A meander through the biggest question facing humanity — In my book, End State, I explore nine big social problems and nine radical ideas to put things right. …

Announcing a new project and a chance to relearn policymaking — A few weeks ago I wrote about the task of building a new institutional settlement for a digital society. I teed up some new work that I’m now pleased to say I’ll be doing in collaboration with Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We’re calling the project Social Justice in a Digital Age…

Society doesn’t work like it used to. But what if, just maybe, it’s better? — Uneasy, anxious, precarious. Whatever word we use to describe our historical moment, I suspect we can agree: things aren’t going well. In this post I want to mull on why that is. What is it that makes our times feel so dicey? And what distinguishes times like these from halcyon…

Should the state copy big tech — or should we invent something new? — There’s a moment in Peter Drucker’s 1970 book, Technology, Management and Society, where he discusses what we can learn from business management for the way public bodies are run. Drucker writes that we can’t just transfer all the lessons of business management and apply them to the way we run…

A few reflections from a talk I gave recently about End State. The audience were policy experts so I rattled through the intro to spend time on the implications for policy-making. More interesting than my comments were the audience’s questions. I found these really thought-provoking so I’m sharing them here…

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the history of conceptions of equality and I summed up some thoughts in this thread: This might sound like a distraction from the theme of this blog, which is the question of how we reform the state for digital capitalism, so I…

There’s a nice part in Keynes’ 1926 essay, The End of Laissez-faire, in which he points out that people often get in a muddle when they criticise capitalism. He writes that people mix up two very different critiques of capitalism: a moral distaste for the idea that money-making should be…

On the hunt for [X] — Last summer I wrote an essay titled Goodbye social democracy. Hello [X]. It was an admittedly clickbait take on a complicated topic but the premise is one I believe in. The social democratic settlement wasn’t a timeless solution to the challenge of governing capitalism, it was a set of governing…