What Is the Proper Place of Technocracy in Democracy? | Margaret Levi Interviewed by Avital Balwit

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Glen Weyl wrote, "While technical knowledge, appropriately communicated and distilled, has potentially great benefits in opening social imagination, it can only achieve this potential if it understands itself as part of a broader democratic conversation." My talk will lay out what kinds of technical knowledge have these benefits and under what conditions. It will provide some historical context going back to the Technocracy Movement, which arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most importantly, I will elaborate what is required to ensure that democracies can take advantage of the best scientific and expert knowledge without undermining democratic decision-making and accountability processes.

SPEAKERS

Margaret Levi is Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and professor of political science, Stanford University. She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College and PhD from Harvard University. She is the 2019 recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. She was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004-5. Her books include the sole-authored Of Rule and Revenue and Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism and the coauthored Analytic Narratives; Cooperation without Trust?; In the Interest of Others; and Labor Standards in International Supply Chains. She is general coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science and an editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics.

Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She wrote her capstone thesis on regulatory questions concerning the Big Five technology companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) in the areas of privacy, antitrust, and taxation. She also writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has work published in Kanstellation, and New Reader Magazine, and forthcoming in World Weaver Press. She won the Atlantic's 2020 poetry contest.