Latest thinking

Social Brain report: Changing the Subject

Blog

21 Dec 2009

I've just published a report that can now be downloaded (see below in this post for link).

Reed's Law

Blog

19 Dec 2009

Jonathan Rowson

The main reason social research is so difficult is that human interaction does not lend itself  to law-like regularities.  However, after stumbling across 'Reed's Law' (more on that in a sec) in an article about social capital, I was moved to examine wikipedia's list of eponymous laws i.e laws named after people. These laws range from the serious, like Amara's law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run", to the troubling, like Wirth's law: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster",  to the wry, like Hofstatder's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law".

Public services - the stakes are high

Blog

18 Dec 2009

Matthew Taylor

The effectiveness of public services is vital to our social fabric and important to our economic competitiveness. Public service policy will feature heavily in the forthcoming General Election campaign, with debate overshadowed by the  fiscal deficit. 

The Copenhagen leadership challenge

Blog

17 Dec 2009

Matthew Taylor

I am brewing a post – or maybe a series of posts – on ‘five mega trends in public services for the 2010s’. But often when I write about public services I get few if any responses so I need to find a way of making my great thoughts engaging.

The state of well-being

Blog

16 Dec 2009

Matthew Taylor

When social historians they look back on the debates that emerged in the first years of the 21st century they are likely to notice a pronounced trend. This is the emergence of a field that might be labelled psycho-social policy. There are four distinct but overlapping sets of ideas:

I think therefore I learn

Blog

15 Dec 2009

Teaching philosophy in primary schools is viewed by some as one thing too many or an unnecessary luxury, yet it seems to me that the disciplines such as rational and critical thought, learned through the practice of philosophy, can provide an important foundation on which a child can build throughout his or her school career. These are skills that will enable a child to more easily access the rest of the curriculum – to take full advantage of the learning opportunities provided in other subjects.

Policy design for resourcefulness

Blog

15 Dec 2009

Matthew Taylor

The RSA design team has been undertaking a project with the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) exploring how the police can be better at engaging and satisfying the public. Yesterday we held an event to discuss the research emerging from the project, much of it generated by work on the ground in Peterborough (this is an early example of our broader collaboration with the city).

Tony, Nina, and me ...

Blog

14 Dec 2009

Matthew Taylor

I was going to post about my former boss’s interview with Fern Britton. Tony Blair said that even if had not thought there were WMD he would still have tried to make a case for regime change in Iraq. Whatever we may think of this opinion, it is simply wrong to claim, as many commentators seem to, that this is the same as saying ‘I had decided to invade and made up the WMD threat as a pretext’. That is like saying there is no difference between these two statements: ‘I didn’t rate our office junior and wanted to get rid of him’ and ‘I fabricated the evidence that the office junior raided the petty cash’.

Global Consciousness?

Blog

11 Dec 2009

Jonathan Rowson

With the world's attention beginning to focus on the Climate Change talks in Copenhagen, I felt this might be a good moment to ask  what sense, if any, it makes to think of the 'world community' as a community, and asking this question with the aid of the  'Global Consciousness Project' seemed to be the least boring approach.