Public Debate and Institutional Legitimacy

Steps towards radical redesign

Public debate seems like an important part of changing big systems. When modern nations formed, there was lots of public discussion and debates. In the US, for example, there were arguments in the newspapers about how the US government should work, later collected as the federalist and anti-federalist papers.

It’s time for new discussions like this — not just about democratic systems, but about social networks, property, and many other things. But it’s harder to have such discussions these days. One reason is that a certain kind of expertise is required both among those writing and among their readers. This expertise is about evaluating whether proposed institutional ideas are, in fact, good ideas.

This used to be a subject that many intellectuals and much of the public was interested in. But the evaluation of institutions has since become arcane, abstrusely academic, and balkanized into subfields. Nowadays it’s rare to find someone who is broadly familiar with the economics of institutions AND the sociology of institutions AND political theory. A modern academic would specialize in just one of these fields, ignoring the others. For the broader public, the whole subject seems unapproachable.