This piece looks at the blindspots that have marked recent UK reviews of R&D and innovation The UK government is, once again, reviewing how research is organised, in a post-Brexit environment, and it’s being done, once again, under the leadership of Sir Paul Nurse. The background is one of relative success for the UK. It retains a fairly buoyant global position in relation to its universities and research. The science community has lobbied effectively to grow funding, parti

On the second anniversary of Britain first going into lockdown, and with the country now opening up, this is a good opportunity to make sense of what happened in the pandemic, what it meant, and what needs to be done next. Some of the pandemic’s patterns are now all too clear. COVID’s visible harms concentrated on the elderly, over 150,000 of whom lost their lives in the UK. But there have also been huge invisible harms, largely concentrated on the young. The pandemic has mai

Can social problems be solved? Are they like problems in maths or engineering that just need to be analysed in the right way in order to point to a logical answer? Or are most social problems essentially insoluble, too wicked or complex to be grappled with? In this piece I attempt some answers and suggest how we navigate the space between hubris and fatalism. I start with a quote from Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ which brilliantly captured why we should be humble in the face of

The gap between the social value of people’s work and their monetary reward is wide and widening. In the US, for example, nearly half of the lowest paid jobs are ones deemed essential. Here I argue that this is a sign of remarkable collective stupidity in our economic arrangements, and I suggest an answer. Pay inequality is once again becoming a major public policy issue. One reason is generic: the strong long-term trends towards pay inequality show no signs of letting up