solution because clearly they're about distribution and distribution of stuff to their members but if you're thinking about maintaining the underlying condition for uh democracy which presumably is a good
thing for markets and for Capital than having something like labor unions is necessary and I think that the way that nanan has moved and in particular the way that people like Brink Lindsay uh together with Steve Tellis have moved towards uh endorsement I'll be it was a
certain amount of gruder of labor unions really points to the realization by smart people on the center right and on the you know libertarian in tinged center right that this is something that uh uh that maybe Libertarians have gotten wrong over the last couple of decades Pudo arasmus issued the
following tweet a few weeks ago something like has any successful industrial policy been backed by a regime that took the side of Labor rather than business do you have a response H not off the top of my head I would have to think about that in terms of trust you've written a great deal on
trust what's the most solid piece of evidence or body of understanding we have and why some societies are higher trust than others well I tend to think about trust in terms of Institutions so there are different people who have different takes on this some people talk about trust in terms of this kind of
socially this Broad Social sense of optimism or happiness and things I tend to think that if you want to have trust you need to have well-functioning institutions which which that's circular in a way right um well it depends on what you say I I've got we I I could bore you for hours about how I think
that uh institutions work but uh if if you want to uh if you really want to I guess get the you know the feral sense of the uh social production function it's something like the following that you need uh rough levels of economic inequality which allow for institutions which are reasonably Fair which in turn
uh create uh the conditions for social trust a little bit on literature Gene Wolf book of the new Sun four volumes uh maybe you know the Monty Python skit where they do summarize PR and you have 10 seconds how would you summarize what's in those four volumes why is it interesting I would summar summarize it
as PR with Rock chipon and ray guns so I would say summarize PR to to summarize wolf wolf is proce with rockets and ray guns is it introspective it all seems to be in the sphere of action so we never know what the torture San is thinking or feeling or I don't know it confuses me
is he a good guy a bad guy I'm never sure well we know what he says he's thinking where of course but wealth misleads us systematically yes well wealth misleads us systematically and clearly s veryan is not a he is not reliable uh narrator but then neither is uh PR's narrator either and I think that
if you really want to understand where wol comes from it really is PR his his writing style is PR his pran his concern with time with how it is that time works is uh quintessentially prian and uh you don't look to Wolf anymore than you look to uh other science fiction I think for
characterization I don't think that's the particular strength what you do look is for a kind of a sense of the world and I think in in wolf in particular you know he provides this real understanding of how it is that the workings of society an interestingly conservative understanding of the working of society
and so I think of him almost as being PR in Reverse so PR is describing a world in which the modern world is overtaking aristocracy and that clearly is one of the great problems of PR is what is happening on the social level you know that you have all of these aristocratic
understandings these uh the the marenian uh all of these histories all of these castles all of this wonderful art and they are being replaced by by the modern world with its telephones with its electric lighting and so on and what how do you think about this how do you try to preserve what is happening in the
past and what wolf does which I think is an extraordinarily interesting thing which I think would be impossible for anybody who's not a science fiction writer is to take that and to reverse this and to imagine a world in which modernity has disappeared so it is at the other end of the uh the of the teles
it is this tiny image which is barely discernible if you look through the telescope the wrong way it has been surrounded and uh replaced and uh to some extent supplemented by medieval ways of uh thinking medieval ways of organizing the world and what that would that look like and it's very very
interesting there's this beautiful image one of my favorite images from the book of the new son is of the famous picture that was taken was it not by AR Armstrong himself but of Armstrong in his uh how on the moon with Neil Armstrong with the flag in the background and the reflection of the
other astronaut and uh and so wolf has this and H has it as a you know this is a picture which has been preserved for thousands of years perhaps in this uh in this Art Gallery which is uh maintained in this forgotten Citadel and so he gives you this wonderful sense of what
it would be to have an image like that taken and ripped entirely out of context and uh seen through an entirely alien set of eyes and that's what science fiction does when it does it well is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange in the novalis sense of the word and I think that uh you know
that's that's why for me wolf is a head trip Philip K dick in his worldview why do checks and balances fail in a democracy how do things go wrong right oh we're America we vote for people they give us things we live we die what's the actual problem so I think that Dick's Dick's understanding of politics is uh
at least his his uh intellectual understanding of politics is not his strength so he has this uh you know clearly he's got this very strong paranoid streak everything is about uh Richard Nixon which I suppose is not unreasonable uh given the way that the world is what I think dick gets much
much better than his sense of Politics as such or for that matter than his sense of character because uh he is absolutely terrible on character especially when it comes to women characters his women characters are all uh they are all expression of Dick's own personal anxieties in one way or another
what it gets better is the sense of massive complex systems that don't work particularly well the kinds of constraints that they impose upon individuals and the kinds of ways that people try to respond to those constraints and also of course the sense of profound unreality in his novels
