Many people leave government disillusioned about its ability to achieve change and cynical about politicians. I left with rather opposite lessons.
Category Archive: Geoff Mulgan
A modest dose of self-love is entirely healthy – who would want to live in a world where everyone hated themselves? But taken too far, it soon becomes poisonous.
Radicalism is as British as tea and cakes, as much a part of our make-up as monarchy and football. It will never have its own jubilees, palaces or honours system.
All of nationalism can be understood as a kind of collective narcissism.
Bangalore has become a centre for healthcare.
Science is, rightly, searching for drugs to arrest ageing or to slow the advance of dementia. But the evidence suggests that many of the most powerful factors determining how you age come from what you do, and what you do with others: whether you work, whether you play music, whether you have regular visitors.
Economies are complex beasts that need people to do an extraordinary range of tasks.
Advisers who think that they are very clever while all around them are a bit thick, and that all the problems of the world would be solved if the thick listened to the clever, are liable to be disappointed.
For most of human history, the main goal of states has been to conquer land and to achieve glory for their rulers, usually at others’ expense. Then in recent decades it was all about GDP. It’s only in very recent history that rulers have been willing to commit themselves to helping their citizens live happier lives.
Social innovation thrives on collaboration; on doing things with others, rather than just to them or for them: hence the great interest in new ways of using the web to ‘crowdsource’ ideas, or the many experiments involving users in designing services.