Podcasts about bennett institute

In this episode, Richard Westcott is joined by Simone Schnall, Catherine Molho, and Maximilian Müller to explore a big, everyday question: why do we make the choices we do? From decisions about money and morality to careers and relationships, the conversation digs into what really drives us—whether it's emotions, social pressure, or the stories we tell ourselves after the fact.The conversation explores how physical experiences and emotions like fear or anger can shape our judgement, and how gossip and social norms influence who we trust and how we act. Our experts also discuss how we reshape memories to fit our choices, and how identity can shape what we believe or invest in. It's a fascinating look at what really drives human behaviour—and what that means for how we design policies, technology, the systems we live in, and the role AI might play in shaping our decisions.This episode is hosted by Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus), and features experts Catherine Molho (IAST), Maximilian Müller (TSE) and Simone Schnall (Cambridge University). Season 4 Episode 8 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform: For more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Podcast hostRichard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottPodcast guestsCatherine Molho is a psychologist studying human cooperation, social norms, and the role of emotions in decision-making, at IAST. Her work draws upon insights from social and evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and anthropology. She uses interactive experiments, experience sampling, and cross-cultural surveys to better understand what shapes cooperative and punitive decisions.Maximilian Müller is a behavioural economist at Toulouse School of Economics where he studies questions in fields such as education, development, and family economics. In his research, he examines social influences on individual behavior and beliefs around big life decisions such as career or fertility choices and explores their potential consequences for society-wide outcomes such as intergenerational transmission and social mobility. Simone Schnall is the Director of the Cambridge Body, Mind and Behaviour Laboratory and Fellow of Jesus College at University of Cambridge. By combining insights and methods from social psychology and cognitive science her research explores how thoughts and feelings interact. She aims to understand how people make judgments and decisions about other people, and about physical properties of the world.

We grow up thinking we want to be happy (or at least, not-sad).  But happiness isn't enough. What we need is wellbeing, and as Dr Mark Fabian quotes in the dedication to his book, Beyond Happy, "Wellbeing is about wholeness, not happiness, and wholeness is so much more demanding than happiness.' So what is wholeness, and what does it demand of us? As the old world crumbles and the new is struggling into being, what steps can each of us take to bring ourselves ever closer to a sense of being complete? This week's guest, Dr Mark Fabian, is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick, and an affiliate fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. In, Beyond Happy, his first book for a general audience, he explores how evolution has wired us to keep happiness just out of reach, leaving us perpetually stuck on a happiness treadmill.  Instead of striving to escape it, he argues that we should focus on making the treadmill a place we want to be.  Finding this place of relative equanimity begins with listening to our emotions, discovering intrinsic motivation and pursuing our authentic values.  Mark coaches us through this process of self-actualisation and then knits it together into a collective, cooperative way of being, building relationships that matter and that work. Mark's book will be available in April - here: https://bedfordsquarepublishers.co.uk/book/beyond-happy/Or order from your favourite local independent bookshop. Please remember to put a review up on Amazon and GoodReads as well as anywhere else you feel is worthwhile. (this applies to every book you read and like - algorithms matter) andIf you want to share the journey with us, we're here: Accidental Gods Gatherings https://accidentalgods.life/gatherings-2025/Accidental Gods Membership https://accidentalgods.life/join-us/

Richard Westcott talks to Jonathan Stieglitz, IAST and Martin White, University of Cambridge, about  the global health challenges related to diet and nutrition, the roles of public health policies, cultural practices, and lifestyle changes, while creating sustainable food systems that ensure access to healthy food for all and maintain economic viability.How do we address global health challenges, particularly in relation to diet and nutrition? What role do public health policies, cultural practices and lifestyle changes play in shaping our food choices? How can we create food systems that ensure everyone has access to healthy and sustainable food while maintaining economic viability?To explore these issues, Richard Westcott talks to Prof Martin White, Professor of population health research from the University of Cambridge,  and Prof Jonathan Stieglitz, IAST Scientific Director.Season 4 Episode 7 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. His last role was as a science correspondent covering the covid outbreak, but prior to that he was the transport correspondent reporting on new technologies such as driverless cars, major accidents and large infrastructure projects. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottProf Jonathan Stieglitz is an anthropologist specializing in human health and aging.  He studies how evolved human biology interacts with variability in the environment to influence well-being over the life course. Since 2004 he has worked with indigenous Tsimane forager-farmers of the Bolivian Amazon, studying how environmental transition (for example, changes in infectious exposures, physical activity levels, or consumption of processed foods) influences diverse health indicators. He co-directs the Tsimane Health and Life History Project. Prof Martin White is an interdisciplinary scientist who leads research on food systems and public health, and has a particular interest in evaluation of population interventions to improve diet and health. He led the NIHR funded evaluation of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy and currently leads two UKRI interdisciplinary consortia on food system transformation (https://www.mandala-consortium.org/ and https://www.salientfoodtrials.uk). He was a visiting fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in 2020-22 and is a regular contributor to Cambridge University's Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) Policy Fellows programme for civil servants.

How to measure the good life? According to Cambridge University's Professor of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, quantifying progress doesn't involve traditional economic metrics. In her new book, Measure of Progress, Coyle discusses how economic metrics like GDP, designed 80 years ago, are increasingly inadequate for measuring today's complex economy. She argues we need new approaches that account for digital transformation, supply chains, and long-term sustainability. Coyle suggests developing human-centric balance sheet measures that reflect true progress beyond simple growth numbers. Five Key Takeaways * Economic metrics like GDP were developed 80 years ago and are increasingly outdated for measuring today's complex digital economy with global supply chains.* We lack adequate tools to measure crucial modern economic factors such as data usage, cloud services, and cross-border supply chains.* Economic statistics have always been political in nature, from their historical origins to present debates about what counts as progress.* Coyle advocates for a "balance sheet" approach that considers long-term sustainability of resources rather than just short-term growth figures.* While productivity growth has slowed for many middle-income families over the past 20 years, Coyle rejects "degrowth" approaches, arguing instead for better metrics that capture true progress in living standards.Professor Dame Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is 'Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be', exploring the challenges for economics particularly in the context of digital transformation. Her current research focuses on productivity and on economic measurement: what does it mean for economic policy to make the world ‘better', and how would we know if it succeeds?Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, and an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a DBE for her contribution to economic policy in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Richard Westcott talks to Diane Coyle, Jacques Crémer, and Paul Seabright about Europe's position in competing with the US in technology. They explore the factors shaping Europe's place in the global tech race—how data, policy, investment, competition and culture influence its potential to compete with the US.Our experts unpack the challenges and opportunities for Europe's tech ecosystem. They consider whether Europe should aim to catch up with the US or focus on carving out its own path, questioning what success in innovation really looks like. Along the way, they discuss the role of data, risk-taking, the challenges of scaling up new ideas, and the structural and policy changes needed to support innovation in Europe.This episode is hosted by Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus), and features experts Diane Coyle (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge), Jacques Crémer (IAST), Paul Seabright (IAST)Season 4 Episode 6 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Podcast hostRichard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottPodcast guestsDiane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Diane's new book (April 2025) ‘The Measure of Progress: Counting what really matters' explores how outdated economic metrics are distorting our understanding of today's digital economy. Diane is also a member of the UK Government's Industrial Strategy Council, New Towns Taskforce, and advises the Competition and Markets Authority. She has served previously in a number of public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was awarded a DBE in 2023 for her contribution to economics and public policy. @DianeCoyle1859Jacques Crémer is Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the European Economic Association. He has been the first director of the Digital Center since 2015.  In 2018-2019, as a Special Adviser to European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, he co-authored the report “Competition Policy for the Digital Era”. Jacques has done fundamental work on planning theory, auctions, incentive t

In this episode of Crossing Channels, Richard Westcott is joined by Dimitri Zenghelis, Ulrich Hege, and Mathias Reynaert to explore how green finance can support the clean transition. They discuss the shifting role of financial markets, the balance between public and private investment, and the policies needed to drive long-term change.Their lively discussion breaks down the economic opportunities of the transition, the impact of regulation on industries like automotive and energy, and the financial and political challenges that come with moving to a low-carbon economy. They also explore why policy credibility and stability are key to unlocking investment and ensuring a fair and effective transition.This episode is hosted by Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus), and features experts Ulrich Hege (IAST), Mathias Reynaert (IAST) and Dimitri Zenghelis (Bennett Institute for Public Policy). Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformSeason 4 Episode 5 transcriptFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottUlrich Hege is Professor of Toulouse School of Economics since 2016. He was Director of TSE until 2017 and Vice-President until 2020. His main research area is in Financial Economics, but he also worked on questions in contract theory, entrepreneurship, regulation, law and economics, and digital economics. Prior to joining TSE, he was Professor and Associate Dean at HEC Paris, and held faculty positions at Tilburg University (Netherlands) and ESSEC (Paris). He has also been a Visiting Associate Professor at London Business School and at New York University Stern School of Business. Mathias Reynaert is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics. His fields of interest are empirical industrial organization and environmental economics. His research received recognitions such as the 2015 Paul Geroski and YEEA Prize, the 2022 Edmond Malinvaud Prize, an ERC starting grant (2023-2028), and a 2023 nomination for best young economist in France.  He is a research affiliate at the CEPR and an editorial board member at the Review of Economic Studies.Dimitri Zenghelis is Special Advisor to the Bennett Institute, University of Cambridge and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics. He is also a Partner at Independent Economics. He headed the Stern Review Team at the Office of Climate Change and was a lead author on the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Previously he was Head of Economic Forecasting at HM Treasury. @DimitriZ

Hear Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus) talk to Gina Neff (Cambridge University), Jeni Tennison (Connected by Data), and Jean-François Bonnefon (IAST) about how data and algorithms are shaping our lives. They explore how these technologies impact work, public services, and decision-making, and raise questions about ethics, fairness, and governance.Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformSeason 4 Episode 4 transcriptFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our podcast host and guestsRichard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. In 2023, Richard left the corporation and is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottJean-François Bonnefon, CNRS senior research director, is a cognitive psychologist whose work spans computer science, psychology, and economics, reflected in his more than 100 publications. Renowned for his expertise in moral preferences and decision-making, he is particularly recognised for his contributions to the ethics of advanced artificial intelligence, especially in autonomous driving. In 2024, he was appointed Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department (SBS) at TSE and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulouse (IAST). He is affiliated with TSE, IAST, the Toulouse School of Management, and the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI).Gina Neff is Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University London and Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge. She is the Deputy Chief Executive Officer for UKRI Responsible AI UK (RAi) and Associate Director of the ESRC Digital Good Network. Her award-winning research focuses on how digital information is changing our work and everyday lives. Her books include Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012), Self-Tracking (MIT Press 2016) and Human-Centered Data Science (MIT Press 2022).Jeni Tennison is an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and the founder of Connected by Data.  She is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an adjunct Professor at Southampton's Web Science Institute, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and a co-chair of GPAI's Data Governance Working Group.  She sits on the Boards of Creative Commons and the Information Law and Policy Centre.

In this episode, Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus) talks to David Runciman (University of Cambridge), Kristin Michelitch (IAST) and Ahmed Mohamed (IAST) about the decline in democracy indexes worldwide, the cultural, technological, and institutional factors driving these trends, and whether they can be reversed.Our experts explore the meaning of democracy and the reasons behind the decline of democracy indexes. They examine the impact of technology, media, culture, and religion on reshaping politics and shaping the future of democratic systems. Season 4 Episode 3 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news and the Today programme. In 2023, Richard left the corporation and is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottKristin Michelitch is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at the Toulouse School of Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences (TSE), and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), France. Her research investigates sources of, and solutions to, intergroup tensions and poorly functioning democratic processes in contexts where government institutions are not adequately safeguarding democracy and delivering vital public services. @KGMichelitch Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. =Ahmed's primary research focuses on the role of religion in the political and economic development of less democratic societies, with a special focus on the Middle East and the Muslim World. David Runciman is a recovering academic and fully committed podcaster. He worked at Cambridge University for nearly 25 years, winding up as Professor of Politics. He has authored several books, most recently, The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution (2024). David established the Centre for the Future of Democracy as part of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.. David hosts the weekly politics podcast “Past Present Future” and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018 and the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.

