Hello and welcome to a world to win a podcast from Tribune magazine. I'm Grace Blakely bringing

you your weekly dose of socialist news, theory and action from around the world. This week

I speak to Lindsay McGoy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and author of The

Unknowers, how strategic ignorance rules the world, and no such thing as a free gift, the Gates

Foundation and the price of philanthropy. We discuss how politicians make strategic use of

ignorance and uncertainty, the difference between ignorance and deliberate misinformation

and why, if knowledge is power, then ignorance may be too. Thank you so much to all our amazing

patrons who make the show possible. If you want access to the full hour long episode of this show,

as well as full length interviews with previous guests like Naomi Klein and Dr Cornel West,

then support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash a world to win pod. There's a link in the description.

If you want to support the show in another way, please give us a rating on iTunes to keep us up

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Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Another big thank you to Reverend and the Makers who've let us

use their track Heavyweight Champion of the world as our intro and outro music, and now here is Lindsay

explaining the idea of strategic ignorance. Hello Lindsay McGoy and thank you so much for joining me

on this episode of a world to win. How are you doing today? I'm good thanks. Thanks so much for

having me on. Good. Thank you for being here and I want you to just start by introducing this concept

of strategic ignorance, which many people might see as a contradiction in terms. What is this concept

and why did you see it as so important to write about it now? Strategic ignorance, which is sort of

in the subtitle of my book The Unknowers, has strategic ignorance rules the world.

It's a concept I've been working with for a number of years that sort of preceded the recent

publication of this book and that I've been developing in some sort of earlier sociological

...