Power Without Knowledge

Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But as Jeffrey Friedman argues in Power without Knowledge, there is a fundamental flaw with technocracy: it requires an ability to predict how the people whom technocrats attempt to control will act in response to technocratic policies. However, the mass public's ideas-the ideas that drive their actions-are far too varied and diverse to be reliably predicted. But that is not the only problem. Friedman reminds us that a large part of contemporary mass politics, even populist mass politics, is essentially technocratic too. Members of the general public often assume that they are competent to decide which policies or politicians will be able to solve social and economic problems. Yet these ordinary "citizen-technocrats" typically regard the solutions to social problems as self-evident, such that politics becomes a matter of vetting public officials for their good intentions and strong wills, not their technocratic expertise. Finally, Friedman argues that technocratic experts themselves drastically oversimplify technocratic realities. Economists, for example, theorize that people respond rationally to the incentives they face. This theory is simplistic, but it gives the appearance of being able to predict people's behavior in response to technocratic policy initiatives. If stripped of such gross oversimplications, though, technocrats themselves would be forced to admit that a rational technocracy is nothing more than an impossible dream. Ranging widely over the philosophy of social science, rational choice theory, and empirical political science, Power without Knowledge is a pathbreaking work that upends traditional assumptions about technocracy and politics, forcing us to rethink our assumptions about the legitimacy of modern governance.

Ronald Reagan’s most-quoted living author—George Gilder—is back with an all-new paradigm-shifting theory of capitalism that will upturn conventional wisdom, just when our economy desperately needs a new direction. America’s struggling economy needs a better philosophy than the college student's lament: "I can't be out of money, I still have checks in my checkbook!" We’ve tried a government spending spree, and we’ve learned it doesn’t work. Now is the time to rededicate our country to the pursuit of free market capitalism, before we’re buried under a mound of debt and unfunded entitlements. But how do we navigate between government spending that's too big to sustain and financial institutions that are "too big to fail?" In Knowledge and Power, George Gilder proposes a bold new theory on how capitalism produces wealth and how our economy can regain its vitality and its growth. Gilder breaks away from the supply-side model of economics to present a new economic paradigm: the epic conflict between the knowledge of entrepreneurs on one side, and the blunt power of government on the other. The knowledge of entrepreneurs, and their freedom to share and use that knowledge, are the sparks that light up the economy and set its gears in motion. The power of government to regulate, stifle, manipulate, subsidize or suppress knowledge and ideas is the inertia that slows those gears down, or keeps them from turning at all. One of the twentieth century’s defining economic minds has returned with a new philosophy to carry us into the twenty-first. Knowledge and Power is a must-read for fiscal conservatives, business owners, CEOs, investors, and anyone interested in propelling America’s economy to future success.

In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (2019), Jeffrey Friedman presented a sweeping reinterpretation of modern politics and government as technocratic, even in many of its democratic dimensions. Building on a new definition of technocracy as governance aimed at solving social and economic problems, Friedman showed that the epistemic demands that such governance places on political elites and ordinary people alike may be overwhelming if technocrats fail to attend to the ideational heterogeneity of the human beings whose control is the object of technocratic power. Yet a recognition of ideational heterogeneity considerably complicates the task of predicting behavior, which is essential to technocratic control—as Friedman demonstrated with pathbreaking critiques of the homogenizing strategies of neoclassical economics, positivist social science, behavioral economics, and populist democratic politics. In Technocracy and the Epistemology of Human Behavior, thirteen political theorists, including Friedman himself, debate the implications of Power Without Knowledge for social science, modern governance, the politics of expertise, post-structuralism, anarchism, and democratic theory; and Friedman responds to his critics with an expansive defense of his vision of contemporary politics and his political epistemology of ideationally diverse human beings. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Review.

In Knowledge, Art, and Power John Ryder develops a pragmatic naturalist theory of experience that posits the cognitive (knowledge), the aesthetic (art), and the political (power) as the most general and pervasive dimensions of all human experience.

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

Knowledge is Power in Four Dimensions: Models to Forecast Future Paradigms, Forecasting Energy for Tomorrow’s World with Mathematical Modeling and Python Programming Driven Artificial Intelligence delivers knowledge on key infrastructure topics in both AI technology and energy. Sections lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s computing functionality, starting with how to build a Business Resilience System (BRS), data warehousing, data management, and fuzzy logic. Subsequent chapters dive into the impact of energy on economic development and the environment and mathematical modeling, including energy forecasting and engineering statistics. Energy examples are included for application and learning opportunities. A final section deliver the most advanced content on artificial intelligence with the integration of machine learning and deep learning as a tool to forecast and make energy predictions. The reference covers many introductory programming tools, such as Python, Scikit, TensorFlow and Kera. Helps users gain fundamental knowledge in technology infrastructure, including AI, machine learning and fuzzy logic Compartmentalizes data knowledge into near-term and long-term forecasting models, with examples involving both renewable and non-renewable energy outcomes Advances climate resiliency and helps readers build a business resiliency system for assets

Do governments seeking to collaborate in such international organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank ever learn to improve the performance of those organizations? Can international organizations be improved by a deliberate institutional design that reflects lessons learned in peacekeeping, the protection of human rights, and environmentally sound economic development? In this incisive work, Ernst Haas examines these and other issues to delineate the conditions under which organizations change their methods for defining problems. Haas contends that international organizations change most effectively when they are able to redefine the causes underlying the problems to be addressed. He shows that such self-reflection is possible when the expert-generated knowledge about the problems can be made to mesh with the interests of hegemonic coalitions of member governments. But usually efforts to change organizations begin as adaptive practices that owe little to a systematic questioning of past behavior. Often organizations adapt and survive without fully satisfying most of their members, as has been the case with the United Nations since 1970. When Knowledge Is Power is a wide-ranging work that will elicit interest from political scientists, organization theorists, bureaucrats, and students of management and international administration. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

An impressive and innovative follow up to Women's Ways of Knowing, this book shows how the authors' “ways of knowing” theory revolutionized the fields of law, education, psychology, and women's studies, to name but a few. In essence, this dynamic collection poses the ultimate question: Can we come to understand and respect diverse ways of knowing? Features: 15 essays, all written exclusively for this volume the essays are by the original authors of Women's Ways of Knowing and prominent contributors, including Sandra Harding, Aida Hurtado, Sara Ruddick, Michael Mahoney, and Patricinio Schweickart in separate chapters, the authors explore how their thinking has developed and changed since Women's Ways of Knowing argument is expanded beyond gender and knowledge to address the factors of color, class, and culture.