In this episode, Richard Westcott talks to Gordon Harold, Anna Moore, and Olympia Campbell. about the growing rates of mental health issues among young people. They discuss the key determinants and the most effective ways to support young people's mental health.Our experts examine whether mental health among young people is truly worsening or if we're simply getting better at identifying it. They unpack the key factors shaping mental health today, delve into the role of the digital world, and discuss how policies can evolve to expand support and access to services for young people.This episode is hosted by Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus), and features experts Prof Gordon Harold (University of Cambridge), Dr Anna Moore (University of Cambridge) and Dr Olympia Campbell (IAST). Season 4 Episode 2 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform: For more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. In 2023, Richard left the corporation and is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottGordon Harold is the inaugural Professor of the Psychology of Education and Mental Health at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on three areas: the impact of family dynamics on child and adolescent mental health, the interaction between genetic and family factors, and the promotion of evidence-based practices to enhance youth mental health outcomes. He serves on several advisory groups, including the UKRI-ESRC's Data and Infrastructure Expert Advisory Group and the Department for Work and Pensions Science Advisory Committee, and he advises various UK and international government departments and scientific committees.Anna Moore is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Assistant Professor in Child Psychiatry and Medical Informatics in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge and Clinical Consultant in Paediatric Psychological Medicine. Dr. Moore's group, Timely, is developing a new preventative approach for managing children's mental health problems. To make this possible, the Timely team is building the infrastructure and systems required to enable rapid digital innovation and implementation in paediatrics. Olympia Campbell is a Research Fellow at the IAST. She received a PhD from University College London in 2023 prior to joining. Her research focuses on elucidating the ecological and demographic correlates and causes of gender-biased outcomes, with a particular focus on the role of marriage practices, such as cousin marriage. Of key interest to this research is how kinship intensity can alter the intensity of different forms of evolutionary conflicts such as sexual, parent-offsprin

To kickstart Season Four of Crossing Channels, Richard Westcott (Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus) talks to Prof Alison Liebling  (University of Cambridge), Prof Nicola Padfield  (University of Cambridge) and Prof Arnaud Philippe (University of Bristol, former IAST fellow) about the growing prison population, the prison experience, and the most effective ways to rehabilitate ex-offenders.Our experts discuss why the prison population is growing and the similarities and differences across European countries. They share their expertise on the impact of the prison environment and the privatisation of prisons for rehabilitation. They also identify best practices for effectively rehabilitating and reintegrating ex-offenders into society. Season 4 Episode 1 transcriptFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett Institute and IAST (Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse) visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Follow us on Linkedin, Bluesky and X. With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella Erker and Burcu Sevde SelviVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Aurore CarbonnelMore information about our host and guests:Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o'clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city. @BBCwestcottAlison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology's Prisons Research Centre. She has carried out research on life in prison for over 30 years. She has written multiple books and is currently completing one on ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison'. She was made a member of the British Academy in 2018. @AlisonLieblingNicola Padfield KC (Hon) is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Penal Justice at the Law Faculty, University of Cambridge, where she has worked for more than 30 years. She has a broad research lens, engaged in both ‘hard' law and in socio-legal-criminological research. She is a leading European expert on sentencing law, including the law and practice of release from (and recall to) prison. A barrister by training, she has published widely on criminal law, sentencing and criminal justice.Arnaud Philippe is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics of the University of Bristol. He studies the criminal justice system to better understand the determinants of criminal behaviour, how judicial decisions are made, and the consequences of sanctions on individuals. He is currently an associate researcher at the French Penitentiary Administration, where he explores the effect of carceral experience on recidivism. @ArnaudPhilipp

Democracy 101 is the monthly podcast series from Cumberland Lodge, giving a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of democracy. In this episode, we ask what is populism and how can we identify it? To help us answer these questions, we speak to Steph Coulter from the Bennett Institute of Public Policy.

In this episode, Rory Cellan-Jones discusses with Diane Coyle, Ruth Mace, and Paul Seabright the impact of age on leadership, the consequences of having older leaders for society, and the case for implementing a compulsory retirement age.Our experts discuss the tradeoff between experience, expertise, skill and judgement as society's leaders age. They draw on evolutionary and current examples to evaluate the case for implementing a compulsory retirement age for leaders. Finally, they consider alternative mechanisms - such as reducing voting ages, term limits and cognitive testing - to improve democratic responsiveness. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features guest experts Professor Dame Diane Coyle (Bennett Institute for Public Policy), Professor Ruth Mace (UCL/IAST) and Professor Paul Seabright (IAST). Season 3 Episode 10 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Kevin Sortino More information about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including “Always On” (2021) and his latest “Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC” which was published in 2023. @ruskin147Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. Diane was awarded a DBE in the King's Birthday Honours List 2023 for her invaluable contributions to economic policy and practice, as well as her unwavering commitment to public service. @DianeCoyle1859Ruth Mace is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London (UCL)  and a long-term visitor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Toulouse (IAST).  She trained as an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, and then moved into evolutionary anthropology. Her research has covered a wide range of questions in human life history evolution and behavioural and cultural evolution.  She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences. @tavitonstPaul Seabright is a professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics. He was Director from 2012 to 2021 of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Paul did his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where he was a Fellow of All Souls College. Paul's current research lies in three ar

In his talk, Michael Kenny discusses the main themes of his new book, Fractured Union, which provides a comprehensive analysis of how and why the UK's Union has, in his opinion, come near to breaking apart in recent years. He explores the policy options and cultural changes required in British politics and government to put the Union on a more stable footing. He also considers the implications of the next general election taking place in the UK for the next 10-20 years, and discusses what will be different, and what might continue, in the event of a victory for Keir Stamer's Labour Party. About the Speaker: Michael Kenny is Professor of Public Policy, and the inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge where he leads the Institute's place and public policy programme. He is a visiting Fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit, a Fellow of the UK's Academy of Social Sciences, and holds advisory positions with the Constitution Society, the ‘Behaviour Change by Design' project, and ‘The Science of Global Risk' project. His research includes leading projects on left-behind communities, social infrastructure and devolution, and the future of the UK constitution. His latest book is entitled Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Save the UK.

This week, we're joined by Ben Goldacre, a renowned doctor, academic, author, and journalist. His books include “Bad Science” and “Bad Pharma,” among others, and he is currently a Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at University of Oxford. There, he runs the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science which aims to pioneer the better use of data, evidence and digital tools in healthcare and policy. Patrick and Ben discuss Join Patrick and Ben for an open conversation about Ben's choice to step back from the public eye and the power of the OpenSAFELY platform to improve security, transparency and analysis of Electronic Health Records.

In the seventh episode of our series Wales: A Work in Progress, the IWA's Policy and External Affairs Manager Joe Rossiter talks to Steph Coulter from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Wales: A Work in Progress is the companion piece of our project on the constitutional future of Wales supported by the Legal Education Foundation. In this series, we explore options for Wales' future in conversation with experts and people interested in shaping the way forward for our country. In keeping with the IWA's independence, we don't take position - rather, we want to give voice to different options and examine the evidence to understand what the best path might be for Wales, and why.

In this episode, our guests reflect on 25 years of NICE, how the organisation has developed, the impact its had and how it will change to adapt to the challenges of the next 25 years. Guests: NICE CEO Dr Sam Roberts, Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Sir Chris Whitty, MHRA CEO Dame June Raine, Director of Value and Access at Association of British HealthTech Industries Luella Trickett, and Director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science Ben Goldacre.

Improving NHS productivity is a key national priority. But what's behind the slowdown and can it be reversed?  Over the past few years, amid the turmoil of COVID-19, the NHS has seen substantial growth in funding and clinical staffing levels. Yet the numbers of patients treated haven't risen in step – suggesting services, particularly NHS acute hospitals, have become less productive.  Government has announced a wide-ranging review of public sector productivity and asked services to develop plans to recover productivity performance. At the Spring Budget 2024, £3.4bn in capital funding was announced to support digital and technology projects intended to boost NHS productivity.  So why have activity levels not been keeping pace with recent increases in NHS funding and staffing, what can be done, and is implementing new technologies a solution worth banking on?  To discuss, our Chief Executive Jennifer Dixon is joined by: Anita Charlesworth, Chief Economist and Director of the REAL Centre at the Health Foundation. Neil Sebire, Professor of Pathology and Chief Research Information Officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust.  Show notes Institute for Government (2023). The NHS productivity puzzle.  Institute for Fiscal Studies (2023). Is there really an NHS productivity crisis?  Health Foundation (2023). The unsustainable is not sustained: why productivity is fundamental to the future of the NHS.  Bennett Institute (2021). Productivity in UK healthcare during and after COVID-19 pandemic. Chancellor's speech on productivity growth (2023).  Centre for Health Economics (2024). Productivity of the English National Health Service: 2021/22 update. 

When the world of AI feels so dramatically new, it's hard to look anywhere except toward the future. But previous examples of technological innovation can teach us a lot about building public trust and collaboration.  This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Verity Harding, one of TIME magazine's most influential people in AI. Her debut book is AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own. She points to moments like the Space Race, the development of IVF, and the internet as inspiration for today's potential regulatory framework for AI.  Verity is the Director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the Bennett Institute of Public Policy at Cambridge. She also runs the tech consultancy Formation Advisory. She previously directed policy for Google DeepMind and worked for Deputy Prime Minister the Rt Hon Sir Nick Clegg. Episode Chapters(00:00) Introduction to Verity Harding (01:36) Verity Harding's Transition from Politics to Google DeepMind (08:28) AI Needs You: Unpacking the Book's Message (11:43) Building Public Trust and Engagement in a Polarized Environment (20:34) Advice for Builders Who Don't Want to Decelerate  (24:11) Who are the Stakeholders of AI Governance?  (36:06) AI and the Future: Optimism, Challenges, and the Path Forward (41:18) Closing Thoughts and Where to Find the Book Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.co Email: generativenow@lsvp.com

In this episode, Rory Cellan-Jones  (former technology correspondent for the BBC) chats with Verity Harding (Bennett Institute for Public Policy), Gina Neff  (Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy), and Lawrence Rothenberg  (IAST and University of Rochester), about artificial intelligence (AI) and the fine balance between innovation and regulation. Together, they explore what makes 'good' regulation and the crucial role of global collaboration in shaping the future of AI.They share the latest developments of AI regulation in the UK, US and EU, emphasising the need for effective regulation to address the risks of AI. They also discuss what regulators can learn from past tech revolutions, like in vitro fertilisation, and highlight the critical importance of collaboration to ensure AI improves people's living and working conditions. Season 3 Episode 7 transcriptListen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouseWith thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Tiffany Naylor and Kevin Sortino More information about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including “Always On” (2021) and his latest Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC which was published in 2023. Verity Harding is a globally recognised expert in AI, technology and public policy. She is currently Director of the AI and Geopolitics Project (AIxGEO) at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. She is also Founder of Formation Advisory Ltd, a tech consultancy firm. Her debut book is AI Needs You: How we can change AI's future and save our own  (Princeton University Press 2024). Professor Gina Neff is the executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the effects of the rapid expansion of our digital information environment on workers, workplaces, and our everyday lives.  Her books include Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012), Self-Tracking (MIT Press 2016) and Human-Centered Data Science (MIT Press 2022).Lawrence Rothenberg is a member of the Scientific Council of the IAST and has been a member of the faculty at the University of Rochester for roughly three decades (1989-2002, 2005-present). He began his career in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Tech, and from 2002-2005 was the Max McGraw Distinguished Professor of Environmental Management in the Department of Management and Strategy and the Co-Director of the Ford Center for Global Citizenship at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University.

What's happened to our economy and what does it mean for our health? Many developed economies have been growing more slowly since around 2008, but the UK economy has been struggling more than most. Wages haven't risen since 2008 leaving the average worker £14,000 worse off. Productivity growth – vital to rising living standards – has stalled. Regional inequalities are unusually large, and economic hardship is widespread with 2.8 million people reporting not working because of long-term sickness. So what's driving this economic stagnation, how is it connected to our health, and what can politicians do to address the challenges? To discuss, our Chief Executive Jennifer Dixon is joined by: Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and Co-Director of the Bennett Institute. Torsten Bell, Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation. Show notes The Health Foundation (2023). The unsustainable is not sustained: why productivity is fundamental to the future of the NHS.  The Resolution Foundation (2023). Ending stagnation: a new economic strategy for Britain.  The Health Foundation (2023). What we know about the UK's working-age health challenge. Coyle D and Muhtar A (2022). Contemporary Social Science. Levelling up policies and the failure to learn. Bennett Institute for Public Policy (2023). A Universal Basic Infrastructure for the UK.  The Resolution Foundation (2024) (funded by the Health Foundation). We've only just begun: action to improve young people's mental health, education and employment.

