494. The Limits of Liberal Rationalism feat. William Davies

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

With more and more data available about each of us all the time, what are the consequences of rapid data-driven decision making by organizations, and what are the implications of it for democracy and social well being?

William Davies teaches Politics at Goldsmiths University of London and is the author of several books, including Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason.

Greg and William discuss how the ongoing crises are misunderstood by elites, and reasons behind the decline in public trust toward experts. William goes over the impact of advancements in behavioral economics, and how modern political and economic phenomena are influenced by historical and sociological contexts.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Brexit
• Friedrich Hayek
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Frankfurt School
• Michel Foucault
• Scientific Management
• Elton Mayo
• Mary Poovey
• Dominic Cummings
• Boris Johnson
• Jeremy Bentham
• Thomas Hobbes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Goldsmiths University of London
• WilliamDavies.blog
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
• The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
• The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society)
• Economic Science Fictions

Episode Quotes:

True happiness lies in quality time, not more work or consumption

53:18: This science of happiness proves, not that surprisingly, that actually spending time doing things that we consider to be intrinsically worthwhile, like hanging out with our families or pursuing activities in the outdoors that we enjoy doing, is more likely to make us happy than simply working more and consuming more. This is not a mystery. Most people intuitively understand this, but that would then point towards a set of policy goals regarding work-life balance and the rights to log off and to not always be at the beck and call of your manager, and that thing. So, those are more about empowering people than just fixing them the whole time.

How social media weaponizes our comparisons to others

30:35: I think one of the things that a lot of political psychology and economic psychology demonstrate quite convincingly, and I think that this is something that social media platforms weaponize, is that, when we compare ourselves to others, it makes us far more unhappy than economics.

Why culture mass surveillance aligns with conspiracy theory

46:35: [The] culture of mass surveillance goes hand in hand with a mentality of conspiracy theory because a conspiracy theorist believes, in some ways, quite correctly, that there's all this other stuff going on; you don't yet know about it, but someone else knows about it, and they're right! And that, in a way, has always been a feature of conspiracy theory, of social life. There's always been more to political institutions than meets the eye, but what there wasn't in the past was this capacity for vast quantities of data to suddenly come spewing out and often discrediting quite famous and quite powerful people.