The RSA Blog

The Silver Foundations of the Big Society

Blog

07 Jan 2012

Benedict Dellot

Anyone over the age of 45 may have had the wind taken out of their sails this week. The findings of a longitudinal research study just released by UCL indicate that memory loss begins at a much earlier age than previously thought.

Mental Complexity and 'The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers'

Blog

06 Jan 2012

Jonathan Rowson

Those who have read 'A Guide for the Perplexed' by E.F Schumacher (better known for Small is Beautiful) will recall his excellent analysis of what he called 'the loss of the vertical dimension'. He feared that a purely utilitarian view of the world would strip it of reverence, and remove the path-quality of life, in which primitive life forms evolve in complexity, not only across centuries, but in the space of a single human life. He wanted to keep alive is the idea that human beings not only change, but also grow and develop in some meaningful way.

Matthew Taylor on Apple, Ive and Honours

Blog

06 Jan 2012

This is a guest blog post by RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor.

The Hidden Curriculum of the Big Society

Blog

05 Jan 2012

Jonathan Rowson

I wish I had a trumpet. We just released a report Beyond the Big Society: Psychological Foundations of Active Citizenship. Allegra Stratton covered it in the Guardian, it was discussed on the Today programme, and hopefully there is plenty more coverage to come.

Can we get engaged?

Blog

05 Jan 2012

Matthew Taylor

Undeterred by the gradual drying up of comments, this is – for the time being – the penultimate of a series of posts on ‘the paradox of entitlement’. The most recent have explored two ways of reinforcing the reciprocal dimension of welfare and public service entitlements: conditionality and the contributory principle. Today I return to one of my recurrent themes over the years; how can public services be reimagined and redesigned to accentuate their reciprocal and relational core?

Networked facts are the new black

Blog

04 Jan 2012

Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being.

The more you put in, the more you get out?

Blog

04 Jan 2012

Matthew Taylor

Welfare reform exhibits a well-known ‘trilemma’: out of the three main goals of policy - helping the poorest, incentivising work and saving, and containing expenditure – it is possible to choose any two but never all three. This, in essence, is why the contributory principle, which was only ever partially embedded in the welfare state, has been consistently eroded by governments of all parties. As John Hills, perhaps the UK’s leading welfare expert, argued in a paper back in 2003:

The Third Industrial Revolution

Blog

03 Jan 2012

Jonathan Rowson

They say a rainy day is no match for a sunny disposition, but London's wet, windy, monochrome sky is enough to make the cheeriest soul wish they were elsewhere.

New year, new internship opportunities

Blog

03 Jan 2012

Benedict Dellot

As part of the RSA's rolling programme of internship opportunities, we are pleased to announce that we have three new paid positions opening up in early 2012. These are designed to give successful applicants the chance to experience what it is like to work within a fast-paced research organisation, to get to grips with emerging theories and concepts in different fields, and to hone their abilities in everything from fundraising, to project management, to the research itself.