Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Successful democracies throughout history--from ancient Athens to Britain on the cusp of the industrial age--have used the technology of their time to gather information for better governance. Our challenge is no different today, but it is more urgent because the accelerating pace of technological change creates potentially enormous dangers as well as benefits. Accelerating Democracy shows how to adapt democracy to new information technologies that can enhance political decision making and enable us to navigate the social rapids ahead. John O. McGinnis demonstrates how these new technologies combine to address a problem as old as democracy itself--how to help citizens better evaluate the consequences of their political choices. As society became more complex in the nineteenth century, social planning became a top-down enterprise delegated to experts and bureaucrats. Today, technology increasingly permits information to bubble up from below and filter through more dispersed and competitive sources. McGinnis explains how to use fast-evolving information technologies to more effectively analyze past public policy, bring unprecedented intensity of scrutiny to current policy proposals, and more accurately predict the results of future policy. But he argues that we can do so only if government keeps pace with technological change. For instance, it must revive federalism to permit different jurisdictions to test different policies so that their results can be evaluated, and it must legalize information markets to permit people to bet on what the consequences of a policy will be even before that policy is implemented. Accelerating Democracy reveals how we can achieve a democracy that is informed by expertise and social-scientific knowledge while shedding the arrogance and insularity of a technocracy.

Information technology --- Technological innovations --- Democracy. --- Democratization. --- Democratic consolidation --- Democratic transition --- Self-government --- Breakthroughs, Technological --- Innovations, Industrial --- Innovations, Technological --- Technical innovations --- Technological breakthroughs --- Technological change --- Political aspects. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / General. --- LAW / Science & Technology. --- POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / General. --- POLITICAL SCIENCE / General. --- Political science --- Equality --- Representative government and representation --- Republics --- Creative ability in technology --- Inventions --- Domestication of technology --- Innovation relay centers --- Research, Industrial --- Technology transfer --- New democracies --- Internet. --- administrative government. --- artificial intelligence. --- bias. --- collective decision making. --- computational advances. --- computer. --- cultural cognition. --- democracy. --- dispersed media. --- earmarks. --- education reform. --- elections. --- empirical analysis. --- empiricism. --- federalism. --- friendly AI. --- governance. --- government data. --- information age. --- information costs. --- information markets. --- information technology. --- innate majoritarian bias. --- knowledge falsification. --- machine intelligence. --- majority rule. --- modern technology. --- political bias. --- political campaigns. --- political culture. --- political decision making. --- political information. --- political life. --- political prediction markets. --- politics. --- public action problem. --- public policy. --- regulation. --- representation. --- social governance. --- social knowledge. --- social planning. --- social policy. --- social science. --- social-scientific knowledge. --- special interests. --- status quo. --- technocracy. --- technological acceleration. --- technological change. --- term limits.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Ziyaret Tepe, the ancient city of Tušhan, was a provincial capital of the Assyrian Empire, in its day the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The excavations captured in this innovative book uncovered the palace of the governor, the mansions of the elite and the barracks of the rank and file, charting the history of the empire from its expansion in the early 9th century BC to its fall three centuries years later.The great mound of Ziyaret Tepe, with its accumulated layers rising 22 metres above the surrounding plain, is a record of thousands of years of human occupation. In the course of 18 seasons of fieldwork, both the lower town and the mound looming up over it yielded the secrets of Tušhan, today in southeast Turkey, near the border with Syria. This has always been frontier country.Elaborate wall paintings, a hoard of luxury items burned in a cremation ritual 2,800 years ago, and a cuneiform tablet that hints at a previously unknown language are among the team’s exceptional finds.The story of the project is told by the specialists who dedicated years of their lives to it. Geophysicists, ceramicists, readers of cuneiform, experts in weaving, board games and Neo-Assyrian politics joined archaeologists, zooarchaeologists, archaeobotanists and many others.But this is no dry field book of dusty digging. Both accessible and scholarly, it is a lively, copiously illustrated record of excavations involving the whole team, a compelling demonstration of the collaboration – the science, artistry and imaginative reconstruction – that makes modern achaeology so absorbing.