Francis Fukuyama

Their words

One is Jennifer Pala's uh recoding America. I think she is the most insightful in a way critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. she understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how you know it could actually be reformed to do things better.

Their words

Uh the second one is Mark Dunkelman's why nothing works where he puts everything [snorts] in a bigger historical context a swing between uh Jeffersonianism where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the uh is the engine of change. and he argues that we've been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian uh perspective.

Their words

Uh the God Test. Um I think it actually, you know, he's been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed uh Jeffrey Hinton way back then. uh he's got the best explanation of how LLMs work for a lay person that I know of.

Their words

If it's okay with you, I put two of Larry's books on the list. I think they do need to be read in conjunction with one another because they're written perhaps ten years apart. The Spirit of Democracy still reflected the optimism of what Samuel Huntington labeled 'the third wave of democratization'.

Their words

Larry wrote the second book, Ill Winds, before that happened, but I think that it would simply confirm the kinds of anti-democratic trends that he saw arising in the United States.

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This book was published early on in the Trump administration, and it was a very useful warning. Maybe it was mainly useful to political scientists like me, because we used to have this idea of a 'consolidated democracy.' Basically, democratization is a one-way ratchet and once you became a democracy, you didn't fall back. What Levitsky and Ziblatt have done in this book is to show that that's not true, that you actually can have consolidated democracies that do decay and revert to authoritarian government.