The RSA Blog

The dilemmas of dementia

Blog

05 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

I find myself supporting both the good intentions of the Government’s National Dementia Strategy and sympathising with the doubts of campaigners in the face of extremely limited extra funding. The strategy recognises that the costs of dementia will rise by about £1billion a year for the next 30 years, while only making an extra £150million a year available over the next two years. Without major advances in prevention and treatment it is difficult to see how even today’s patchy standards of care can be maintained. 

Meso Soup

Blog

04 Feb 2009

Steve Broome

 

The recession and social change

Blog

04 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor raises an interesting question on his blog: Do we ever learn from crises in history? Or do we just lurch from too much of one socio-economic attitude to too much of another (from excessive individualism to excessive egalitarianism, say)? He then connects this to the idea of a good society: If the recession is an opportunity to change things for the better, is this change just a lurch from the previous ‘anchoring orientation’ we want to replace, to its opposite (which will turn out to be just as one-sided and problematic down the line)? Or are we learning from the onesidedness of the past?

Example #4 - Infant Simulators

Blog

04 Feb 2009

What must be fed, burped, rocked and have its nappy changed around the clock... and "comes in seven different head styles"? The answer to this rather grisly juxtaposition is the RealCare Baby; a sophisticated infant simulator designed to help teenagers understand the difficult reality of looking after a baby.

David, Hillary and the power of face to face

Blog

04 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be affection and respect, shared values and purpose, or a hard headed sense of mutual dependence. It looks like Miliband and Clinton have all three.

Can humans respond to crisis? More or less...

Blog

03 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

The economic crisis is an opportunity to think afresh about the good society. To learn from this disaster and to avoid the next crisis means not just deciding what we think but understanding how we think.    

Foreign workers, miserable children and the state we're in

Blog

02 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

The Children's Society assault on modernity, and public sympathy for the idea behind the Lindsey and Sellafield protests that we put 'our own' workers ahead of the principles of free market capitalism, show that we are moving into a period of social and cultural transition.  Voices that had been considered unrealistic or extreme will be given a hearing.

Civic goods and civic good

Blog

30 Jan 2009

In her New Statesman preview of the coming Tate Modern exhibition Rodchenko and Popova, Rachel Aspen recounts how the October Revolution brought art into everyday life in complete and programmatic way which is bracing for a designer to imagine today: “Their work was no longer to be confined to the elite realm of galleries and studios. The entire fabric of everyday existence – from mass transportation and housing projects to teacups and book jackets – was to be redesigned to serve a new vision of Russian life”.

Has President Obama already made black Americans 'more intelligent'?

Blog

30 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

I am spending the day at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Imaging Neuroscience.  The all day seminar will explore what implications the insights of neuroscience and the newly emerging discipline of neuro-economics will have for policy.  (By the way, there was a discussion of neuro-economics on the Today Programme this morning.)