Why the most important idea in economics no longer works — In 1714, the Anglo-Dutch social philosopher Bernard Mandeville published a poem called the Fable of the Bees. The poem told the story of a bee colony that underwent a conversion: all the bees became suddenly selfless, putting their vices and self-interest to one side to pursue the wider good of…

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. What I’m really interested in, though, isn’t the ideas themselves but the project they’re a part of — how do we upgrade the state so that it’s capable of governing a…

It’s not 1997 any more (3/4) — This is the third in a four-part series of posts asking: What has changed since 1997 that bears on the way we should govern? In the first post I looked at the rise of a digital practice of production, which I argued redefines what we need from the state but…

We have new intellectual material to work with — This is the second in a little series of posts exploring the question: What has changed since 1997 that bears on the way we should govern? This was prompted by the slightly discomfiting realisation that the year 2050 is now closer than the day of Labour’s 1997 general election victory. …

Enough to change the way we govern — Here’s a disquieting fact for anyone who thinks of themselves as a just-about-millennial, or who came of age politically in the 1990s: as of this week, the year 2050 is closer than the 1997 UK general election. This feels like as good a time as any to follow up on…

Can we be more organised about it? — For obvious reasons I feel freshly determined to leave Twitter. And for equally obvious reasons — aka network effects — leaving Twitter is hard. Like many others, I learned this for myself when I last tried to quit. I spent a few weeks over on Mastodon and then I missed…

A space for civil society to learn about AI calmly together — If the public debate about generative AI has taught us anything, it’s that we’re still not very good at talking about technology. The discourse around AI is breathless and polarised, with evangelists declaring ‘this changes everything!’ every few days while sceptics say AI is either hype or an existential threat. …

Are there other routes to scale? — I suspect one reason we’re struggling to govern in the 21st century is that we’ve seen a shift in the character of social problems. If you think about the defining problems of the 20th century, many were technocratic in nature, or lent themselves to technocratic solutions. I’m thinking of challenges…

What would it take to make it big again? — If you look back and forth from our predicament to our politics, it’s hard to escape the feeling that our predicament is big and our politics is small. So much of our politics is about change within the system. Yet our biggest social problems seem to relate to the loss…