How to Fix Democracy

Redistribute productivity | Sir Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford University. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, Sir Paul Collier explains why he thinks the biggest problem of capitalism in the last two centuries in the US and UK has been the concentration of moral load-bearing. While in the past, derailments of capitalism have been remedied by families and firms, along with governments, all taking responsibility, nowadays, that burden has concentrated in the state. Decentralization of political and economic power can be a way to reverse this, and the key is re-skilling workers whose labor has become less and less valuable outside of the few major clusters of knowledge intensive firms.

Individual choice | Gideon Rachman is the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. He was previously at the Economist for fifteen years, during which time he was a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington, and Bangkok, and editor of the business and Asia sections. In this interview with Andrew Keen, Rachman discusses how globalization has deepened conflict between capitalism and democracy. Individual choice is at the core of both capitalism and democracy, and so the two work better together than it may seem today, when anti-democratic, anti-globalist politics are emerging in many democratic, free market countries.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. In this interview, host Andrew Keen and Professor Wolff discuss the definition of capitalism from the Marxist perspective. When the system of capitalism experiences dire crises, Wolff argues, it has been natural to question the nature of the system itself, just as the financial crises of the early 20th and 21st centuries have prompted reforms of capitalism to varying extents. Today, the path to better political democracy, says Wolff, lies in stronger economic democracy.

Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, talks with host Andrew Keen about the impact capitalism has on the health of democracy. Both are powerful forces, she says, and are closely linked to such an extent that a crisis in one seemingly always leads to a crisis in the other. Historically it was naïve, she argues, to assume that democratic states would continue to strengthen during globalization, and we are now dealing with the consequences.

Amity Shlaes is a best-selling author, Chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, and Presidential Scholar at The King’s College in New York City. Her most recent book Great Society: A New History, presents a critical view of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to expand the social safety net and reduce poverty in the United States in the 1960s. Shlaes argues in this interview with Andrew Keen, our first remote interview of the series, that government intervention is not how the United States will economically recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, she recommends tax cuts and finding ways to bolster Wall Street to help the U.S. economy. To remedy this crisis, Shlaes argues, more people need to buy into America.

Sarah Miller, Executive Director of the American Economic Liberties Project, talks with host Andrew Keen about trust-busting. From the Gilded Age and the New Deal to the present day, their discussion touches upon how capitalism has been met with regulation over the last century. Miller argues that now is the time once again to revisit such measures as power, both economic and political, is concentrating in the hands of the few, thereby posing a threat to the health of American democracy.

In this episode, host Andrew Keen sits down with distinguished economist, Sir Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, and Senior Scholar at Princeton University. Sir Angus Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015 for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare, discusses why capitalism is no longer delivering happiness and quality of life for working class people in the United States. Instead, it has created growing inequality in the U.S. healthcare system as many Americans are deprived of health insurance and can no longer afford care, especially when they are unemployed. Deaton’s latest book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, written with his fellow Princeton economist and wife Anne Case, looks at precisely this issue: how a changing global economy can have dire public health consequences. Fixing healthcare inequality, Deaton argues in this interview, must be a top priority for the future of capitalism and democracy in the land of the American Dream.

Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Previously, he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Chief Economist at the IMF. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, Rajan calls capitalism today an uneven playing field that doesn’t efficiently skill people to meet the needs of the economy. This leads to unequal access to good jobs and growing income inequality. As a result, democracy has at times turned against capitalism. But Rajan reminds us that capitalism works best when there is economic competition, while democracy works best when there is political competition. With this in mind, Keen and Rajan discuss how these two forces can work better together.

Presidential Scholar at CUNY and author of Capitalism, Alone, Branko Milanovic kicks off the second season of How to Fix Democracy. He discusses elements of different capitalistic systems, such as in the United States and Denmark, and rejects the commonly held assumption that people universally value freedom over economic prosperity.

Considered one of the world’s leading experts on democracy, Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, believes democracy worldwide is in a recession. The crisis is “bad, deepening, accelerating,” but he suggests several steps we can take to reverse the trend, such as ranked choice voting to tackle the two-party system, and spreading “motor voter” laws to increase the number of registered voters. For Diamond, democracy is the only political system that can preserve freedom, which is itself intrinsic to being human.

