Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:29:38.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE NEW BATTLE OF IDEAS: HOW AN INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION WILL RESHAPE SOCIETY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Paul Collier
Paul Collier*
Affiliation:
Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, United Kingdom St Antony’s College, Oxford, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author: paul.collier@bsg.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

Keywords

uncertaintysocial cohesioncommunityanxietyA12A13B55P11P17P26
Type
Notes and Contributions
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 257: ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO INFECTION CONTROL , Summer 2021 , pp. 118 - 124
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of National Institute Economic Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Centola, D. (2018), How Behaviour Spreads. The Science of Complex Contagions, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cottam, H. (2018), Radical Help. How We Can Remake the Relationships between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State, London: Virago.Google Scholar
Hankins, J. (2019), Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, J. (2020), The Weirdest People in the World. How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Kay, J. and King, M. (2020), Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Putnam, R.D. and Romney, G.S. (2020), The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Sandel, M.J. (2020), The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Young, M. (1958), The Rise of the Meritocracy, London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar