Tagged “politics”
- Fighting the Wrong Battle: How the Academic Left Chose the Wrong War
- Is Religion an Ideology?
- Phones Moved Toward Freedom One Concession at a Time, and So Does Power
- A Cellular Network Nobody Owns Is Technically Easy and Politically Forbidden
- The Limits of Understanding: Do the Social Sciences Actually Explain Anything?
- A Society Can Be Watched Closely and Still Be Free, on Three Conditions
- A Fifty-Fifty Election Extracts Almost No Information From the Public
- Why Elections Come Out Fifty-Fifty Even When Every Issue Has a Clear Majority
- Why a Representative Government Cannot Settle an Issue Even When the Public Has Settled It
- What Are Elections Actually For?
- Voting for a Person Is How You Get Rid of the Responsibility to Understand
- The Rift Between the People and the Government Widens on Its Own
- Representation Does Our Understanding for Us, and Keeps the Change
- You Want the Smartest Surgeon and an Ordinary Prime Minister, and That Tells You What Governing Is
- The State Got Smaller Than the Things It Regulates, and Our Fear Did Not Move
- Every Right We Have Was Pried From a Closed Fist, and Look What Is Still in It
- Treat the Government as a Black Box and Measure the Distance to the Public
- Capitalism, Human Rights and Representative Democracy Arrived Together, and That Is Not a Coincidence
- Read the Spec of Representative Democracy as If Someone Were Proposing It Today
- Graph How Often People Throw Out Their Governments, and Watch the Ideology Disappear
- Representative Democracy Is Designed to Make Half the Country Distrust Its Government
- Politics Moved Into the Workplace Because It Had Nowhere Else to Go
- We Trust the Judges We Did Not Choose More Than the Representatives We Did
- Government Has Less Unity of Purpose Than Any Corporation, and by Design
- Democratic Values Need Constant Maintenance, and That Tells You Who Is Eroding Them
- The Consent of the Governed Is Not Given, It Is Assumed
- Religion and Modernity Collide Harder Every Year, and Not Every Religion Braked in Time
- Why the Religious Right Believes People Are Bad
- Nobody Has a Get-Out-of-Politics Card
- Representative Democracy Cannot Bind Its Future Self
- Weinberg Was Too Kind: Religion Does Not Need Good People to Do Evil
- Cultural Relativism Protects Religion Far More Than It Protects Politics
- We Have Been Lucky With Our Superpower, and We Should Say So
- Wars Have Several Causes, and the Betrayal of the People Is Only One
- The Singularity Breaks Ideologies
- Why There Are Different Societies, and Why Their Meetings Go Badly
- A Population More Radical Than Its Regime Is a Dictator's Best Insurance
- The Authoritarian Wave Has Several Causes, and the Largest Is That Democracy Is Not Working
- Freedom May Have a Speed Limit, but No Country Is Anywhere Near It
- The Zeitgeist Has a Direction, and Communication Is What Drives It
- Our System Hands Extra Power to the People Most Certain They Are Right
- Polarization Has Five Authors, and We Are One of Them
- The Central Bank Is a Standing Vote of No Confidence in Our Representatives
- Both the Left and the Right Contradict Themselves, and Neither Notices
- Austrians and Keynesians Agree on One Thing, and It Is the Important One
- Trust in Government Is Not a Nicety, It Is the Thing That Makes a State Work
- World Politics Runs on Six Factors, Each Simple to Understand and Impossible to Predict
- Printing Money Is a Tax, and Should Be Judged Like One
- The Enemy Within Is Not a Dictator's Belief, It Is His Equipment
- Representative Government Is Harder to Topple Than a King, and That Is Not Only Good News
- Realpolitik Is Usually a Cover Story, and We Have No Way to Check
- There Are Only Two Levers on Human Behaviour, and We Can Pull One
- I Do Not Trust the Doomsday Clock Is Three Different Objections, and All of Them Fail
- Political Change Is the Last Step, Not the First
- If You Had to Give Up One Election, Give Up the City
- We Say All Cultures Are Equal Because We Do Not Trust Our Government
- A Pre-Commitment to Expropriate the Rich If the Climate Breaks
- Every Year a Regime Buys Its Population, the Eventual Reform Gets More Dangerous
- Why You Stay With Your Side Even When the Other Side Is Right
- The Lottery Salesman Who Agreed With Me and Kept Selling
- Work on the Whole Society, Not the Neighbourhood
- A Law That Forces the Legislature to Answer One Question Every Two Months
- Politics Is About Organizations, Not People
- If Groups Differ, a Predictor Will Discriminate, and Blinding It Makes It Worse
- The Men Who Lied About Iraq Also Killed People in the Pandemic
- Free-Floating Rationales: Why Nobody Wanted the Policy You Are Living Under
- Orwell Was Right About the State, and That Is No Longer the Whole Problem
- Coalition Politics Is an Iterated Game That Ends Every Election, So Everyone Defects
- Atatürk and the Uncomfortable Case for the Interim Autocrat
- A Society Can Be Too Free to Defend Itself From the People Inside It
- Arguing About What an Ideology Really Means Is the Misdirection
- Rawls Designed Principles for Institutions and Forgot What Institutions Do to Principles
- Two Organizations Can Be Allies on Monday and Enemies on Tuesday, and Both Are Sincere
- When an Institution Fails in an Emergency, Inject Randomly Chosen Citizens Into It
- Legal Language Is the Wrong Language for Politics
- Justice Costs a Lawyer, and That Is Not an Accident
- You Fight Differently When Everything You Own Is on the Beach
- The Police Do Not Get to Interpret the Law
- Institutions Made Us Moral, Philosophers Just Wrote About It
- I Accuse the Israeli Political System
- A Peace With an Autocracy Is a Peace With One Man
- Forty Years of Secrecy Is the Length of a Career, and That Is Not a Coincidence
- Cryptocurrency Removes the One Thing That Kept Decentralized Organizations Poor
- Every Ideology Explains Less Than the One Before It, and That Is the Point
- The Extremists Are Being Born Where Nobody Is Allowed to Argue With Them
- If Existential Risk Is What Matters, Direct Democracy Is Not Optional
- Why Truth-Finding Rejects Democracy but Politics Requires It
- Every Catastrophe Is Paid For in Liberties, and the System Is Glad to Collect
- Political Science Is Not a Science Because Its Biggest Truths Cannot Be Said
- A Basic Income Would Let People Speak, Which Is Exactly Why It Is Opposed
- We Could Rent Everything and Tax the Rest, and No Government We Have Could Make It Happen
- Russell's Fear That Culture Decides Truth
- Capitalism Feeds Us and Then Has to Convince Us We Are Hungry
- Housing Is a Product You Must Buy, and Capitalism Has No Answer for Those
- Half of Our Alienation Is Biology, the Other Half Is Policy
- You Cannot Fool All the People All the Time, So Do Not Let a Decision Stand Still
- Everyone Who Wants World Government Has No Route to It, Except One
- Free Societies Are Resented Because Their Governments Arm the Jailers
- Dispersed Power Is More Moral
- Jefferson Wrote Down the Right to Replace a Government, and We Filed It Away
- Gouldner's New Class Finally Has a Room to Meet In
- We Already Pay the Price of Freedom, We Just Do Not Collect the Goods
- We Demand Freedoms We Have Never Weighed
- Seven Things Wrong With Sortition
- Three Conditions Decide Whether Direct Democracy Can Take Root
- Direct Democracy Does Not Decide Technical Questions, It Decides Who Inspects Them
- Trading With Dictators Is a Nash Equilibrium, and Only a Coalition Can Leave It
- A War the Majority Chose Is a War You Can Fight
- A Weak Regime Cannot Hold the Social Contract Together
- Four Roads to Direct Democracy, and Why the Destination Is More Certain Than the Route
- A Voting Formula for a Party That Takes Its Orders From the Public
- Direct Democracy Will Not Slide Back Into Autocracy, Because Nobody Wants It To
- Direct Democracy Can Be More Liberal Than Any Representative Regime
- Biology Proves Hierarchy Is Optional
- Direct Democracy Is the Open Wrestling of Groups, and Open Is Better
- Direct Democracy Is Also a Weapon in the Struggle Between Regimes
- The Planet Would Vote Against Nuclear Weapons, and Cannot
- Representative Government Hoards Information, and the Hoarding Is the Point
- Large Events Come From Stored Tension, and Direct Democracy Releases It Early
- Climate Change Will Be Used to Roll Back Democracy Unless the System Changes First
- Small Anarchism Could Be Right and Still Not Worth Supporting
- The Attribution Error Is What Keeps the Political System Unquestioned
- Religion as a Private Benefit Paid For by the Public
- The Missing Solidarity of Israeli High-Tech
- Institutions Almost Never Die, and That Fact Is Evidence
- A Book Idea: Are We Steering, or Drifting?
- Freedom as a Conserved Quantity
- The Business Cycle Has a Political Factor Economists Leave Out
- The Higher You Climb, the Less Free You Are
- The Two-Party System Corrupts Institutions, Not Just Voters
- You Could Be Consistently Libertarian in 1970 and Socialist in 2020
- What Do Hierarchies Actually Select For?
- The System Asks What Wins, Never What Is Right
- "Everyone Is Entitled to Their Own Beliefs" Is Nearly Empty
- Representative Government Forces Every Debate to the Wrong Altitude
- Should Society Push People to Act Against Their Instincts?
- Leaders Believe Their Own Ideology Less Than the Public Does
- The Structural Advantages of Being a Known Political Liar
- Buchanan, Olson, and the Economic Case for Direct Democracy
- "Don't Ask Me About My Politics" Is How Bankrupt Systems Defend Themselves
- Minimum Wage Is to Economics What Gay Marriage Was to Culture
- Design the Process, Don't Write the Law
- Ranking Humanity's Problems by Tractability, Not Severity
- Organizational Corruption Differs in Kind from Personal Corruption
- Political Problems May Need a Language We Have Not Built Yet
- Foreign and Security Policy: More Guts Than Brains?
- On Mike Tyson, Survivor, and the Binding of Ehud