In this week's podcast:   How AI will affect the clinician-patient relationship? Our annual Nuffield Summit roundtable asks how the promise of tech tools stacks up against reality, and how the future of the therapeutic relationship can be protected (participants below).   Your code is as important as your methods, which is why The BMJ now requires you to share it - Ben Goldacre and Nick De Vito, from the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford, explain why it's so important, and how The BMJ's new data and code sharing policy could change research transparency.   Nye Bevin set up the NHS when the UK was in the economic doldrums, and the public's need for care was becoming an emergency - BMJ columnist Matt Morgan has helped turn that story into a play, currently showing at the National Theatre; and reflects on the parallels between now and then.   1:58 Nuffield Summit roundtable 17:32 New BMJ rules on data and code sharing 29:03 Aneurin "Nye" Bevan play   Taking part in our roundtable were: Rebecca Rosen, Senior Fellow at the Nuffield Trust and GP Juliet Bouverie, CEO of The Stroke Association Daniel Elkeles, CEO of London Ambulance Service Neil Sebire, Professor and Chief Research Information Officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital Reading list: How is technology changing clinician-patient relationships? Mandatory data and code sharing for research published by The BMJ Scalpels and spotlights: bringing theatre to the theatre

This episode asks why are women disadvantaged in the workplace? Experts explore why women are underrepresented in certain professions. Why is the motherhood wage gap so persistent? How does flexible work impact women's careers? And what does policy need to do to reduce gender inequalities in the workplace?Podcast host, Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), discusses these issues with leading academics Emmanuelle Auriol (IAST), Nina Jörden (Bennett Institute for Public Policy) and Francesca Barigozzi (University of Bologna). Season 3 Episode 6 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.With thanks to:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Tiffany NaylorMore information about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including “Always On” (2021) and “Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC” (2023). Emmanuelle Auriol is a full professor at Toulouse School of Economics. Her work, which combines theoretical and empirical approaches, focuses on industrial organization and development economics. She is the author of two award-winning books and a fellow of different scientific societies. Francesca Barigozzi is a Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. She is an applied microtheorist and her fields of research include family economics, public economics, information economics, health economics, and behavioral economics. She holds a PhD in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics. Nina Jörden is a research associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and a member of The Productivity Institute. Her work focuses on questions about the future of work in the public and private sectors. Relevant linksAuriol, E., Friebel, G., Weinberger, A., & Wilhelm, S. (2022). Underrepresentation of women in the economics profession more pronounced in the United States compared to heterogeneous Europe. PNAS.Barigozzi, F., Cremer, H., & Roeder, K. (2020). Having it all, for all: child-care subsidies and income distribution reconciled. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 176, 188-211.Barigozzi, F., Di Timoteo, C., & Monfardini, C. (2023). The Gender Gaps in Time-Use Within Italian Households During 2002–2014. Italian Economic Journal, 9(3), 1263-1296.Barigozzi, F., Cremer, H., & Roeder, K. (2020). Caregivers in the family: daughters, sons and social norms. European Economic Review, 130, 103589.Barigozzi, F., Cremer, H., & Monfardini, C. (2019). The gender gap in informal child care: theory and some evidence from Italy.

Big medical datasets pose a serious problem. Thousands of patients' health records are an enormous risk to personal privacy. But they also contain an enormous opportunity – they could show us how to provide better treatments or more effective health policies. A system called OpenSAFELY has been designed to solve this problem, with the help of a computer code “robot”. Professor Ben Goldacre, director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford, explains how it works. Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples Sound mix: Hal Haines Editor: Charlotte McDonald

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Jean-Paul Azam, Diane Coyle and Andy Westwood about the potential of universal basic income to tackle regional inequalities, boost economic growth in ‘left behind' and growing places, and rebuild democracy. This episode unpacks why current policies are failing to tackle regional inequalities and how a universal basic infrastructure might boost productivity across all places. Leading experts examine the value of infrastructure in different country contexts and how different levels of various departments and government could work together to deliver a universal basic infrastructure in all places. Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform Season 3 Episode 4 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouseWith thanks to:    Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Tiffany NaylorRelevant links:Townscapes: A Universal Basic Infrastructure for the UK by Coyle, D., Erker, S. and Westwood, A. Bennett Institute (2023).A Universal Basic Infrastructure in the UK by Coyle, D., Erker, S. and Westwood, A. Bennett Institute (2023). To Fight Populism, Invest in Left-Behind Communities by Coyle, D. Project Syndicate (2023).  More information about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. His latest book is “Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC”. @ruskin147Jean-Paul Azam is a professor of economics Emeritus at the Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse and a member of IAST. After publishing mainly on the macroeconomics of Africa, he has focused since the mid-1990s on explaining violent conflict and its prevention, with application to foreign aid, civil war, and transnational terrorism.Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is ‘Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be‘ on how economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy. @DianeCoyle1859Andy Westwood is Professor of Government Practice at the University of Manchester and a Director of the ESRC funded Productivity Institute. He has worked as an expert adviser to the EU, OECD and IMF, as well as a specialist adviser to the Select Committees on Economic Affai

This week David talks to the economists Dieter Helm and Diane Coyle about the challenges of building sustainability into the way we live now. Why is GDP such a poor guide to long-term economic well-being? How can we stop squandering future resources? What should the next Labour government do to create a sustainable economy – and what will happen if they don't?Dieter Helm's new book is available to download for free hereRead the Bennett Institute report on Universal Basic Infrastructure here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UK has many strengths, from world-class universities and creative industries to high employment. But having grown more quickly than most advanced economies from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, the UK has been in relative decline ever since: the average productivity gap with France, Germany and the US doubled, to 18 per cent, between 2008 and 2022. Panel discussion on 'Getting growth up' at the final report conference of The Economy 2030 Inquiry. Speakers: Emily Fry, Economist at the Resolution Foundation Dr Swati Dhingra, Associate Professor of Economics at CEP LSE Tom Riordan, Chief Executive of Leeds City Council Dame Sharon White, Chair of the John Lewis Partnership Professor Diane Coyle, Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University Dr Anna Valero, Distinguished Policy Fellow at CEP LSE (Chair) Read the report: https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/reports/ending-stagnation/  View the event slides: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/events/ending-stagnation/ 

Rory Cellan-Jones (host) talks to Ingela Alger (IAST) and Flavio Toxvaerd (University of Cambridge) about the drivers of research silos, the merits of conducting interdisciplinary research and how to overcome disciplinary divides. This episode takes a look at why academic research is trapped in research silos. Ingela Alger and Flavio Toxvaerd engage in a thoughtful discussion with Rory Cellan-Jones, to shed light on the challenges faced in conducting interdisciplinary research. They emphasize the significant benefits that interdisciplinarity can bring and share insight into how to foster interdisciplinary research culture for improved results. Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformSeason 3 Episode 2 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.With thanks to:Audio production - Steve HankeyAssociate production -  Stella ErkerVisuals - Tiffany NaylorMore information about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021. @ruskin147Ingela Alger is a CNRS Senior Scientist (DR) in Economics, and the current Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) as well as the Chair of the Department in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her research, which has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and PNAS, focuses on the evolutionary foundations of human preferences, when these are transmitted from generation to generation and are subject to selection.  @ingelaalger Flavio Toxvaerd is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare College and an Affiliated Researcher with the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. He serves as UKRI Policy Fellow in Competition and Productivity Economics with the Competition and Markets Authority. His research and teaching interests are in microeconomics and game theory with applications, including industrial organisation, competition policy and economic epidemiology. @toxvaerd1If you enjoyed this podcast then check out:Crossing Channels S2E5 featuring Sarah Dillon and Manvir Singh: Why are Stories important for society. 

This event was part of the IfG's Labour Party Conference 2023 fringe programme. Speakers: Paula Barker MP, Shadow Minister for Devolution and the English Regions Simon Christian, Director at Grant Thornton UK LLP Richard Parker, Labour & Co-op Candidate for West Midlands Mayor Akash Paun, Programme Director at the Institute for Government Jack Shaw, Affiliate Researcher, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge Jessica Studdert, Deputy Chief Executive, New Local This event was chaired by Emma Norris, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government. This event was kindly supported by Grant Thornton UK LLP.

Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, joins Dr Hannah White, Director of the Institute for Government, and Professor Michael Kenny, Director of Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, for an in conversation.   This event was part of the IfG and Bennett Institute's joint conference on the Future of the UK Constitution.

In this first episode of series 3, Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Dr Anne Degrave, Prof Dennis Grube and Halima Khan about the drivers of short-termism in government, the interplay between voter preferences and policy change, and the mechanisms needed to embed longer-term decision-making.This episode unpacks why governments have been trapped in short-term thinking. Leading experts examine the impact of short-term decision-making on policy outcomes and explore the policy tools needed to instill longer-term decision-making. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features guest experts Dr Anne Degrave (IAST), Prof Dennis Grube (Bennett Institute) and Halima Khan (Bennett Institute). Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platformSeason 3 Episode 1 transcriptFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Tiffany NaylorMore about our host and guests:Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021. @ruskin147Anne Degrave is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. She studies comparative politics, historical political economy and state formation. Her work investigates the implications of state formation for citizens and their relations with the state and elites, using quantitative analyses of historical data. Dennis C. Grube is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and research lead in political decision-making at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. His research explores institutional memory as an aid to better decision-making, decision-making structures in government, and expertise and the politics of evidence-based policymaking. Halima Khan is an independent adviser on public service innovation and an affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her interests are in approaches to public service innovation which incorporate the insights of citizens and frontline staff, and which build social capital and wellbeing. @halima_khan1

Speakers: Dr Catherine Haddon, Programme Director at the Institute for Government Dr Alice Lilly, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government> Jack Newman, Research Associate at the Productivity Institute and the Department of Politics, University of Manchester Akash Paun, Programme Director at the Institute for Government The event was chaired by Jess Sargeant, Associate Director at the Institute for Government. This event was part of the IfG and Bennett Institute's joint conference on the Future of the UK Constitution.

Parliament is at the centre of the UK constitution, passing law, representing citizens, and holding the government to account. However, the government's strong control of the House of Commons, and issues of democratic legitimacy in the House of Lords, have raised questions about whether parliament is an effective check on the executive.  So how well does parliament fulfil its constitutional role? Are MPs and peers able – and willing to protect the constitution? What reforms are needed to help ensure that they can?  Speakers: Rt Hon Sir David Lidington, former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rt Hon the Baroness Smith of Basildon, Shadow Leader of the House of Lords Rt Hon the Lord Wallace of Saltaire, Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson on the Cabinet Office  Dr Hannah White OBE, Director of the Institute for Government The event was chaired by Jess Sargeant, Associate Director at the Institute for Government. This event was part of the IfG and Bennett Institute's joint conference on the Future of the UK Constitution.

The devolution settlement of 1999 marked a major constitutional development for the UK, but over two decades on devolution is anything but settled. The devolved governments and parliaments have become established features of the UK constitution, but the UK's central institutions have failed to adapt. With further devolution on the agenda, there may be more changes in the near future. So what can the UK government, parliament and civil service do to improve the workings of devolution? How can the UK government work with devolved legislatures to achieve common aims whilst also respecting the desire for policy divergence in different nations? How can the UK parliament reflect the multi-national state? And what civil service reforms are needed to facilitate co-operation over conflict? Speakers: Rt Hon Sir Robert Buckland MP, former Secretary of State for Wales Christine Jardine MP, Member of Parliament for Edinburgh West and Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Scotland) Ciaran Martin, Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at the Blavatnik School of Government Jessica Studdert, Deputy Chief Executive of New Local The event was chaired by Professor Michael Kenny, Director of Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge

There is now an expectation that the public should be consulted on constitutional change. However, traditional routes for gaining public legitimacy – such as referendums and elections – can result in binary choices, or unclear mandates.  So is there a greater role for deliberative democracy? Processes including citizens' assemblies, with informed discussions amongst a representative group of citizens, can offer many benefits to decision-makers, but getting them right is a challenge and getting them wrong can do more harm than good. When and how the public should be involved in constitutional decision making? How could options for deliberative democracy best be implemented? What are the challenges and benefits of this approach? Speakers: Sarah Allan, Director of Capacity Building and Standards at Involve Joanne Anderson, former Mayor of Liverpool Doreen Grove, Head of Open Government at the Scottish government Professor Alison L Young, Sir David Williams Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge This event was chaired by Dr Rebecca McKee, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government. This event was part of the IfG and Bennett Institute's joint conference on the Future of the UK Constitution.

