Latest thinking

The case for keeping it simple

Blog

28 Nov 2011

Matthew Taylor

As the UN Climate Summit opens in Durban against a background of rock bottom expectations, is it worth rethinking the message about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

Calvinism, confirmation bias, county councils and the Big Society

Blog

22 Nov 2011

Matthew Taylor

I don't have any Calvinist influences in my life or family history, so it has always struck me as odd that I seem to be an instinctive believer in predestination. There is a Margaret Atwood novel - I think it's Bodily Harm - in which she describes a strongly Calvinist community in which the sense of fatalism in the face of God’s plan led people to assume good fortune would sooner or later even out. 'For us' I recall Atwood writing 'good luck was bad luck'. 

What's wrong with wonky carrots?

Blog

18 Nov 2011

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but today 5,000 people, including me, have had exactly that. The event in Trafalgar Square was the brainchild of Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. The aim of the event is to draw attention to the astonishing amount of food that gets thrown away every year.

Waste Not, Want Not?

Blog

16 Nov 2011

Jonathan Rowson

I never really understood the expression/idiom/injunction 'waste not, want not'.

The Brain is Wider than the Sky

Video

16 Nov 2011

With Bryan Appleyard and Rod Liddle

Thinking, fast and slow

Blog

15 Nov 2011

This evening, a lucky audience will have the privilege of listening to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard at an event hosted by LSE. They will be discussing Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the author’s lifetime of work on the triumphs and pitfalls of conscious and unconscious thinking.

The century of the brain?

Blog

15 Nov 2011

Matthew Taylor

Yesterday I posted on my favourite subject – the social aspiration gap. The question being how do we enable people to be the people they need to be to create the future they say they want? One consequence of this citizen-centric way of thinking is that policy makers need to think more deeply about human nature; what is it that makes us behave as we do?

The medical model of mental illness: we’re not convinced

Blog

11 Nov 2011

A great systematic review has been published in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry. It has the slightly less than tabloid-friendly title Biogenetic Explanations and Public Acceptance of Mental Illness: Systematic Review of Population Studies, but behind the dense title is a really useful and important piece of work.

Nudging towards organ donation: Wales leads the way

Blog

08 Nov 2011

Today, the Welsh government has published proposals to change the way organ donation is organised from an opt-in to an opt-out system. The soft opt-out system they propose would allow people to register their preference not to donate, and would include some flexibility so that families can still refuse that their loved one’s organs be donated after they have died. The Welsh government said that a bill will be introduced in 2012, legislation in place by 2013 and the system up and running by 2015.