Lawrence Lessig discusses his book, “They Don’t Represent Us”, at Politics and Prose.
In this non-partisan analysis of today’s political divisiveness, Lessig identifies unrepresentativeness as the one problem that underlies the others. He sees it both in institutions—such as the media’s response to narrow interests rather than to those of the wider citizenry—and in the people, who are uninformed about the issues. Lessig, host of the podcast Another Way, co-founder of Creative Commons, and Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, proposes a number of solutions to fix both the “them” and the “us,” ranging from Electoral College reforms to new forums that offer citizens the chance to speak in an informed and deliberative way.
Planet Money: The Seattle Experiment
It’s no secret how elections work: A winning campaign costs a lot of money, so candidates court people who have the money to spend. Say, business interests. Then, when a politician takes office, their powerful donors have more influence than the average citizen. It’s not a great system.
So Seattleites decided to tear it all up and try something radical: Fighting big money by flooding elections with even more money. The experiment… did not necessarily go as planned.
This episode is a collaboration with Vox’s The Impact podcast.