Maya MacGuineas on How To Fix Democracy

Latest up on my How To Fix Democracy show is Maya MacGuineas, the Washington DC based president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. But our conversation, which focused the all-important fixes to American democracy was anything but inside-the-beltway or wonkish.

Andrew Keen: One of the most persistent themes in the second series of our How to Fix Democracy Series has been the problematic relationship between the growing riffs of inequality in contemporary capitalism and the crisis of democracy and the role indeed of technology and compounding those those inequalities. Maya MacGuineas is the President of the Bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and she’s also somebody — a DC-based thinker and writer who’s very concerned about this relationship between inequality, technology, and democracy. Maya, how problematic in terms of the future of democracy are the current economic inequalities fostered by capitalism?

Maya MacGuineas: Yeah; I think — I mean I think to take a step back and start, the — the threats to democracy are coming at it from kind of all sides right now. And if you look at how we got to this moment, which is just filled with massive levels of division, dysfunction, and distrust in our country, I think they came from a number of factors — political, cultural, technological I would say, and certainly economic…