Baroness Hale, former President of the Supreme Court, joins Dr Hannah White, Director of the Institute for Government, and Professor Michael Kenny, Director of Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, for an in conversation. This event was part of the IfG and Bennett Institute's joint conference on the Future of the UK Constitution.

Uncertainties over the UK's future territorial politics are great. The SNP is in turmoil, and the UK government's block on Holyrood's gender legislation is being challenged in the courts. Labour's Brown Commission has recommended major changes, and further proposals are being developed in Wales. Renewed devolution within England is on the cards. Is fundamental reform of the UK's territorial arrangements needed? If so, what might this mean in practice?SpeakersDr Anwen Elias – Reader in Politics at Aberystwyth University, and member of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of WalesKezia Dugdale – Director of the John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow, and former Leader of the Scottish Labour PartyProfessor Michael Kenny - Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of CambridgeChair: Professor Alan Renwick – Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit, UCL

Dr. Mark Fabian on the importance of introspection, the Ideal, Ought and Actual Selves, our basic psychological needs and much, much more… Dr. Mark Fabian is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick. Mark has held research and teaching positions at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, the Institute for Social Change at the University of Tasmania and the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Chapters 0:00 Show Intro 2:50 Self-Actualisation 10:30 Comfort in Ambiguity 26:25 The importance of introspection 30:30 Disclosure of Being 36:30 Healthy introspection 40:40 The Motivation Continuum 50:05 Introspection strategies 57:30 Integrity Further resources “The Coalescence of Being: A Model of the Self-Actualization Process” https://openresearch-repository.anu.e... Mark's podcast, ePODstemology https://www.buzzsprout.com/1763534 “Self-Determination Theory” by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci “A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing” by Mark Fabian “The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef To view other episodes of TMWBS on YOUTUBE    / @thementalwellbei...   To view short clips of TMWBS on YOUTUBE SHORTS https://www.youtube.com/@thementalwel... To view TMWBS on SPOTIFY https://open.spotify.com/show/4yAzyeo... To view TMWBS on TIK TOK https://www.tiktok.com/@tmwbspodcast To view TMWBS on INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/tmwbshow/ To view TMWBS on TWITTER https://twitter.com/IndiDissa

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Michael Kenny, Louis Baktash, and Mathieu Carpentier about the governance challenges in France and the United Kingdom, the impact of recent political protests, and whether devolution might be the answer to address these challenges. Leading experts reflect on recent political protests and movements - including protests over Macron's pension reforms, the gilets jaunes movement, and Brexit - and the impact these have on policy. The guests discuss how the structure of the UK and French government could be reformed, and whether devolution is the adequate response. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features experts Michael Kenny (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge), Louis Baktash (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge), and Mathieu Carpentier (Toulouse Capitole University).Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform Season 2 Episode 9 transcript For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Production:Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella Erker, Bennett Institute for Public PolicyVisuals by Tiffany Naylor, Institute for Advance Study in Toulouse, FranceRelevant links: Devolving English government by Michael Kenny and Jack Newman (2023).More information about our guests:Rory Cellan-Jones is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021. @ruskin147Michael Kenny is Professor of Public Policy, and the Inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge where he leads the Institute's place and public policy programme. His research includes leading projects on left-behind communities, social infrastructure and devolution, and the future of the UK constitution. His forthcoming book, Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Save the UK is published by Hurst (2023). @michaelkenny_Louis Baktash is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include French and British regional policies, left-behind areas, territorial politics and electoral geography. Louis graduated from Sciences Po Paris with a degree in Social Sciences and from Paris-Sorbonne University with a degree in History. He then completed a Master's degree in Public Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and a Master's degree in Management from HEC Paris.Mathieu Carpentier is Professor of Public Law at Toulouse Capitole University. He is a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France and he is the Codirector of the Institut Maurice Hauriou. He specialises in legal philosophy and in constitutional law, especially from a comparative perspective.

On this week's episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington, the Director at the Study of Governance and Society here at King College London, interviews Professor Diane Coyle. This episode is titled "The data that is and that data the isn't: the pitfalls of using big data", and discusses the various uses and implications of big data in society, and the many pitfalls that may arise.  The Conversation ‘Big Data' fuels AI models like ChatGPT and the machine learning systems that are generating much debate about their promise – and peril – for decision-making. The impact of the technology will depend on the character of the data used. While the issue of data bias is well-understood (although not solved), less attention has been paid to other aspects such as data quality (is the data an accurate measure of the underlying object?), missing data (do we have only part of the picture?), and the meaning of data (how are the underlying concepts represented by the data constructed and interpreted)? As AI models are advancing fast enough to be deployed increasingly widely in society, there is a pressing need to reflect on the perspective on our social world created for them through the data on which they are trained and updated. The Guest Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is ‘Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be‘ on how economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours.

How is the rapid progress in AI technology going to impact women? The Financial Times' Artificial Intelligence Editor Madhumita Murgia joins Nuala McGovern to talk us through the issues of gender bias, legal grey areas and possible dangers for women as AI becomes more and more central to our lives. Have you ever heard an interview with a robot on the radio? Nuala speaks to the world's first ultra-realistic artist robot, Ai-Da. Ai-Da will tell us about her latest art project, as well as what she feels about people's fears around artificial intelligence. Her creator, Aidan Meller, will also join the conversation to tell us why Ai-Da is so ground-breaking. Where does the UK stand when it comes to AI progression? The government have recently released their ‘White Paper', setting out investment aims for the technology industry. Verity Harding, visiting fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, to talk us through what's in the plan for the future. Plus, hear how such investments can truly change the way we live, as Sarah Kerruish, Chief Operating Officer at Kheiron Med, tells us about MIA, the new artificial intelligence that helps radiologists identify 13% more breast cancers. Does Artificial Intelligence really pose a threat to our jobs? And how will it impact women in the workplace? Professor Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge University, talk about the risk for women and what needs to be done to level the playing field when it comes to AI in the workplace. Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Lottie Garton

Leading experts, Sam Gilbert Bennett Institute), César Hidalgo (IAST) and Jeni Tennison (Bennett Institute)  talk to podcast host Rory Cellan-Jones  (former technology correspondent for the BBC) about the latest developments of emerging forms of technologies, their opportunities and harms, and what policymakers can do to mitigate the associated risks. This episode unpacks the most recent advancements of generative artificial intelligence and the metaverse, their policy implications, and the role of policymaking and legislation in this sphere. Our guests highlight the need for deliberative and participatory governance structures to facilitate the development and use of new technologies. Season 2 Episode 8 transcriptFor more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.frTweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Audio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella ErkerVisuals by Thomas DevaudMore about our guests:Rory Cellan-Jones is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest, Always On, which was published in 2021. @ruskin147Sam Gilbert is an entrepreneur and an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute, working at the intersection of politics and technology. He is the author of the book Good Data and recent policy briefs on the Online Safety Bill, and Crypto, Web3 and the Metaverse.  @samgilbCésar Hidalgo leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is an Associate Member at IAST, Toulouse School of Economics, an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester, a Visiting Professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a founder of Datawheel.  César is author of Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021). @cesifotiJeni Tennison OBE is the founder and Executive Director of Connected by data, an initiative that aims to put community at the heart of data narratives, practices and policies. Jeni is also the co-chair of the Data Governance Working Group at the Global Partnership on AI, and undertakes work as an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. @JeniT

Prof David Runciman and Prof Karine Van der Straeten talk to Rory Cellan-Jones about extending voting rights to school-aged children. This episode unpacks the main objections against lowering the legal voting age, the merits of extending democratic rights to children, and how children's voices might be better represented in electoral processes. Leading experts explore how the enfranchisement of children could revitalise our democracy and inject a fresh set of perspectives. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features guest experts Karine Van der Straeten (IAST) and David Runciman (University of Cambridge). Season 2 Episode 7 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and iast.frTweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouseAudio production by Steve HankeyAssociate production by Stella Erker, Bennett Institute for Public PolicyVisuals by Thomas Devaud, Institute for Advanced Study in ToulouseFurther reading:David Runciman - “Why we should lower the voting age to six”About our guests:Rory Cellan-Jones is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021. @ruskin147David Runciman is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. His research covers the history of modern political thought, with a particular focus on the history of democracy; theories of the state and political representation; the role of technology in democratic politics; generational and educational divides in contemporary politics. David created the Centre for the Future of Democracy as part of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy where his work focuses on democracy for children and young people. He co-hosted the weekly politics podcast Talking Politics, and was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.Professor Karine Van der Straeten is a senior researcher at the CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research), a member of the Toulouse School of Economics and of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Her research, which is at the intersection of economics and political science, focuses mostly on collective decision making in democracy. Recent topics include: institutions and corruption, citizen information and the quality of public decision-making, public opinion measurement, inequality and redistribution.

What does global investment in infrastructure mean for the workforce? Karin Kimbrough is the Chief Economist at LinkedIn and an expert in the global workforce. With increased global investment in infrastructure, a skilled workforce is needed to meet that demand. In this conversation, we discuss what this investment means for green jobs and women, and how we can expect the job market to shift in coming years. This episode first aired on September 22, 2022, as part of Microsoft's Public Sector Future podcast Karin Kimbrough LinkedIn's Economic Graph -- A digital representation of the global economy Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge Jeremy Goldberg | LinkedIn | Twitter Microsoft Public Sector Center of Expertise Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts

This week, Josh and Nayana are joined by Ben Goldacre and Nick De Vito from the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. In a wide-ranging conversation, they explore how the Bennett Institute develops tools and platforms to enable safe, secure health analyses and promote open science.The Bennett Institute can be found online at https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk and @BennettOxford on Twitter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit skeptechs.substack.com

Rory Cellan-Jones and leading experts Charlotte Cavaillé, Ailbhe McNabola and Jack Shaw discuss the causes of income and regional inequality, why policymakers should care, and what policy interventions work best to reduce them.Guests discuss recent trends in income and regional inequality, and evaluate the effectiveness of different policy approaches. They debate the opportunities and challenges of (de)centralisation, what works best to revive ‘left behind' places, and whether the assumptions built into the Levelling Up White Paper will deliver to reduce inequalities. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features guest experts Professor Charlotte Cavaillé (Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan and IAST), Ailbhe McNabola (Bennett Institute for Public Policy and Power to Change) and Jack Shaw (Bennett Institute for Public Policy). Season 2 Episode 3 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Audio production by Steve Hankey.Associate production by Stella Erker. Visuals by Thomas Devaud. Relevant links and publicationsShaw, J., Garling, O. and Kenny, M. (2022). Townscapes: Pride in Place. The Bennett Institute, https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/pride-in-place/ Charlotte Cavaillé (forthcoming). Fair Enough? Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, https://charlottecavaille.wordpress.com/book-project/ More information about our guests:Professor Charlotte Cavaillé is a visiting Research Fellow at the IAST and an Assistant Professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the dynamics of popular attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, high fiscal stress and high levels of immigration. In her forthcoming book, Fair Enough? Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, Charlotte proposes a new framework to explain why, in countries where inequality has increased the most, voters are not asking for more income redistribution.Ailbhe McNabola is an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and Director of Policy and Communications at Power to Change, a charitable trust that supports communities to run businesses that reinvest profits into their local area. She is also Co-Chair of the Social Research Association, a membership organisation that promotes excellence in social research, and a CAPE Policy Fellow. Her career has encompassed management consultancy in the financial services and public sectors, and the commissioning and production of research, evaluation and policy analysis reports for a range of UK government bodies.Jack Shaw is an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and recently co-authored a report on pride in place with Professor Michael Kenny and Owen Garling, also at the Bennett Institute. His background is in local government and economic development and currently works at the Institute for Public Policy and Research.Rory Cellan-Jones is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business

