• Week 5: Regulation and multinationals

    Concern over the dangers of multinationals is not new.  Read anything on the subject by Ray Vernon (Sovereignty at Bay (1971) Storm over the Multinationals (1977), Beyond Globalism (1989), In the Hurricane’s Eye (1998)) or, more recently, Dani Rodrik (Has Globalization … Continued

  • Week 4: The entrepreneurial society and the entrepreneurial state

    Mariana Mazzucato has deservedly received extensive media coverage and plaudits (e.g., Martin Wolf in the FT or Richard Cooper in Foreign Affairs) for her important 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths.  If you have not read … Continued

  • Week 3: The elusive pursuit of government regulation of technology

    For the past weeks, AT&T had been in advanced merger talks with Time Warner and today (Saturday), AT&T reached a deal for $86 billion. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Apple had been in discussions with … Continued

  • Week 2: Policy windows and links to evidence

    I use the example of the recent agreement to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to raise the question of why policy happens at one time and not another and how action is linked to evidence  The evidence (the underlying science) has not … Continued

  • Week 1: Michaelmas 2016: experts in a world of post-truth politics

    Apologies for the delay in getting the first blog uploaded. There seems to have been a bit of a snafu since various Cambridge Wordpress accounts had been attacked by hackers. Hopefully this is all sorted now. The danger of writing about the current … Continued

  • Week 8: Politics of the Anthropocene

    I was not particularly keen to bring up climate change again since we already waded through the gore that is national INDCs.  I was inclined to offer a foray into LSE’s excellent series of retrospective evaluations that they conducted for … Continued