Everything we make includes an element of design. But design isn't limited to household objects, clothes or buildings, it influences whole systems that shape the way we live. The climate crisis and corrosive inequality tell us that the systems we have need a redesign,...
The giant services firm Carillion collapsed under the weight of its own greed, hubris and mismanagement in January this year. Earlier this month the excellent Joint Work and Pensions and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Parliamentary produced one of those...
New Weather's Sarah Woods adapts Das Kapital for BBC Radio 4, broadcast on the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth... LISTEN HERE: Das Kapital, the drama, until 4th June on BBC Radio i-player Marx's Das Kapital is one of the most influential books of the modern world. It...
One of the peculiar implications of our obsession with oil and fossil fuels is the strange way the UK has decided to pay for the decommissioning of the vast swathes of concrete and steel that now litters the North Sea. READ THE NEW REPORT HERE: Rigged: how the UK oil...
Economics associations from Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic stage the first international conference on the 33 Theses 'Deconomisation' - definition - noun: undoing the hold over society of a single, dominant economic approach It was 29 years since I...
Shouting ‘look over there’ while getting on with something nefarious over here is a tried and true tactic. So as the genuine scandal of the appalling Cambridge Analytica unfolds, it’s worth looking at what else is happening. Which brings us to Melrose. This company is...
Folk tales often grow from periods of great hardship. The tale of Hansel and Gretel, though first written down much later, is thought to stem from the onset of the medieval cold period, known as the Little Ice Age and the Great Famine in Europe of the early...
Lindsay Mackie and Andrew Simms ask why we're not using proven alternatives to 'big' outsourcing News last week that Capita was in difficulties led to a near 50 percent drop in its share price as anxiety about its stability surged following the disclosure of net debts...
‘Back with the fairies’, by David Boyle, charts the strange revival of beliefs in fairies, asks in an age of irrational politics what might be driving the phenomenon, and what it might mean about seeking both escape and connections in the modern world. His...
It is a strange thing, vouchsafed to few of us, to find ourselves vindicated by the National Audit Office of all people. Yet I have been. I have explained here and elsewhere that the reason why the Govia Thameslink and Southern rail franchise had been such a disaster...