which I think is really why dick much more than say Orwell or Huxley or any of the other people you might think of zatan is really the person who captures the kind of dystopian characteristics of the society that we live in at the moment which isn't a society where we have a stage telling everybody what to
think but it's a world in which nobody knows quite what to believe is true anymore and you have multiple different versions of the truth uh Philip K dick would have just raveled in qanon I think he would have had a a very very good sense of how it is that we could end up
in a world with people like Donald Trump and Q andon reinforcing each other in a kind of a feedback loop and what's the best of his creations and what's the most important and are they the same so the best of his Creations if you want to think of the best as a novel I think is
the transmigration of Timothy Archer which I think is plausibly the only genuinely good novel that he wrote and also is the only uh novel that has a sympathetic and interesting uh female character in it uh but it's not his most important work I mean I I think it's it's good at showing that towards the
end he managed to get some kind of a sense of himself from outside and of perspective on his struggles with mental health which clearly were both a driving creator Force for him and a source of much personal uh Agony and destruction I think that the works that are most
important I think are ubic and uh Martian time slip both of these I think capture these are the most the quintessential dick novels about how it is that reality can break up and what it feels like to be in that kind of world so if I think again about the kinds of you know when I feel depressed about the
way in which somebody like Donald Trump seems to dominate in very unhealthy ways ways our Collective imagination so that uh it's almost impossible to get away from I really think about one of the kinds of psychic predators that wolf describes you know uh Jory Graham I think it is if my memory is correct in
ubic you know this kind of very very the sense of the world in which all of these paths uh converge towards a single actor who just gobbles up all of our attention so you know uh dick doesn't have any very plausible way of getting out from the Asos of He suggests more or less
that we need some kind of divine intervention but uh it I think it captures some of the reasons why the world that we live in very often feels so unpleasant uh even when we don't want to pay attention to Donald Trump in the United States we find everybody around us wants to pay attention to Donald
Trump and Trump if nothing else seems to have a unique Mastery of uh the skill of remaining at the center of attention a few questions about Ireland what do you miss about Ireland the most what I miss is also what I'm happy to get away from which is the sense of comfort and belonging so Ireland is a very small
country within 60 seconds of having met Another Irish person you probably have figured out who that person's family are where they come from you will have made a wide variety of INF inferences about what kind of person they are what their plausible political beliefs are and so
on and that's very very comforting to be in it's also somewhat constraining and constricting so uh what I love about the United States is uh the precise opposite that nobody much cares about where you come from uh where you come from they if they think about Ireland at they think about it as being a small quaint Place
uh with leprechauns and green fields and what have you and uh so you have a much greater opportunity to make yourself and to decide who you are uh in the United States than in Ireland and uh at least if you are if you have the economic wherewithal to do it that makes uh Ireland uh in some ways a much more
confining a much more restrictive way place than the United States again assuming that you have uh enough money in the United States to be able to realize yourself why did Ireland seem to secularize faster than just about any other country in world history less than 30 years now the rate
of church going is very low it used to be one of the most religious Catholic places I think that it's a um it's what's his name Timmer Kuran I think that this is a Timmer Kuran story where you have the this set of beliefs and expectations which are mutually reinforcing because everybody believes
that everybody else uh believes them and that when this collapses the collapse can happen very very quickly indeed so I think we saw a massive wave of preference Revelation happening and it's pretty possible to pinpoint this the uh the point at which it happened uh one of
my professors was a character called Brian Farrell who was very well known for being quite careful and reticent because he was also a uh television broadcaster uh he ran the big Ireland current Uh current affairs show and then one day uh we had a the Revelation that a bishop who would become the
spokesperson for the Irish church had been found to have had a child and to have been supporting that child for 17 years using Church funds and uh that morning I or the following morning I saw Brian in the car parking University College Dublin and I saw him in absolute Glee saying the bastards they've lost
finally the bastards have lost and he was right because at that moment the uh the strangle hold which a certain version of conservatism had held on Ireland it it it began to evaporate very very quickly and after that I think that the uh you know the the having the church as a center of uh society as a
center of all these social functions all of these things began to disappear uh material Prosperity helped substantially as well but I really think that this would the reason why it happened so fast was because it should have happened 20 20 or 25 years before and it took a a
shock to the system to really cause this kind of this Cascade of Norm of Norm to generation so that people switched rapidly from one equilibrium to another last but not least e the Henry Farrell production function so at Crooked Timber you have a lot of readers right uh we do
although I feel guilty because I haven't been writing nearly as much in crooked Timber as I uh would like to but in in the equilibrium why aren't there more crooked Timbers what is the scarce input right why people like readers so I I think I think that crooked Timber I think that we had a useful Catalyst
function I think that uh if you look at the world today that there are a lot of people who are able to do the things that we were able to do in different mediums so if you look at the world you know that we began writing in this was the world where uh the uh the Iraq War was uh beginning I think we we started
