Breaking the Fever

The pandemic has highlighted severe inequity, revealed a global leadership crisis, and generated widespread frustration with the status quo. In companies, workers are calling for more say over key strategic decisions and holding their employers to account. In political systems, both democratic and authoritarian regimes are under pressure, and the neoliberal consensus has dissolved. In the financial system, capitalism is in crisis. We don’t like our current power structures, but new ones have yet to emerge to replace them. Breaking the Fever is hosting a series of conversations to explore perspectives of shifting power and authority, looking at where we’ve come from and asking where to from here.
Hosts:
Alison Taylor - Ethical systems
Jérôme Tagger - Preventable surprises
Breaking the Fever is produced by Fiorella Lavorgna - www.bevocal.eu

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with David Sloan Wilson about cooperation—how it evolved in social beings, how culture and norms can support and disrupt it, and how to sustain it across different levels (community, industry, nation, etc).
We discuss:
- How David got interested in the evolution of positive or prosocial cultural change
- The intellectual tradition of individualism
- The idea of society as an organism
- Why natural selection at the smallest scale is socially disruptive
- The game of Monopoly as an illustration of multilevel selection theory
- Polycentric governance in a nutshell
- Archipelagos of knowledge
- The spread of new norms, like those constituting the Me Too movement, online and off
- Elinor Ostrum’s Nobel Prize-winning core design principals of effective groups
- How nations approximate Ostrum’s core design principles
- The problem with the invisible hand, neoliberal model of globalization
- Changing norms in tight versus loose cultures
David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others.

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Denise Hearn about the most significant opportunities and concerns with capitalism, the need for ESG and corporate governance to evolve, and the ideas behind her new project, Embodied Economics.
We discuss:
- How monopoly, competition dynamics, and instrumentalist thinking affect ESG investing
- Ways ESG investing has been shaped by the pandemic
- The problem with the idealized, abstract, self-interested logic of economics
- What good corporate regulation looks like in a contentious political climate
Denise Hearn is co-author of The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition—named one of the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2018 and endorsed by two Nobel Prize winners. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and a thought partner to SheEO. She is also Board Chair of The Predistribution Initiative—a multi-stakeholder project to improve investment structures and practices to address systemic risks like inequality and climate change. Denise helped launch the First Principles Forum, a platform to support and challenge technology company founders who want to use their wealth for good—now housed at Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She has an MBA from the Oxford Saïd Business School, where she co-chaired the Social Impact Oxford Business Network and has a BA in International Studies from Baylor University.