The United States: A Petri Dish for Liberal Democracy? - Timothy Ferris March 23, 2010

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/03/08/How_Science_Inspired_Democracy_in_the_Modern_World

Science writer Timothy Ferris presents the United States as a science experiment in liberalism, based on the theory that "ordinary people should be maximally free." Ferris argues that while liberal democracies are good at experimenting with laws and social programs, they are not so effective at evaluating the results -- thus spurring the growth of increasingly larger governments.

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Timothy Ferris, Former Editor of Rolling Stone and Professor Emeritus at U.C. Berkeley, makes the case that science inspired the spread of democracy.

Just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger and disease, Ferris argues that the Enlightenment values it inspired have swelled the number of persons living in free democratic societies from fewer than 1 percent of the world population in 1600 to over a third today. - Commonwealth Club of California

Tim Ferris is a documentary filmmaker and science writer whose works have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books and Scientific American.

Ferris is a former editor of Rolling Stone and Professor Emeritus at U.C. Berkeley.