writing just around the time that the that the Iraq War took off uh in which there wasn't much of an organized left and a coherent and systematic intellectual left in the United States there was more of one in the United Kingdom uh and so I think that in a sense that that isn't true anymore if
you look at the uh if you look at the left you may uh disagree or you may agree with what it says but there is a lot of thriving debate there's a lot of argument there are a whole bunch of journals uh schisms factions all of these things you was a much more lively much more thriving intellectual debate
than there was back then so in a sense we uh came into being at a moment when I think that the a lot of the energy of the left had run out so you had places like descent and other places which were really running on the uh accumulated energy of the 1960s and 1970s but which
were particularly strongly they weren't oriented towards the uh present day circumstances that they found themselves in now I think we're in a very different world where there just isn't as much need for a crooked Timber as there used to be because there are so many other places where people can write where
people can argue where people can find things to say and it's I think it's a very interesting intellectual phenomenon and uh that that that you you have a vibrant left which is also beginning to engage with the policy process I think again in a way that it hasn't for a long
long time if you think about just in general how you study things what is something you do that's non obvious and maybe most other intellectuals do not do you read standing on your head you go for long walks in the rain what what's well I think what do I do that's unusual I I would say I read widely and I play
with a lot of ideas most of which don't come to fruition so this is and again this is of the advantage of social media that you can toy with an idea you can turn it into a micro thread of three or four things on Twitter and you can throw it out into the world and you can see if it sticks
you can see if it grabs attention you can also see if you've worked it out to your own satisfaction and most of the time that's not going to work uh it's uh you know most of our intellectual products are failures uh but we live in a world where it's possible to throw to
throw these failures at a far far more rapid rate at other people and try to figure out what what works than in the past and so I found that to be an extremely useful way of uh of thinking through things and playing with Initial Ideas so kind of combinatorial iteration yeah yeah so effectively you know you
can think about it as a evolutionary Dynamic that uh that you know so this is a system in which it becomes you know you you throw out variations most of those variations fail some of those variations take root and then those variations can succeed far far better what's your favorite movie that's the
kind of question I secrets and lies actually Mike Lee Secrets lies last question your plans for the future intellectually what you will write or what you will do what can you tell us well what I'm really interested in at the moment two things first of all the weaponized interdependence work which
which we've talked about already so it probably doesn't bear much more talking about no the world will cooperate and serve you up much more content yeah yeah the world and and the world is maybe Co cooperating too much uh myself my coer are finding ourselves uh we're joke we
joke that we're on a treadmill because stuff keeps on happening people keep on asking us to write stuff and it's fun and it's exciting and it's wonderful to see your ideas go out there into the world but it also uh it also requires a lot of work to keep pedaling and also and I think this this is the uh PL
plausible fate of anybody who has a uh idea that takes off you see the idea effectively escaping your control so people are talking about what weaponized independence with respect to a much wider and broader and diffus range of phenomena than uh 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 so here maybe the intuition of something like the following so we have a standard set of arguments that have been extremely influential uh among Libertarians and I think more broadly in the world which
are derived from people like Hayek you know we have this uh uh this set of arguments which are beautifully expressed and which I think are very important arguments that hyek makes about how markets work extraordinarily well to gather all of this diffuse information this information which is
simply un encodable and to make it into something that can be uh useful by uh through the through the price mechanism so the price mechanism takes all of this tasset knowledge and makes it actionable in important ways uh the hyek and the misa's story is of course one where they
contrast this with State planning and they argue very plausibly that uh if you look at Central planning processes that these Central planning processes are never plausibly going to be able to compete with uh with with the market at least for doing that kind of thing I think that states can do lots of other
things I think that they underestimate that but that's a different argument what I also think is that democracy 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 the gner or the proper view of
society which is more or less that we have all of these people with different understandings different aims different aspirations Within societ soety and you want to do two things first of all you want to maintain peace among all of these quarreling um these quarreling people you 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 and 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 ranous and and squalled much of the time but to recognize that The Clash of debate of different ideas The Clash of perspectives also has a lot of
informational value and does things that markets can't 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 uh what are the kinds of Institutions that allows democracy to do this better
better or worse this I think is a major set of questions obviously there are lots of of other people who are doing good things on it but uh if I think about the other work that I'm doing with people like uh Cosmos shitti uh who you are familiar with uh with Hugo Mercier
and Melissa schwarzburg these are the kinds of ideas that we are trying to get at and also uh work with Bruce schneer which is thinking about the opposite side of this which is uh 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 uh various forms of informational attacks not only Russian type attacks but the kinds of attacks that uh domestic political actors uh seek to uh use in order to uh pursue their own short-term aims Henry farell
thank you very much thank [Music] you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show