Europe: The Crucible of Trust
Monday 23 January sees the launch of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer – with its core message that trust in government has fallen dramatically worldwide, and that business now has the opportunity to shift from protecting its License to Operate to properly earning its License to Lead. There is a global sense of citizens rising...
TaxPayers’ Alliance make a mockery of themselves by denying wellbeing evidence
We’ve seen mixed reviews for the recent (ONS) announcements on options for a national wellbeing index to run alongside GDP. In support for these revolutionary new measures of progress we have an unlikely series of bedfellows, including the prime minister; progressive business leaders like Ian Cheshire and Ian Marchant CEOs of B&Q Kingfisher and SSE;...
Taking a longer view
Politics in Britain today is failing to recognise the need for a radical updating of capitalism. At the heart of this is a need for a new macroeconomics with people and planet not wealth and growth as its focus. Wellbeing economics is a fast moving and game-changing subject, it is at the vanguard of debate...
An Informed Society and a new hope?
By the time I had returned to the office on Friday from speaking at the #Polis11 conference at LSE (curator: @CharlieBeckett), a colleague had already received an excited e-mail from a local politician asking for a transcript of my five minutes on An Informed Society? Apparently, I was ‘making waves’ – though the broad themes...
The blindness of the ‘wise’
A group of the UK’s leading economist have just written to the Chancellor saying his Plan A needs a Plan B. These wise men and women feel that the only problem with finding a return to growth is in the details of a ‘growth strategy’. Sadly these ‘wise’ people are as wrong as Osborne in...
Citizen Capitalism and the Peaceful Revolution
The following is an extract from a talk given on Saturday 5 March in Portmeirion, Wales, at Names Not Numbers – billed as ‘a very British Davos’. The theme of the 2011 gathering was Community and Values. The most consequential outcome of the global financial crisis is now the challenge to capitalism itself.
Small society, Big Bang
As Professor Tim Jackson says in his TED talk we live in times where we “spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.” As we have written in Citizen Renaissance, our hyper-consumerist lifestyles are fueled by unsustainable credit-bubble, debt-based growth which...
Heading Our Way: Why the Re-Alignment of Trust is Good News for The Citizen
Today’s publication of the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, also covered in The FT, confirms the re-alignment of Trust in the wake of the great crises of recent years.
The Big Society Can Bite Back: A Citizen Perspective
It is, admittedly, early days but opinion is divided as to whether David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is a genuine commitment to citizenship and civic responsibility or a clever ideological play to dramatically reduce the size of the state, delivering a Grantham fist within a Notting Hill glove.
