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Rowland Atkinson The world seems to keep getting more unpredictable, and darker. So many assumptions we may have had, about the conventions of economic and political life, about the extent of corruption, are being unsettled or overturned every day. There are few clear or stable reference points to hold on to. From the perspective of…
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Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton You want to read this book because you want to combine your interest in the rise of a disconnected and sociopathic class of billionaires with your desire for high quality thriller fiction. On every level Birnam delivers, a plot-driven narrative that is both plausible and intensely readable. The basic premise is…
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A deal with the devil is being made as this blog is written. The FT has a longform piece on how wealthy donors and business leaders are flocking to the centre left Labour party. Much of this seems to be about backing what is now clearly a winner, rather than some ideological unity. Or is…
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An interesting story emerged this week as the head of a corporation called for greater investment in policing, favouring social cohesion and safety over the proposed tax cuts being prepared by the UK government. This story was interesting on two levels. First, this is not the kind of story one generally tends to hear, but…
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Homeowners are locked into dramatically escalating mortgage payments, and rented property is tipped into lucrative Airbnb short lets. There is real social pain behind macro-economic headlines, genuine suffering among those paying rent, struggling in work or in positions of disability. Yet such a troubling scene need not impinge on the expanded ranks of the super…
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In 1968 Martin Nicolaus1 gave a searing address to the American Sociological Association in which he condemned sociologists for looking down on the poor, acting effectively as an arm of the state’s surveillance of the marginal, while looking up, hands outstretched, to government funders in order to conduct work to advance their own careers. The…
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I wrote this summary of the concept of domicide some years ago, on the idea of how and why home may be ‘killed’. In the context of the appalling loss of innocent life in Gaza and continued destruction of the possibility of home there I am uploading a pdf of that document.
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The social sciences often have a hard time being heard. Making arguments for social investment, reducing inequalities of various kinds and addressing structural divides across regions and communities require significant public investment. But we do, at least, have the money to do the job. Even a light tax regime on the estimated $35tn of monies…
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I thought it would be useful to create a summary of my book Alpha City: How the super-rich captured London. This is a plan language summary of the key ideas and arguments, alongside a set of concrete proposals for how to address the challenges of a city that works against low and middle-income residents in…