Annika Savill, Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund admits that the word “democracy” doesn’t appear anywhere in the UN charter, but finds it exists in the demands of people everywhere who are working to hold their governments accountable. She tells Andrew Keen that, as a former journalist, she is passionate about facts and worried about clickbait and “tidbits of information without verification.” She also offers the concept of “citizens’ assemblies” as an alternative for referenda, and muses about exploring the relationship between “linguistic echo chambers” and democracy.

Prior to the 2016 election, Richard Stengel, former managing editor of Time magazine, witnessed the rise of disinformation firsthand from his position as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He believes that consuming media with caution could be a powerful antidote to efforts to deceive us,  and is skeptical that governments attempting to “counter” disinformation on social media platforms is the correct approach. From the limits of free speech laws to legislation erring on the side of privacy, Stengel and host Andrew Keen discuss what does and doesn’t work in the information wars.

Leon Botstein, music director and conductor, scholar, and president of Bard College in upstate New York, had once thought that the Berlin Wall would never come down. And he found the revolutions surrounding 1989 “frightening” because they could lead to the ascent of unregulated capitalism and the release of suppressed nationalism. Botstein explains that democracy “is harder than people expected” and worries that we are spending too much time staring at our smartphones and “mesmerized by nothing” rather than finding meaning and value by our own activity.

Referenced in the interview: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/college-behind-bars/

Consumer advocate, lawyer, and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader believes that democracy is about civic organization, not just public opinion. In his assessment, the American people have lost perspective and ceded control of politics to “big money.” But they should understand that there is broad popular support for many of the things they want, and the key is Congress. Nader, who made a career on circumventing big business control in Washington, urges Americans to put the focus on Congress, the most powerful branch of government, and remarks that, historically, it’s only taken concerted effort from 1% of the population to push major change. He reminds the public that there is something that politicians want more than money from special interests: your vote.

Canadian political philosopher and writer John Ralston Saul discusses how the crisis in democracy today is self-inflicted and intentional. The people, he says, have given up holding power themselves, accepting instead to gain influence over power. In pursuing good causes they have turned over the levers of power to business and the higher echelons of government. To fix democracy, Ralston Saul hopes that citizens — a concept he says has been abandoned —  will seek to participate in democracy at local levels in order to reclaim the foundations of democratic power.

Rob Riemen, Dutch philosopher and founder of the Nexus Institute, names Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher, as one of the first great minds to understand the importance of democracy. Spinoza, he says, saw that only democracy would be able to put human dignity and individual freedom first. But maintaining democracy, Riemen says, is not about institutions. Instead, it relies on cultivating the “spirit of democracy” through liberal education.

Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, recalls how the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States marked a turning point, derailing the idea that democracy would simply continue its forward march in history. His hope, however, is that democracy’s current regression spurs people around the world to defend it more vigorously.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Constanze Stelzenmüller discusses how domestic problems have led to disruptions in foreign policy—turning partners into rivals. At home, many democracies are struggling with balance: between national security and privacy, the political center and the peripheries, or direct and representative democracy. Stelzenmüller goes into detail about the many aspects we should re-evaluate, particularly in Germany, France, the UK, and the United States. And she relishes the challenge for her generation to preserve democracy for the future.

Rappler CEO and co-founder Maria Ressa got her start as a journalist in the Philippines in the 1980s and has seen the pendulum of democracy swing in both directions since. In her interview with Andrew Keen, Ressa—who was among the journalists named Person of the Year by Time Magazine in 2018—dives into the way that “lies laced with anger” have spread faster than facts across social media, playing to the worst of human nature and undermining democracy. As we find ourselves in a political environment she likens to dystopia and chaos, Ressa asks us all to reflect on the values that guide us.

Yascha Mounk, associate professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and expert on the rise of populism, describes three main challenges to democracy: the stagnation of living standards in developed democracies, cultural and demographic changes that are shifting the status quo, and the social media’s domination. These elements have combined to increase the supply of “noxious ideas” that have led to factions and division in the United States and other countries. One way to reverse this process, Mounk argues, is to resist divisive ideology in favor of what he calls “inclusive nationalism.”