A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Monthly Archive: June 2026

General

 by 

Incentivizing Democracy

Two global crises are troubling policy-makers, academics, and large swaths of the general public. The first one is political, currently unfolding, and could be best labelled as a crisis of democracy. As the latest V-DEM Report on Democracy shows, the gains of the so-called “third wave of democracy” have been almost completely wiped out, with democracy worldwide going back to 1978 levels. Only 7% of the world population are now considered to live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, global dissatisfaction with democracy among ordinary citizens has reached unprecedented levels in the last few years. The other crisis is economic, currently looming, and is traceable to the impact that loosely regulated AI development is likely to have for the job market. While it is too early to offer more than potential scenarios for this evolution, even in the near to medium-term future, there is a fairly widespread sentiment that the consequences of AI for employment, at least in some sectors, will be rather pernicious. For example, most business executives believe that AI is likely to displace a large number of existing jobs, while about two thirds of both EU and US citizens believe that AI will lead to more jobs dissappearing than being created. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has strikingly predicted as recently as January 2026 that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years. In this piece I briefly outline an institutional proposal, which is not novel but instead has excellent historical pedigree, that could contribute to attenuate these crises if coupled with other kinds of substantive democratic reforms.

Athenian Tetradrachm

Source: https://www.navic.org.au/numismatic-items/the-athenian-tetradrachm/

(more…)

Democracy / Duties / General

 by 

Partisanship and the ethics of citizenship

An important body of literature has documented, and sometimes lamented, the decline of partisanship over the last few decades. Party membership and partisan identification seem to have decreased significantly, while skepticism towards partisan politics has increased among populations of consolidated democracies. However, as I argue in a recent article, while some aspects of this evolution are worrisome, it is unclear that we should regret the age of massive partisan loyalty. While parties may be essential to a well-functioning democracy for a diversity of reasons, partisanship, understood as the sustained commitment by citizens to a particular political party, is more ambivalent. In other words, parties may be more valuable than partisanship.

Strawberry Thief printed textile designed by William Morris (1883).
(more…)

Children / Economics / Gender / General / MediaPhilosophy / Public Philosophy / Technology

 by 

‘Polluter Pays’: A Tax on Big Tech to Reduce Online Harms

Mihaela Popa-Wyatt and Ajinkya Deshmukh from The University of Manchester.

Image credit

That platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook operated by Big Tech companies cause harms to their users is now a well-established fact. The US Surgeon General has repeatedly warned that adolescent mental health and body image are adversely affected by social media. Large-scale studies from Canada and the UK show that this is not specific to the US. The thornier issue is: how do we mitigate these harms? A popular policy solution has been banning social media for young people. Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia have done this, while France, Finland and several other countries are considering it.

72% of children aged 8–12 are still accessing sites and apps with a minimum age of 13

– Ofcom

The problem is that bypassing age-restrictions is trivially easy for many children. Ofcom research shows that “72% of children aged 8–12 are still accessing sites and apps with a minimum age of 13”. Unless there is a concerted global effort such that even technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) cannot circumvent bans, this bypassing is unlikely to stop. We think a better solution is to tax the companies that build these products based on how their algorithms amplify harmful content. Here is why this is better than bans.

(more…)