How to Fix Democracy

No Nostalgia   Jan Sowa is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. In this interview, he explains the Marxist view of capitalism as more than an economic system. The social and cultural aspects of a capitalist system are just as important and have shaped democracy in the modern era. In Sowa's view, democracy must continue to develop beyond its current structures and p...

Laboratories of Democracy   Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America, a think tank in Washington, DC. In this interview, she discusses with host Andrew Keen possible structural changes to American democracy, including adopting ranked-choice voting and re-thinking campaign finance. She argues that capitalism--it's ethos and influence--has infected the political process. American politicians h...

Crisis of Confidence Ian Bassin is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy, a non-profit created to fight threats to democracy in America. Bassin explains some of the factors eroding liberal democracy in the United States, including economic causes. From tackling voter suppression and checks and balances in the federal government, this interview covers a wide range of challenges...

Mark Blyth is William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics at Brown University. In this interview, he discusses how our economics are rife with anger and frustration. Blyth's "angry-nomics" emerged from financial crises and a decline in social institutions, like unions, that give people feelings of stability and control. In this frank discussion of the conflicts between our economics and...

Political Power without Capital? Peniel Joseph, Professor of Public Affairs and Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the University of Texas at Austin, explains the critical views of capitalism that emerged in the American Civil Rights movement. Major figures in this movement, like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, explored social democratic and socialist...

Listening to Others Arlie Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent work deals with the rise of the American far-right. Her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right , was built on interviews with Tea Party supporters in Louisiana. For Hochschild, it is important to understand the feelings behind political v...

Winner Takes All   Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management Emeritus at Cornell University's SC Johnson Graduate School of Management. What does a winner take all ethos in capitalism mean for democracy? Robert Frank discusses with Andrew Keen what the concentration of wealth amongst the best of the best and the sinking top tax rates means for conceptions of equality a...

Four Horsemen of Leveling Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and the Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. Scheidel specializes in the history of economic inequality, and his book The Great Leveler examines what forces have reduced economic inequality throughout history. Politicians a...

This Is When You Want Deficits Maya MacGuineas is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and an expert on budget, tax, and economic policy. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, they discuss the economic threats to democracy in America, in particular the loss of trust in our institutions and in the very system of capitalism. At the core of this loss of trust...

System Attrition Adam Tooze is Director of the European Institute & Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. In this interview with Andrew Keen, he discusses the past relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy and how the development of the two went hand-in-hand in the modern era towards a high-point, in large part due to the wars of the 20th century....

Describing the Deficit Stephanie Kelton is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Stony Brook University focusing on monetary policy and public finance. In this interview, she explains modern monetary theory (MMT) and clarifies some of the myths surrounding spending deficits, especially concerning the U.S. federal government's massive debt. MMT is a change in the way the government explains...

Us Later, Not Me Now Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University Business School. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, she explains how she has been re-imagining capitalism. Free markets, Professor Henderson argues, need to be balanced with free politics, mirroring what many others in How to Fix Democracy Season 2 have identified as a core linka...

All About Taxes  Gabriel Zucman is an Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley. In this interview, hosted by Andrew Keen, Professor Zucman discusses issues of taxation and tax havens. According to Professor Zucman, a major problem within free market capitalism is tax avoidance. He argues that in a gl...

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-beari...

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 a...

Reform and Revolution 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...

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...

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 Andr...

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 concent...

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, discuss...

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 t...

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 th...

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...

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 s...