The Governance Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance Podcast, CSGS Director Mark Pennington speaks with Dr Samuel Bagg about his recent book - The Dispersal of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, published by Oxford University Press. The book presents an in depth consideration of the problem of 'elite capture' and the possible strategies to address this. 

The Guest

Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before moving to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.His research aims to ground democratic theorizing in a realistic picture of the dynamics of social inequality and political power. Among other venues, it has appeared in the American Political Science Review; the American Journal of Political Science; the Journal of Politics; Perspectives on Politics; the Journal of Political Philosophy; the European Journal of Political Theory; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; Social Philosophy and Policy; Social Theory and Practice; and Political Research Quarterly. 

About the Talk

In this episode of the Governance podcast, our Director Mark Pennington speaks to Prof. William Easterly from New York University on liberal vs paternalist approaches to economic development policy.

The Guest

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute, which won the 2009 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award. He is the author of three books: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (March 2014), The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), which won the FA Hayek Award from the Manhattan Institute, and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001). He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed academic articles, and has written columns and reviews for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Review of Books, and Washington Post. He has served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and as Director of the blog Aid Watch. He is a Research Associate of NBER, and senior fellow at BREAD. Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009, and Thomson Reuters listed him as one of Highly Cited Researchers of 2014. He is also the 11th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio.

Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other.

Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies.

Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Professor Cass R. Sunstein. This episode is titled "The Use of Algorithms in Society", and discusses the various ethical and moral dilemmas and implications of increasing AI us in society, and its impact on both social and economic factors.    The Guest

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr. Steven Klein interviews Prof. Martin Weale from the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. This episode is titled “UK Pensions Crisis and Central Banking”. This episode discusses the pension funds sell-off that occurred following the UK government's mini-budget in early October 2022 and which led to the Bank of England's intervention.    The Guest Martin Weale is Professor of Economics at King's Busines School. Martin graduated in 1977 in Economics from Clare College, Cambridge. On graduating he took up an Overseas Development Institute Fellowship at the National Statistics Office in Malawi. He returned to Cambridge in 1979 to work on economic modelling projects directed by Sir Richard Stone and Professor James Meade, before becoming an Assistant Lecturer in 1987 and subsequently a Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics and Politics. He was elected a Fellow of Clare College in 1981.   Martin is an applied economist with an interest in macro-economic and micro-economic problems. Recent work includes exploring the effects of the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme and an exploration of the relationship between the education of parents and that of their children. In 2016 he joined the Office for National Statistics Panel of Economics Experts and he is currently developing work on democratic measures of economic performance. 

 

This episode explores Prof McCloskey’s criticism of the way the discipline of economics has unfortunately been separated from matters of ethics, the importance of liberal values for human progress, and her calls for a human-centered approach to economics called ‘humanomics’.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Danielle Guizzo from University of Bristol. This episode is titled “Cultures of Expertise in Economics”. This episode explores the way in which the discipline of Economics has evolved over the years, the way economists achieved their status as scientific experts, and how pluralism and diversity may be promoted within the wider discipline.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Erwin Dekker from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

This episode is titled “Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons”, which features Erwin’s recently co-edited volume with Cambridge University Press, Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons.

The Guest

Dr. Erwin Dekker is senior fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

He has recently published Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021) and The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016), as well as the edited volume Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons (2021) all with Cambridge University Press.

He has published in professional journals regarding history of economics, methodology of economics, cultural economics and economic sociology. He is currently working on a history of the intellectual descendants of the German Historical School as well as a project on markets at the margins of society, so-called grey zones.

He has previously worked as assistant professor of cultural economics at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Associate Director Dr. Samuel DeCanio interviews historian Niall Ferguson from the Hoover Institution. This episode is titled “Counterfactual History with Niall Ferguson”.

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Carmen Pavel from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. This episode is titled “Sovereignty and International Law”, which features Carmen’s recently published book with Oxford University Press Law Beyond the State.