How can you be both interdisciplinary and be a contributing specialist in your discipline in this day andage? It's a core theme of this podcast, as well as our guests' research. Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is “Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be” on how economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy.Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. Diane joins Greg to discuss the shifting dynamics of economic measurement' over and underestimating GDP' mathiess; and why the public has such a skewed perception of what economists do.Episode Quotes:Why is the public's perception of economists skewed?20:51: It's partly what they see on the news when they turn on the TV in the evening, and often it's somebody who works in the financial markets talking about the kinds of things that financial markets are trying to predict second by second. That's very dominant. I've done some work in schools over the years to try to encourage young women to go into economics because it's a very male-dominated profession. Both they and the boys in the class take away the idea that what economics is about is going to work on Wall Street or in the City here and making a lot of money. They think it's about money. And I think that's the dominant perception that people have. Money is a metric—we use it quite a lot. But it's not really what economics is about.Data are social contracts08:54: Data are not things that are given. They're things that are made—they're social constructs.How do you identify what's happening in a market?41:07: If you want to identify what's happening in a market, going and talking to people who participate in the market is a great way to find out about it. And you have megabytes of data. It's just text, and you can analyze that in a very systematic way. Diane's aspiration for economist30:08: I would like, as us economists, to pay more attention to other insights from other disciplines from people who think differently to ourselves, that basic intellectual hygiene thing of talking to people who disagree with you so that you understand why you might be wrong. But I suppose my ultimate dream is we manage to make economics consistent with the human sciences. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much - Book by Eldar ShafirBob Schillers book on narrativePaul RomerVegra Lickus (?) paper in 1994 in the American Economic Review ??Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeProfessional Profile at Enlighten EconomicsDianne Coyle on TwitterDianne Coyle on LinkedInHer Work:Enlighten EconomicsDianne Coyle on Google ScholarCogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should BeGDP: A Brief but Affectionate History - Revised and expanded EditionThe Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters - Revised EditionSex, Drugs and Economics: An Unconventional Introduction to EconomicsParadoxes of Prosperity: Why the New Capitalism Benefits All Governing the World Economy (Themes for the 21st Century)

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to leading economists Diane Coyle, Jacques Crémer and Jean Tirole, about why productivity growth has slowed in spite of immense technological progress and what policy can do about it.This episode unravels the impact of digitalisation on economic growth and its implications for policy. Leading economists discuss the productivity puzzle, why regulating Big Tech is so difficult, the threats of mass surveillance, and what policymakers can do to address these challenges. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones (former technology correspondent for the BBC), and features guest experts Professor Diane Coyle (Bennett Institute for Public Policy), Professor Jacques Crémer (Toulouse School of Economics) and Professor Jean Tirole (Toulouse School of Economics – International Advanced Study in Toulouse). Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform: https://pod.fo/e/14406bSeason 2 Episode 1 transcript: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/CC-S2-EP1-transcript.pdf For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouseWith thanks to:Audio production by Steve Hankey.Podcast editing by Stella Erker. More information about our guests:Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads the themes of progress and productivity, and researches the digital economy and economic measurement. Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, and a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics. Professor Jacques Crémer received his undergraduate degree from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1971, a SM in Management and a PhD in economics, both from MIT, in 1973 and 1977. He has held appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. His current research interests are the economics of organization, the economics of the Internet and of the software industries, as well as contract theory.Professor Jean Tirole is honorary chairman of the Foundation JJ Laffont-Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and scientific director of TSE-Partnership. He is also affiliated with MIT, where he holds a visiting position, and the Institut de France. Professor Tirole's research covers industrial organization, regulation, finance, macroeconomics and banking, and psychology-based economics. Rory Cellan-Jones is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021.

For this episode I am very excited to talk to Ben Goldacre. Ben has an outstanding career in medicine, science and science communication and is the author of many articles and books, like e.g. "Bad Science". Today is he running the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science in Oxford, UK.I met with Ben Goldacre earlier this year (2022) to discuss his report on 'Better, Broader, Safer: Using Health Data for Research and Analysis'. This report, published in April 2022 and commissioned by the UK government, is based on more than 300 individual interviews and many more with key stakeholder groups. One of the key findings and recommendations is the need for proper software engineering. Needless to say that RSEs play an important part in this. In fact, Ben has been a strong supporter and promoter for Research Software Engineering as well as open science and software. Here a few linkshttps://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/ben-goldacre Ben Goldacre's web-sitehttps://twitter.com/bengoldacre Ben on Twitterhttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis - 'Better, Broader, Safer: Using Health Data for Research and Analysis' report, April 2022https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk Bennett InstituteLicence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/Support the Show.Thank you for listening and your ongoing support. It means the world to us! Support the show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/codeforthought Get in touch: Email mailto:code4thought@proton.me UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt Mastadon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

What does global investment in infrastructure mean for the workforce? Karin Kimbrough is the Chief Economist at LinkedIn and an expert in the global workforce. With increased global investment in infrastructure, a skilled workforce is needed to meet that demand. In this conversation, we discuss what this investment means for green jobs and women, and how we can expect the job market to shift in coming years. Karin Kimbrough LinkedIn's Economic Graph -- A digital representation of the global economy Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge Jeremy Goldberg | LinkedIn | Twitter Microsoft Public Sector Center of Expertise Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts

How much influence does the public have on the decisions made by government? Should they have more? And how should that work? People want a greater say in the decisions that affect them and their lives, with polling by UCL's Constitution Unit finding that 77% of people felt they had too little influence over how the UK is governed. There is often a disconnect between the public and the UK's representative institutions. So what needs to be done to bridge this gap between citizens and the state? This event, part of the Institute for Government and Bennett Institute for Public Policy's Review of the UK constitution, explored ambitious ideas for reinvigorating democracy in the UK. From new digital technologies, tools for allowing people most affected by policies to help design them, and citizens' assembles on the most important policy challenges facing the country, our panel will pitch their proposals to improve the UK constitution and bring decision making closer to the people. Sarah Castell, CEO of Involve Miriam Levin, Programme Director at Engage Britain Professor Jane Suiter, Director of Dublin City University's Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society Oli Whittington, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, Nesta The event was chaired by Jess Sargeant, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government #IfGBennettInst

Earlier this year, JMJ and The Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge released a study titled, Sustainability: Corporate culture and leadership perspectives. The research asked global business leaders across a range of sectors to share attitudes, barriers, and enablers of successful corporate sustainability strategies from a leadership and culture standpoint.In the latest edition of JMJ's Culture Transformation Consulting podcast, Jeff Williams, CEO of JMJ and the Bennett Institute's Prof. Diane Coyle discuss the study's purpose, methodology and key findings including:How organizations define corporate sustainability and ESGThe internal and external pressures that make corporate sustainability a business imperativeChallenges to successful implementationHow people at different levels of organizations perceive the role of leadership and culture in driving sustainability transformationAdvice for leaders setting out on a sustainability transformation journeyThis is the first in a series of podcasts looking at the different aspects of sustainability. Be sure to tune in for future broadcasts when Jeff will focus on the findings from the perspectives of: Culture; stakeholders and drivers; leadership and people.

This podcast looks at the psychological quirks of humankind, what effects our bad decisions have on the society we live in, and how policy might best steer us towards better outcomes.Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Dr Bence Bago - Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and Professor Dame Theresa Marteau – the Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge and co-chair of The Lancet Chatham House Commission on improving health post Covid-19.They draw on their research to explore what defines a ‘bad decision', what causes us to make them, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on governments' and citizens' decision-making, the role of social media in misinformation processing, what we can do to prevent ourselves from making bad decisions, and what governments can do to improve matters.Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform.Episode 9 transcript For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr . Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.  Audio production by Steve Hankey Podcast editing by Annabel ManleyMore about our guestsProfessor Dame Theresa Marteau is Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of interventions to change behaviour (principally food, tobacco and alcohol consumption) to improve population and planetary health and reduce health inequalities, with a particular focus on targeting non-conscious processes. She co-chairs the Lancet-Chatham House Commission on improving population health post-COVID-19, and participated in the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), responding to Covid-19. She is also one of the members of the management board of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.Dr Bence Bago is a research fellow at the IAST, with an academic background in cognitive psychology. His research interests in the interplay between intuitive and analytical processes in human decision-making, including applications in truth discernment when exposed to misinformation.Rory Cellan-Jones was a technology correspondent for the BBC. His 40 years in journalism have seen him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has also written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021. 

For our new mini-series - Science, Policy and Climate Resilience - Host Rob Doubleday is joined by our new Co-Host Emily So, Professor of Architectural Engineering, University of Cambridge. Season 6 is focusing on the race to resilience global climate campaign and how to accelerate climate priorities after COP26. In this first episode, Rob and Emily are joined by Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Climate Scientist and Director at Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge's climate initiative, Amy Mount, a climate policy and politics expert who has worked in government, NGOs and now advises philanthropies, and Dimitri Zenghelis, Economist and Co-Founder of the Wealth Economy Project at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in Cambridge. -- Season 6 is produced in partnership with the research project Expertise Under Pressure, Centre for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of Cambridge. CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Jessica Foster. Research for this series is supported by CSaP Policy Researcher Nick Cosstick. Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here. -- Resources relevant to this episode: The Glasgow Climate Pact – Key Outcomes from COP26. Glasgow Climate Pact: https://unfccc.int/documents/310475 Last IPPC Report published before COP26––Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. The Paris Agreement: https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement Cambridge Zero work on cascading risks associated with climate change. Bennett Institute working paper – Climate and Fiscal Sustainability: Risks and Opportunities. The Climate Change Act: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/27/contents UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2022: https://bit.ly/3Py8vQH Climate Change Committee New Article – It's Time to Turn the Tide on UK Adaptation Action Climate Change Committe Post-COP26 report – COP26: Key Outcomes and Next Steps for the UK. UN Convention on Biological Diversity: ​https://bit.ly/3MBTbRm Sign up to our CSaP newsletter by clicking here.

In the digital era, data is practically the air we breathe. So why does everybody treat it like a product to be hoarded and sold at profit? How would our world change if Big Tech operated on assumptions and incentives more aligned with the needs of a healthy society? Are more data — or are bigger models — really better? As human beings scamper around like prehistoric mammals under the proverbial feet of the new enormous digital monopolies that have emerged due to the Web's economies of scale, how might we tip the scales back to a world governed wisely by human judgment and networks of trust? Would Facebook and Twitter be more beneficial for society if they were public services like the BBC? And how do we settle on the social norms that help ensure the ethical deployment of A.I.? These and many other questions grow from the boundary-challenging developments of rapid innovation that define our century — a world in which the familiar dyads of state and market, public and private, individual and institutional are all called into question.Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on Complexity, we speak with two researchers helping to rethink political economy:SFI External Professor Eric Beinhocker is the Professor of Public Policy Practice at the University of Oxford, and founder and Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University's Oxford Martin School. He is also the author of The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society.Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and co-director of the Bennett Institute, whose latest book — Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be— was published by Princeton University Press last fall.In the first episode of this subseries, we spoke with SFI President David Krakauer about how the study of political economy has changed over the last two hundred years due to the innovation of new mathematical and computational methods.  In this episode, we examine how the technological milieu that empowered these changes has also transformed the subject of study itself:  digital surveillance architecture, social media networks, big data, and (largely inadequate) attempts to formalize econometrics have all had a profound impact on modern life. In what ways do new institutions beget even newer institutions to address their unintended consequences? How should we think about the complex relationships between private and public agencies, and what status should we give the data they produce and consume? What is it going to take to restore the trust in one another necessary for society to remain coherent, and what are the most important measures to help economists and policymakers navigate the turbulence of our times into a more inclusive, prosperous, and sustainable world?Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced…If you value our research and communication efforts, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:Toward a New Ontological Framework for the Economic Goodby Eric D. BeinhockerComplexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposiumedited by W. Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, Allison StangerSocializing Databy Diane CoyleThe Public Optionby Diane CoyleCommon as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownershipby Lewis HydePitchfork Economicsby Nick HanauerThe Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolvesby W. Brian ArthurGeoffrey West on Complexity 35Will A Large Complex System Be Stable?by Robert MayBlockchain: Trust Companies: Every Company Is at Risk of Being Disrupted by A Trusted Version of Itselfby Richie EtwaruHelena Miton on Complexity 46The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrativeby Sam Bowles, Wendy CarlinRecoupling Economic and Social Prosperityby Katharina Lima de Miranda, Dennis J. SnowerSignalling architectures can prevent cancer evolutionby Leonardo Oña & Michael LachmannWhy we should have a public option version of Google and Facebook (response to Diane Coyle)by James PethokoukisBryant Walker Smith on Complexity 79“Premature optimization is the root of all evil."— Donald Knuth

