The current debate in the UK about the  “Big Society” has been marred by some unfortunate mythology about to what extent the “Big Society” already exists, whether it is growing or shrinking, and whether it is counter-posed to the “Big State”.  The argument can be summed up as follows:

The New Labour government made a great song and dance about “evidence based policy”, which was generally observed more in rhetoric than in reality. But to be fair to them, their period in office did see a big increase in knowledge about “what works” and “what performs” in government, even if they didn’t always (often?) […]

Over the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of students from (usually autocratic) Arab states have attended universities in Britain, America and other western countries. On a smaller scale, many western universities have also run all sorts of training and education programmes in these same states.

I got the following question from a student in Turkey, about a post I made some time ago about religion and “soft power”, and specifically why Joseph Nye seemed to ignore it. My reply is below.

Further to my earlier post about Libya,

In the 1970s the US economist Arthur Okan came up with the concept to measure the social costs of simultaneous high inflation and unemployment, until then a relatively unknown phenomena. The idea is simple – add together the unemployment rate and the rate of price increases as a measure of how much ‘misery’ the people […]

I’m in Toronto as a guest of Social Planning Toronto – the real Big Society! I spoke at their annual conference yesterday, and at Ryerson university the day before.

The London School of Economics (LSE) has gotten into hot water over links it has to the Gaddafi regime, including some executive education courses it has been running there. Confession time: I taught part of one the modules on the LSE run programme for aspiring Libyan civil servants a couple of years ago.

As the AV referendum campaign gets seriously under way the prime Minister has weighed in against AV. He said that “the principle of one person, one vote is what makes our democracy fair. AV flies in the face of that.” He went on to claim that AV can lead to getting the second best candidate elected […]

David Cameron is starting to get something of a reputation for screeching hand-brake turns that leave observers, and many of his MPs, with their heads spinning.