The RSA Blog

The Cabinet Reshuffle - Much Ado About Nothing

Blog

06 Sep 2012

The political equivalent of football’s transfer deadline day, David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle at the start of the new season excited political anoraks everywhere, even those who admitted they should know better by now than to expect substantive political change arising from minor cast adjustments. The age of twitter has only served to enhance the inherent tacky glamour of the day, politicians followed in cars and hounded for information like third rate celebrities on a catwalk by a succession of scrap hungry journalists, determined to out scoop each other.

Our moral palates

Blog

01 Sep 2012

Benedict Dellot

Not long ago, I described 3 particular ‘meta concepts’ that are present or emerging in the RSA’s work. These were:

Long-term Unemployment and the Recession

Blog

24 Aug 2012

The number of people unemployed in the three months to June fell by 46,000 to 2.56m – how do we square this fact with the continuing recession? In the second quarter of 2012 the revised GDP Growth Rate was -0.5%.

Making sense of the world

Blog

07 Aug 2012

Benedict Dellot

Occasionally it can feel as though there are a thousand and one ways of making sense of the world. That is, of understanding why people think and behave in the way that they do and of knowing what can be done to help people live the lives they want to lead. Not a month goes by without the publication of another book telling us about the most important thing we need to know if we want to solve our problems – be it the importance of willpower, the power of ‘influencers’, the art of taking things more slowly, or of the significance of ‘group-identity’ and belonging.

Excuse me, could I speak to the person in charge please?

Blog

03 Aug 2012

Gaia Marcus

As a type this I am sitting on a train that has unwittingly and unwillingly gone rogue. We are a train in search of direction. We are driving; we have a driver; we have a guard; we even have a spare driver. But there is no-one in charge. It is not clear at what speed we should be going, where exactly we are going, how we are going to attach ourselves to our sister train, where we should be stopping and at what time we are supposed to arriving, wherever it is that we are aiming to be.

The (Mind) Games: are you training your brain enough?

Blog

26 Jul 2012

Gaia Marcus

It’s not just your legs that benefit from a good work-out: they say that learning new things is the key to keeping that most treasured possession: your mind. How often do you give yours a good work out? How often do you learn new things, challenge your known things, challenge your assumptions and your words? My word is ‘networks’, my assumptions leftish by way of human rights, and I know that I do not challenge these enough.

What happened to the Work Programme?

Blog

17 Jul 2012

Benedict Dellot

Is the Work Programme in a mess? Apparently so. This week the Government announced that the original estimate of the number of unemployed people who are expected to use the scheme is to be halved, indicating that some welfare-to-work staff may shortly end up out of a job themselves due to a lack of clients to support. In response, the shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne commented that the £3-5bn back-to-work scheme was now in an “almighty mess” with a government department unable to cope.

Are we addicted to grand policy solutions?

Blog

12 Jul 2012

Benedict Dellot

Most public policy innovations will fail. Take a moment to think about this. It’s not something you’d hear many politicians admit (nor indeed many think-tankers). Yet according to the likes of Paul Ormerod, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and others, this is the reality that we live with. Multi-million pound interventions are hailed in the media upon their launch as the big solution to whatever crisis they are attempting to solve, and then suddenly dissolve without a trace as they struggle to live up to their hype. Many of these initiatives are rarely talked about again.

An introduction to the Cuckoo Clock Syndrome

Blog

10 Jul 2012

Benedict Dellot

Last week Matthew Taylor forwarded to me an academic paper he had been reading as part of his annual lecture research. I wasn’t expecting a great deal, but the paper – The cuckoo clock syndrome: addicted to command, allergic to leadership – proved to be quite a revealing read. Matthew has written various blog posts before about the author Keith Grint’s work but I think it’s worth taking the time to reiterate in basic terms some of the key messages coming out of this insightful piece…