Data and the Data Economy are increasingly important issues affecting all of society. Hear from a panel of experts on responsible technology and public policy discussing mental models of how value accrues in the Data Economy, how to form protective legislation and infrastructure, and dealing with extreme concentrations of power and wealth plaguing the data economy. This was originally aired on RxC TV as part of the 2021 RadicalxChange unConference Online.SpeakersSushant Kumar (@sushants) As Director on the Responsible Technology team, based in India, Sushant is focused on Omidyar Network's work on a new data paradigm, with a vision for technology that underpins greater individual empowerment, social opportunity, and user safety.Previously, Sushant was part of the intellectual capital team, helping to define Omidyar Network's strategy, research, impact, and learning agendas, with a focus on India.Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Sushant was a principal at Accenture Strategy, where he led major initiatives across consumer goods and technology industries. In this role, he advised clients in Europe, Africa, and India growth strategy, operating model transformations, and international expansion. Before Accenture, Sushant worked as a strategist with the GSM Association, and Capgemini, driving thought leadership across policy, consumer technology, and digital media sectors.Sushant earned his MBA from the London Business School and received a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi.Diane Coyle (@DianeCoyle1859)Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her latest book is ‘Markets, State and People – Economics for Public Policy' examines how societies reach decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources. Her next book, 'Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be' is published on 12 October 2021.Diane is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours.Matt Prewitt (@m_t_prewitt) Matt Prewitt is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.

• Research identifies leadership and culture as catalysts • “Leadership must take the lead in aligning mindsets, structures, skills, and culture” (Total Recorded Time is 16:51) Organizations aren't quick to change and most businesses are around for profit. So does the issue of “sustainability” mean anything for the future of business? Yes, says a new study by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and JMJ, an Austin, Texas-based cultural transformation firm. “The Bennett Institute's research underscores the link JMJ has identified between an organization's culture and the success of its sustainability strategy,” says Jeff Williams, CEO at JMJ. “Those that treat ESG (environmental, social and governance considerations) as a box-ticking exercise will fail to take advantage of the strategic opportunity presented by enabling sustainability across all activities. “If an organization is going to embrace sustainability as a practice, leadership must take the lead in aligning mindsets, structures, skills, and culture,” Mr. Williams says. Jeff Williams is our guest on this Bizgnus Interview Podcast. Please click here to watch the interview: https://youtu.be/cBbHCF951o4 “There is no doubt leaders in business will need to embed sustainability in their corporate strategies,” says Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge Diane Coyle,. “Many will already have realized the importance of sustainability metrics. They need to go beyond that discussion to think about how their strategy, culture, and day-to-day activities will have to change -- and about the role of leadership in delivering that.” For more information: https://www.jmj.com/ ======================================= ABOUT US Bizgnus reports, writes, edits and publishes business news in online, broadcast and printed publications. We have published unbiased, unfiltered and in-depth interviews with business and other thought leaders since 2005. Opinions are those of our guests. Bizgnus never endorses the viewpoints, products or services of its guests, who are selected based on their knowledge and experience. No one pays to get on our podcasts. And we don't accept advertising (although Google/YouTube sells ads on our videos.) We'd appreciate your financial support through Patreon. If you'd like to help, please click here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=56957587 Our address is 150 Herons Run, #104, Sarasota, Florida 34232. Call us anytime at 209.470.3400. Our email address is editor@bizgnus.com

Tanya is an academic and entrepreneur. She leads the Digital State project at Cambridge University's Bennett Institute and is the founder of StateUp, an advisory firm focused on innovation that serves a public purpose. In this conversation, we talk about the idea of "public purpose technology", the companies that are building it, and the investors that are funding it. We talk through the challenges of building for the public sector - from procurement to fundraising - as well as the big opportunities for citizens, governments, and entrepreneurs in more effective public purpose tech. Enjoy this conversation with Tanya Filer.-----------------Thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show. You can learn more about Entrepreneur First at www.joinef.com and subscribe to my weekly newsletter at tib.matthewclifford.com

