Boston Review:
The COVID-19 pandemic seems to take every public problem vast social inequality, political polarization, the spread of conspiracy theories and magnify it. Among these problems is the public’s growing distrust of scientists and other experts. As Archon Fung, a scholar of democratic governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has put it, the U.S. public is in a “wide-aperture, low-deference” mood: deeply disinclined to recognize the authority of traditional leaders, scientists among them, on a wide range of topics including masks and social distancing.
As the world continues to struggle through waves of disease, many seek a world more inclined to listen to scientific experts. But getting there does not require returning to the high-deference attitude the public may have once held toward experts. Turning back the clock may well be both impossible and undesirable. In a way, a low-deference stance toward experts and authorities is just what a well-functioning democ
Its authority derives not from unbiased experts but from the institutions and norms that structure their work.
The COVID-19 pandemic seems to take every public problem vast social inequality, political polarization, the spread of conspiracy theories and magnify it. Among these problems is the public’s growing distrust of scientists and other experts. As Archon Fung, a scholar of democratic governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has put it, the U.S. public is in a “wide-aperture, low-deference” mood: deeply disinclined to recognize the authority of traditional leaders, scientists among them, on a wide range of topics including masks and social distancing.
A conversation with Heather McGhee about the zero-sum thinking that has long dominated American attitudes to race and wealth and how to organize to secure public goods for everyone.
In this interview, Archon Fung speaks with Heather McGhee about her new book,
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather is a public intellectual, policy analyst, and political advocate who works on solutions to inequality. She is the former president of the think tank Demos and currently chairs the board of Color of Change.
• • •
Archon Fung: Heather, your new book has been getting a huge amount of well-deserved attention. Out of its many contributions, two struck me as especially important. First, I think you really effectively talked about racial injustice and inequality at the same time. I know a lot of people have been trying to do that, including myself, but it’s so hard for us to avoid this mental habit of either saying, “It’s race tha
President Joe Biden has portrayed the end of the Trump era as the return of US global leadership. But experts say America is in no place to lecture the wider