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Jan 2024
57m 46s

#53 Jason Brennan - The Case Against Dem...

Alex J O'Connor
About this episode

Jason Brennan is an American philosopher and business professo at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Brennan writes about democratic theory, the ethics of voting, competence and power, freedom, and the moral foundations of commercial society. (Wikipedia.) He speaks in this episode about the faults and flaws of democracy, and why people are often not as good as voting as they think they are.

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