In Episode 4 of Series 7 of The Rights Track, Todd is in conversation with Sam Gilbert, an entrepreneur and affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Sam works on the intersection of politics and technology. His recent book – Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Future – explores the different ways data helps us, suggesting that “the data revolution could be the best thing that ever happened to us”.  Transcript Todd Landman  0:01  Welcome to The Rights Track podcast which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. In Series 7, we're discussing human rights in a digital world. I'm Todd Landman, in the fourth episode of this series, I'm delighted to be joined by Sam Gilbert. Sam is an entrepreneur and affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, working on the intersection of politics and technology. His recent book, Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Future explores the different ways data helps us suggesting the data revolution could be the best thing that ever happened to us. And today, we're asking him, what makes data good? So Sam, welcome to this episode of The Rights Track. Sam Gilbert  0:41  Todd thanks so much for having me on.  Todd Landman  0:44  So I want to start really with the book around Good Data. And I'm going to start I suppose, with the negative perception first, and then you can make the argument for a more optimistic assessment. And this is this opening set of passages you have in the book around surveillance capitalism. Could you explain to us what surveillance capitalism is and what it means?  Sam Gilbert  1:01  Sure. So surveillance capitalism is a concept that's been popularised by the Harvard Business School Professor, Shoshana Zuboff. And essentially, it's a critique of the power that big tech companies like Google and Facebook have. And what it says is that, that power is based on data about us that they accumulate, as we live our lives online. And by doing that produce data, which they collect, and analyse, and then sell to advertisers. And for proponents of surveillance capitalism theory, there's something sort of fundamentally illegitimate about that. In terms of the way that it, as they would see it, appropriates data from individuals for private gain on the path of tech companies. I think they would also say that it infringes individual's rights in a more fundamental way by subjecting them to surveillance. So that I would say is surveillance capitalism in a nutshell.  Todd Landman  2:07  Okay. So to give you a concrete example, if I'm searching for a flannel shirt from Cotton Trader, on Google, the next day, I open up my Facebook and I start to see ads for Cotton Trader, on my Facebook feed, or if I go on to CNN, suddenly I see an ad for another product that I might have been searching for on Google. Is that the sort of thing that he's talking about in this concept? Sam Gilbert  2:29  Yes, that's certainly one dimension to it. So that example that you just gave is an example of something that's called behaviour or retargeting. So this is when data about things you've searched for, or places you've visited on the internet, are used to remind you about products or services that you've browsed. So I guess this is probably the most straightforward type of what surveillance capitalists would call surveillance advertising.  Todd Landman  2:57  Yeah, I understand that, Sam, but you know when I'm internally in Amazon searching for things. And they say you bought this other people who bought this might like this, have you thought about, you know, getting this as well. But this is actually between platforms. This is, you know, might do a Google search one day. And then on Facebook or another platform, I see that same product being suggested to me. So how did, how did the data cross platforms? Are they selling data to each other? Is that how that works?  Sam Gilbert  3:22  So there's a variety of different technical mechanisms. So without wanting to get too much into the jargon of the ad tech world, there are all kinds of platforms, which put together data from different sources. And then in a programmatic or automated way, allow advertisers the opportunity to bid in an auction for the right to target people who the data suggests are interested in particular products. So it's quite a kind of complex ecosystem. I think maybe one of the things that gets lost a little bit in the discussion is some of the differences between the ways in which big tech companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon use data inside their own platforms, and the ways in which data flows out from those platforms and into the wider digital ecosystem. I guess maybe just to add one more thing about that. I think, probably many people would have a hard time thinking of something as straightforward as being retargeted with a product that they've already browsed for, they wouldn't necessarily see that as surveillance, or see that as being particularly problematic. I think what gets a bit more controversial, is where this enormous volume of data can have machine learning algorithms applied to it, in order to make predictions about products or services that people might be interested in as consumers that they themselves haven't even really considered. I think that's where critics of what they would call surveillance capitalism have a bigger problem with what's going on. Todd Landman  4:58  No I understand that's, that's a great great explanation. Thank you. And I guess just to round out this set of questions, really then it sounds to me like there's a tendency for accumulated value and expenditure here, that is really creating monopolies and cartels. To what degree is the language of monopoly and cartel being used? Because these are, you know, we rattle off the main platforms we use, but we use those because they have become so very big. And, you know, being a new platform, how does a new platform cut into that ecosystem? Because it feels like it's dominated by some really big players. Sam Gilbert  5:32  Yes. So I think this is a very important and quite complicated area. So it is certainly the case that a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies have deliberately pursued a strategy of trying to gain a monopoly. In fact, it might even be said that that's sort of inherent to the venture capital driven start-up business model to try and dominate particular market space. But I suppose the sense in which some of these companies, let's take Facebook as an example, are monopolies is really not so related to the way in which they monetize data or to their business model. So Facebook might reasonably be said to be a monopolist of encrypted messaging, because literally billions of people use Facebook's platform to communicate with each other. But it isn't really a monopolist of advertising space, because there are so many other alternatives available to advertisers who want to promote their products. I guess another dimension to this is the fact that although there are unquestionably concentrations of power with the big tech companies, they also provide somewhat of a useful service to the wider market, in that they allow smaller businesses to acquire customers much more effectively. So that actually militates against monopoly. Because now in the current digital advertising powered world, not every business has to be so big and so rich in terms of capital, that it can afford to do things like TV advertising. The platform's that Facebook and Google provides are also really helpful to small businesses that want to grow and compete with bigger players.  Todd Landman  7:15  Yeah, now I hear you shifting into the positive turn here. So I'm going to push you on this. So what is good data? And why are you an optimist about the good data elements to the work you've been doing? Sam Gilbert  7:27  Well, for me, when I talk about good data, what I'm really talking about is the positive public and social potential of data. And that really comes from my own professional experience. Because although at the moment, I spend most of my time researching and writing about these issues of data and digital technology, actually, my background is in the commercial sector. So I spent 18 years working in product and strategy and marketing roles, and particularly financial services. Also at the data company, Experian, also in a venture backed FinTech business called Bought By Many. And I learnt a lot about the ways in which data can be used to make businesses successful. And I learned a lot of techniques that, in general, at the moment, are only really put to use to achieve quite banal goals. So for example, to sell people more trainers, or to encourage them to buy more insurance products. And so one of the things that I'm really interested in is how some of those techniques and technologies can move across from the commercial sector, into the public sector, the third sector, and be put to work in ways that are more socially beneficial. So maybe just to give one example of that type of data that I think contains huge potential for public goods is search data. So this is the data set that is produced by all of us using Google and Bing and other search engines on a daily basis. Now, ordinarily, when this data is used, it is to do banal things like, target shoes more effectively. But there is also this emerging discipline called Infodemiology, where academic researchers use search data in response to public health challenges. So one great example of that, at the moment has been work by Bill Lampos at University College London and his team, where they've built a predictive model around COVID symptoms using search data. And that model actually predicts new outbreaks 17 days faster than conventional modes of epidemiological surveillance. So that's just one example of the sort of good I believe data can bring. Todd Landman  9:50  So it's like a really interesting example of an early early warning system and it could work not only for public health emergencies, but other emerging emergencies whether they be conflict, or natural disasters or any topic that people are searching for, is that correct? Sam Gilbert  10:05  Yes, that's right. I mean, it's not just in the public health field that researchers have used this, you just put me in mind actually Todd of a really interesting paper written by some scholars in Japan who are looking at citizens decision making in response to natural disaster warnings. So floods and earthquakes that that migration patterns I guess, would be the way of summarising it. Those are things that can also be detected using search data.  Todd Landman  10:31  Well, that's absolutely fascinating. So if we go back to public health then. I was just reading a new book, out called Pandemocracy in Europe: Power, Parliaments and People in Times of COVID. And it's edited by Matthias Kettemann and Konrad Lachmayer. And there's a really fascinating chapter in this book that transcends the nation state, if you will. And it talks about platforms and pandemics. And one section of the chapter starts to analyse Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and telegram on the degree to which they were able to control and or filter information versus disinformation or misinformation. And just the scale of some of this stuff is quite fascinating. So you know, Facebook has 2.7 billion daily users, it's probably a bigger number now. And you know, 22.3% of their investigated Facebook posts contain misinformation about COVID-19. And they found that the scale of misinformation was so large that they had to move to AI solutions, some human supervision of those AI solutions. But what's your take on the role of these big companies like we've been talking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and their ability to control the narrative and at least provide safe sources of information, let's say in times of COVID, but there may be other issues of public interest where they have a role to play?  Sam Gilbert  11:57  Yes, I think this is such an important question. It's very interesting that you use the phrase, control the narrative, because of course, that is something that big tech companies have traditionally been extremely reluctant to do. And one of the things I explore a bit in my book is the extent to which this can really be traced back to some unexamined normative assumptions on the part of tech company executives, where they think that American norms of free speech and the free speech protections of the First Amendment that's sort of universal laws that are applicable everywhere, rather than things which are culturally and historically contingent. And for that reason, they have been extremely reluctant to do any controlling of the narrative and have tended to champion free speech over the alternative course of action that they might take, which is to be much more proactive in combating harms, including but not limited to misinformation. I think this probably also speaks to another problem that I'm very interested in, in the book, which is what we are concerned about when we say we're concerned about big tech companies' power, because I think ordinarily, the discussion about big tech companies power tends to focus on their concentrations of market power. Or in the case of surveillance capitalism theory, it concentrates on the theoretical power that algorithms have over individuals and their decision making. And what gets lost a bit in that is the extent to which tech companies by providing these platforms and these technologies actually empower other people to do things that weren't possible before. So in some work I've been doing with Amanda Greene, who's a philosopher at University College London, we've been thinking about that concept of empowering power, as we call it. And as far as we're concerned, that's actually a much more morally concerning aspect of the power of big tech, big tech companies than their market position.  Todd Landman  14:11  Yeah. So I like it that you cite the First Amendment of the American Constitution, but interestingly, the international framework for the protection and promotion of human rights also, you know, has very strong articles around protection of free speech, free assembly, free association, which of course, the tech companies will be interested in looking at and and reviewing. But what it raises to I believe really is is a question around the kind of public regulation of private actors, because these are private actors. They're not subjected to international human rights law in the way that states are. And yet they're having an impact on mass publics. They're having an impact on politics. They're having an impact on debate. So perhaps I misspoke by saying control the narrative. What I'm really interested in is we seem to have lost mediation. We have unmediated access to information. And it seems to me that these it's incumbent upon these organisations to provide some kind of mediation of content, because not all things are true just because they're said. So it gets back to that question, what where's the boundary for them? When will they step in and say this is actually causing harm if there's some sort of a big tech Hippocratic oath about do no harm that needs to be developed? So that, so there is at least some kind of attempt to draw a boundary around what is shared and what is not shared? Sam Gilbert  15:34  Yes, so the idea of a Hippocratic oath for tech workers is definitely out there, the writer who has explored it more than I have is James Williams in his book Stand Out Of Our Light. I think that that is certainly something that would help. I also think that it is beneficial that at the moment, we're having more discussion about data ethics and the ethics of artificial intelligence, and that that is permeating some of the tech companies. So I think more ethical reflection on the part of tech executives and tech workers is to be welcomed. I don't think that's sufficient. And I do think that it's important that we have stronger regulation of the tech sector. And I suppose from my perspective, the thing that needs to be regulated, much more than anything to do with how data is collected or how data is used in advertising. Is this what sometimes referred to as online safety, or other times it's referred to as online harms. So that is anything that gives rise to individuals being at risk of being harmed as they live their lives online. There's actually legislation that is coming through in the UK at the moment called online safety bill, which is far from perfect legislation, but in my opinion, it's directionally right. Because it is more concerned with preventing harm and giving tech companies a responsibility for playing their part in it, then it is concerned with trying to regulate data or advertising. Todd Landman  17:13  Yeah, so it's really the result of activity that is trying to address rather than that the data that drives the the activity, if I could put it that way. So if we think about this, do no harm element, the mediating function that's required at least to get trusted information available to users. I, I wonder if we could pivot a little bit to the current crisis in Ukraine, because I've noticed on social media platforms, a number of sites have popped up saying we're a trusted source for reporting on on the current conflict, and they get a sort of kite mark or a tick for that. I've also seen users saying, don't believe everything you see being tweeted out from Ukraine. So where does this take us and not only COVID, but to something as real time active and horrific as conflict in a country, we can talk about Ukraine or other conflicts about the sharing of information on social media platforms? Sam Gilbert  18:08  Yes, well, this is a very difficult question. And unfortunately, I don't have the answer for you today. I guess what I would point to is something you touched on there Todd, which is the idea of mediation. And we have been through this period with social media, where the organizations, the institutions that we traditionally relied on to tell us what was true and what was false and sort fact from fiction, those organisations have been disintermediated. Or in some cases, they have found themselves trying to compete in this very different information environment that is much more dynamic in a way that actually ends up undermining the journalistic quality that we would otherwise expect from them. So this is not a very satisfactory answer, because I don't know what can be done about it, except that it is a very serious problem. I suppose just to make one final point that I've been reminded I've been reading stories on this topic in relation to the Ukraine crisis, is that the duality of this power that tech companies and that technology has given to ordinary users in the era of social media over the last 15 years or so. So if we were to rewind the clock to 2010, or 2011, the role of Twitter and Facebook and other technology platforms in enabling protest and resistance against repressive regimes that was being celebrated. If we then roll forwards a few years and look at a terrible case like the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, we are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum where the empowerment of users with technology has disastrous consequences, and I guess if we then roll forward again to the Ukraine crisis, it's still not really clear whether the technology is having a beneficial or detrimental effect. So this is really just to say, once again, when we think about the power of tech companies, these are the questions I think we need to be grappling with, rather than questions to do with data. Todd Landman  20:31  Sure, there was there was a great book years ago called the Logic of Connective Action. And it was really looking at the way in which these emerging platforms because the book was published some years ago about lowering collective action costs, whether it was, you know, for protest movements, or, you know, anti-authoritarian movements, etc, we did a piece of work years ago with someone from the German Development Institute on the role of Facebook, in, in opposition to the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, and Facebook allowed people to make a judgement as to whether they should go to a protest or not based on number of people who said they were going and and so it lowered the cost of participation, or at least the calculated costs of participating in those things. But as you say, we're now seeing this technology being used on a daily basis, I watch drone footage every day of tanks being blown up, of buildings being destroyed. And you know, part of my mind thinks it's this real, what I'm watching. And then also part of my mind thinks about, what's the impact of this? Does this have an impact on morale of the people involved in the conflict? Does it change the narrative, if you will, about the progress and or, you know, lack of progress in in the conflict, and then, of course, the multiple reporting of whether they're going to be peace talks, humanitarian corridors and all this other stuff. So it does raise very serious questions about the authenticity, veracity and ways in which technology could verify what we're seeing. And of course, you have time date stamps, metadata and other things that tell you that that was definitely a geolocated thing. So are these companies doing that kind of work? Are they going in and digging into the metadata, I noticed that Maxar Technologies, for example, is being used for its satellite data extensively, and looking at the build-up of forces and the movement of troops and that sort of thing. But again, that's a private company making things available in the public sphere for people to then reach judgments, media companies to use, it's an incredible ecosystem of information, and that it seems like a bit like a wild west to me, in terms of what we believe what we don't believe and the uses that can be made of this imagery and commentary. Sam Gilbert  22:32  Yes, so there is this as an all things, this super proliferation of data. And what is still missing is the intermediation layer to both make sense of that. And also tell stories around it that have some kind of journalistic integrity. I mean what you put me in mind of there Todd was the open source intelligence community, and some of the work that including human rights organisations do to leverage these different data data sources to validate and investigate human rights abuses taking place in different parts of the world. So to me, this seems like very important work, but also work that is rather underfunded. I might make the same comment about fact checking organisations, which seem to do very important work in the context of disinformation, but don't seem to be resourced in the way that perhaps they should be. Maybe just one final comment on this topic would relate to the media, the social media literacy of individuals. And I wonder whether that is something that is maybe going to help us in trying to get out of this impasse, because I think over time, people are becoming more aware that information that they see on the internet may not be reliable. And while I think there's still a tendency for people to get caught up in the moment, and retweets or otherwise amplify these types of messages, I think that some of the small changes the technology companies have made to encourage people to be more mindful when they're engaging with and amplifying content might just help build on top of that increase in media literacy, and take us to a slightly better place in the future. Todd Landman  24:26  Yeah, I mean, the whole thing around media literacy is really important. And I I also want to make a small plea for data literacy, just understanding and appreciating what data and statistics can tell us without having to be you know, an absolute epidemiologist, statistician or quantitative analyst. But I wanted to hark back to your idea around human rights investigations, we will have a future episode with a with a group that does just that and it's about maintaining the chain of evidence, corroborating evidence and using you know, digital evidence as you, you know in ways that help human rights investigations and, you know, if and when this conflict in Ukraine finishes, there will be some sort of human rights investigatory process. We're not sure which bodies going to do that yet, because we've been called for, you know, like a Nuremberg style trial, there have been calls for the ICC to be involved as been many other stakeholders involved, but that digital evidence is going to be very much part of the record. But I wonder just to, yeah go ahead Sam.  Sam Gilbert  25:26  Sorry I am just going to add one thing on that, which I touched on this a little bit, and my book, but I think there's a real risk, actually, that open-source intelligence investigations become collateral damage in the tech companies pivot towards privacy. So what some investigators are finding is that material that they rely on to be able to do their investigations is being unilaterally removed by tech companies, either because it's YouTube, and they don't want to be accused of promoting terrorist content, or because it's Google or Facebook, and they don't want to being accused of infringing individual's privacy. So while this is not straightforward, I just think it's worth bearing in mind that sometimes pushing very hard for values like data privacy can have these unintended consequences in terms of open source intelligence. Todd Landman  26:24  Yes, it's an age old chestnut about the unintended consequences of purposive social action. I think that was a Robert Merton who said that at one point, but I guess in closing that I have a final question for you because you are an optimist. You're a data optimist, and you've written a book called good data. So what is there to be optimistic about for the future?  Sam Gilbert  26:42  Well, I suppose I should say something about what type of optimist I am first, so to do that, I'll probably reach for Paul Romer's distinction between blind optimism and conditional optimism. So blind optimism is the optimism of a child hoping that her parents are going to build her a tree house. Conditional optimism is the optimism of a child who thinks, well, if I can get the tools and if I can get a few friends together, and if we can find the right tree, I think we can build a really incredible tree house together. So I'm very much in the second camp, the camp of conditional optimism. And I guess the basis for that probably goes to some of the things we've touched on already, where I just see enormous amounts of untapped potential in using data in ways that are socially useful. So perhaps just to bring in one more example of that. Opportunity Insights, the group at Harvard run by Raj Chetty has had some incredibly useful insights into social mobility and economic inequality in America, by using de-identified tax record data to understand over a long period of time, the differences in people's incomes. And I really think that that type of work is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this enormous proliferation of data that is out there. So I think if the data can be made available to researchers, also to private organisations in a way that, as far as possible, mitigates the risks that do exist to people's privacy. There's no knowing quite how many scientific breakthroughs or advances in terms of human and social understanding that we might be able to get to. Todd Landman  28:52  Amazing and I guess, to your conditional optimism, I would add my own category, which is a cautious optimist, and that's what I am. But talking to you today does really provide deep insight to us to understand the many, many different and complex issues here and that last point you made about, you know, the de-identified data used for for good purposes - shining a light on things that that are characterising our society, it with a view to be able to do something about it, you see things that you wouldn't see before and that's one of the virtues of good data analysis is that you end up revealing macro patterns and inconsistencies and inequalities and other things that then can feed into the policymaking process to try to make the world a better place and human rights are no exception to that agenda. So for now, Sam, I just want to thank you so much for coming on to this episode and sharing all these incredible insights and, and and the work that you've done. So thank you. Chris Garrington 29:49 Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rights Track, which was presented by Todd Landman and produced by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts with funding from 3DI. You can find a detailed transcript on the website at www.RightsTrack.org. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts to access future and earlier episodes. Further reading and resources: Sam Gilbert (2021) Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Digital Future. Bill Lampos' covid infodemiology: Lampos, V., Majumder, M.S., Yom-Tov, E. et al. (2021) “Tracking COVID-19 using online search”. Infodemiology Japan/natural disasters paper: [1906.07770] Predicting Evacuation Decisions using Representations of Individuals' Pre-Disaster Web Search Behavior (arxiv.org) On “empowering power”:  Greene, Amanda and Gilbert, Samuel J., (2021) “More Data, More Power? Towards a Theory of Digital Legitimacy”. On the Hippocratic oath for tech workers: James Williams (2018) Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Matthias C. Kettemann and Konrad Lachmayer (eds.) (2022) Pandemocracy in Europe: Power, Parliaments and People in Times of COVID-19. W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra  Segerberg (2013) The Logic of Connective Action; Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics.

