Bounded Rationality and Politics

Martin L. Lasater (Author)

Policy in Evolution: The U.S. Role in China's Reunification

The reunification of Taiwan with China is one of the most important policy issues of our time. The i

Jacob Hale Russell (Author)

The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism

2,The problem with expertise--and the dark side of the equation "knowledge = power." Experts are not infallible. Treating them as such has done us all a grave disservice and, as The Weaponization of Expertise makes painfully clear, given rise to the very populism that all-knowing experts and their elite coterie decry. Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson use the devastating example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate their case, revealing how the hubris of all-too-human experts undermined--perhaps irreparably--public faith in elite policymaking. Paradoxically, by turning science into dogmatism, the overweening elite response has also proved deeply corrosive to expertise itself--in effect, doing exactly what elite policymakers accuse their critics of doing. A much-needed corrective to a dangerous blind faith in expertise, The Weaponization of Expertise identifies a cluster of pathologies that have enveloped many institutions meant to help referee expert knowledge, in particular a disavowal of the doubt, uncertainty, and counterarguments that are crucial to the accumulation of knowledge. At a time when trust in expertise and faith in institutions are most needed and most ...

Primavera De Filippi (Author)

Blockchain Governance

1,An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal thought shape the governance of blockchain communities, and are, in turn, shaped by blockchain technology. How can digital cash truly be "trustless"? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the "rule of code"? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance, Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers, and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more, in an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology, now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype, they show how blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions. Blockchain-based systems, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and countless others, offer new ways of organizing digital cash, "smart" contracts to execute transactions, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that ...