The norms and conventions of the UK's uncodified constitution are being pushed to their limits – and sometimes beyond. In the absence of clear legal rules, the constitution relies on a shared understanding of what constitutes good behaviour in public and political life, and trust that people in positions of power will abide by that understanding. The constitutional historian Peter Hennessy describes as this as the “good chaps” theory of UK government. However, the Brexit process saw conflict between different branches of government – parliament, the government and the courts – while Westminster has been rocked by a recent series of scandals around the behaviour of ministers and MPs. So is this a temporary aberration or a deeper problem? Is greater codification needed to regulate the behaviour of constitutional actors? Can the UK rely on “good chaps” or is more needed to ensure norms and conventions are followed? As part of our review of the UK constitution, the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy hosted a panel of experts to discuss these issues and more: Professor Andrew Blick, Head of the Department of Political Economy and Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at King's College London Dr Catherine Haddon, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government Professor Meg Russell, Professor of British and Comparative Politics and Director of the Constitution Unit at University College London The event was chaired by Maddy Thimont Jack, Associate Director at the Institute for Government. #IfGBennettInst

The UK is currently one of the most regionally unequal countries in the developed world. The government's White Paper on Levelling Up sets out 12 “missions” to increase economic opportunities across all regions. The UK is far from the first country to try and “level up” regional areas. Countries including France, Germany and China are also making efforts to tackle similar regional inequalities.But just how easy is it to tackle regional economic imbalances for levelling up to work?  Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Sylvain Chabé-Ferret from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and Professor Michael Kenny and Dame Fiona Reynolds from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy about just how far public policies can really go to address regional inequalities.Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Episode 5 transcriptThe Crossing Channels podcast series is produced by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and IAST. Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse #CrossingChannelsAudio production by Steve Hankey.Podcast editing by Annabel ManleyMore about our guests:Professor Michael Kenny  is the inaugural director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and leads its Policy and Engagement programme on ‘Place'. He is leading research projects on left-behind communities, social infrastructure and devolution, and is writing a book about the UK's constitutional future.Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE is the Chair of the Management Board for the Bennett Institute, and chair of the National Audit Office and Chair of the Governing Council of the Royal Agricultural University.Dr Sylvain Chabé-Ferret is Assistant Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, Research Fellow at Inrae and member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse.  He specialises in the econometrics of causal inference with applications to the evaluation of Payments for Environmental Services and of Job Training Programs. Sylvain has also set The Social Science Knowledge Accumulation Initiative (SKY), which aims to summarise evidence in social science, mainly via meta-analyses.www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.ukwww.iast.fr

In Episode 3 of Series 7 of The Rights Track, Professor Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Bennett Institute joins Todd to discuss the dizzying digital changes over the last 25 years, how it has disrupted the economy and impacted on our lives. Transcript Todd Landman  0:01  Welcome to The Rights Track podcast which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. In Series 7, we're discussing human rights in a digital world. I'm Todd Landman, in our third episode of the series, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Diane Coyle. Diane is Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and co- directs the Bennett Institute, where she leads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her most recent book- Cogs and Monsters - explores the problems and opportunities for economics today, in light of the dizzying changes in digital technology, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. And today we're asking her, why is it that digital is so very disruptive? So welcome, Diane, it's wonderful to have you here on this episode of The Rights Track. Diane Coyle  0:49  It's a pleasure, I'm flattered to be invited. Todd Landman  0:52  Well, it's great. And you know, I was reading Cogs and Monsters over the holidays and enjoy very much your dissection of you know, the state of the discipline of economics and where it's going, and some of its challenges, etc. But I was really taken by the section on digital technology and digital transformation. And you, you reference your 1997 book, The Weightless World. And of course, that was 25 years ago. So the time between the publication of The Weightless World and Cogs and Monsters. And you know, factoring in Moore's Law of technological change, a lot has happened over these 25 years. So I wonder if I could just start by asking you, what are the sort of broad brush, absolutely huge changes in this area? And what has been their impact on economics? Diane Coyle  1:34  Well, where to start, as you say, it's 25 years since I first got interested in digital technology, and was always sure, it was going to be transformative. But for a lot of economists, that was not obvious for quite a while. And I remember talking to one very senior figure in the UK profession who said, well, this digital stuff, it's going to reduce transactions costs a little bit, but we know how to handle transactions costs in our models so, so what's so special about this? And I suppose they've been inflection points where small changes or what might seem to be small changes bring about very large consequences. One of those was the switch from dial up internet, to broadband. And simply the loss of friction in the sort of *dial-up joining sound* when the modem did the handshake, for those who are old enough to remember, it made a big difference in the kind of services and opportunities that people thought they were able to put online and expanding the audience for them. And then the other was 2007, and the smartphone. Steve Jobs at that iconic Apple press conference, holding up the first smartphone first iPhone, which converged with the arrival of 3G, so that data transmission became cheaper and more possible at volume and speed. And also the kind of market design ideas in economics that enabled the creation of apps and in particular, matching apps and digital platforms. And if you look at what's happened since 2007, both in terms of individual behaviour and economic transactions, the fact that we spend a whole day a week, whole 24 hours a week, I think it's 28 now, online. And the new kinds of business models and the way that markets have restructured, it has been absolutely extraordinary. And I think in many areas, we're only just beginning to think through what the consequences are, and what the implications are for politics and policy and regulatory choices. Todd Landman  3:38  Thank you for that. And you know, that rapid expansion just in terms of volume, scale, speed has fundamentally transformed our lives. I remember Steve Jobs, the announcement and I thought what am I ever going to do with that? Why do I need a phone that takes a picture? And equally when the iPad came out, I thought, I'm not sure how I'm going to use that now of course I can't live without one. And it sort of does. It changes our workflow, it changes our productivity, people who are amenable to multitasking find that these devices do help us and of course, being able to share information at rapid speed. As we know, through the pandemic, we've been able to communicate and stay on, on track in some ways in engaging with the sorts of things that we do. And so I wanted to focus a little bit on those that haven't really experienced this incredible transformation. I was recently at an event where a representative from one of the local housing association said well, we have about you know, 10,000 houses in our portfolio, if we add up all the housing associations in our, our portfolio plus other providers that might be 100,000 houses in this region, most of whom do not have access to these digital transformations. So what could you say about the sort of the left out, the left behind or the famous word about the digital divide? How do we address some of those issues, both economically but also maybe in policy terms? Diane Coyle  4:52  In different ways it's a different level of the digital divide, and one is just the sheer network infrastructure. And the economics of these networks is such that population density really makes a difference to their financial viability. So to get universal service at high speed, there has to be public subsidy for it. In this country, we've got a government that has since Mrs. Thatcher's time being focused on you try all the market solutions possible first, and then grudgingly, you have some public intervention. And I think there should have been public intervention long ago and much more focused on minimum universal service. Ofcom does set standards and I think the standards that they have set are now outdated by the technology. So that needs revisiting, and then the investments got to happen. And we've had, you know, more or less monopoly of Openreach having the core of the network. And that problem hasn't really been fixed. So there's a set of problems about network infrastructure, and who's going to pay for it, and universal services and utility. And then there's access to devices and the payment plans. And for that, you know, obviously, smartphones are expensive, we've got plans where you can get the handset subsidised if you sign up to a reasonably expensive data plan. But lots of people can't do that. And this is a universal problem in all countries, because they're all pretty unequal. And so the people who are best off have best access. During the pandemic that's been diabolically bad, in particular for schoolchildren who've been learning online. And if you've got a limited plan, limited data, and you've only got a phone, not a tablet or a computer, you're not going to learn, you're not going to learn that learning deficit is going to scar those individuals for the rest of their working careers. So that has been a problem. And I'm not sure I've got an easy fix for this except that this is a necessity of modern life. And if people need subsidising to get necessities, if we subsidise their energy, for example, then we should be subsidising their connectivity as well. And then there's this sort of whole digital literacy bit, which is a whole other kettle of fish. And how do we teach people to be properly sophisticated consumers of whatever it is, whether it's social media misinformation, or whether it's price comparison websites, and how to interpret the information that you're getting from those.  Todd Landman  7:18  When I've listened to you, you know, it feels like you're making the case for digital connectivity as almost a public good like access to health care, education, social welfare, social, you know, the social safety net, if you will, is that your view that this really is, you know, akin to the provision of education and health and welfare?  Diane Coyle  7:43  I think it is because it's about conveying information really. And this is the fundamental characteristic of information and how that drives economic growth, particularly in what we call the knowledge economy. And all of this is useful because it gives people information to do things that make their lives easier or better in some way that matters to them. A trivial example might be, you've got an app on your phone that helps you navigate around the city so that you don't waste time because your bus isn't running. So that's one kind of valuable information and the time saving that goes with that. But you know, that's, that's the fundamental point of it. It's accessing public services online is almost essential now, leading your daily life, making it more convenient, making it more enjoyable, in business, using the information that you can get to deliver better services to your customers. So it's all, it's all about information. And that is the key characteristic of information - it is a public good, it's non-rival. Todd Landman  8:38  Ah it is a non-rival public good and it's very interesting that that crosses over with a lot of discourse of the Human Rights field around rights to information, rights to be informed, etc. But also date obligations to progressive really realise that the fulfilment of social, economic and cultural rights. So there's a really interesting communication or conversation, if you will, that could take place between economists and human rights people around the provision of non-rival public goods. But the other thing that I was struck by what you said was this idea about digital literacy about not knowing in a way, how good all this can be for you, but also what some of the pitfalls are, how is one a good consumer of digital information, but also what's the unwitting phenomenon of people sharing tremendous amounts of information about themselves in the absence of that digital literacy, literacy? And I know you've done some work on you know, how much is your data worth? So how do we calculate what people's data is worth in the marketplace? Diane Coyle  9:36  Aha, how much time have you got? Actually, my colleague here in the economics department, Wei Xiong has done some work looking at Chinese data on how concerned users of one of the huge apps are about privacy. And the finding there that is really interesting. You know, there's this privacy paradox. People say they care and then they act as if they don't, and they found that people care more the more sophisticated a user they are. So people who don't go online very much or don't think about it very much don't care about their privacy, but the more people use it, and learn about the pitfalls, I suppose the more they care about, about the privacy questions. But this is this is a really interesting area. And it's an ongoing area of research for me. And, you know it operates at different levels. So one is just what's it worth to the economy? People think data is an asset, because it helps businesses tailor their services better, develop better products, serve their customers better, make more money, which is a good thing in a capitalist economy. And there's a growing gap between the most productive companies and all the rest. So the top 5% In most OECD countries are pulling further away in terms of productivity and also profitability. More and more research is suggesting that's because they are using digital tools better, they using predictive analytics, they are building their own software to use the data, growing databases. So all of those more digital firms are becoming more productive and sort of winning the competitive race, the competitive rivalry that takes place in market economies. So we would like more firms to do that, to grow the economy and grow jobs and make better products and services. But then there's also the individual point that you alluded to. And being an economist, I think about this in terms of externalities. And as the negative externality that you pointed to that your behaviour online, or the data that people accumulate about you online, can reveal things about you that you don't want to be known. Or you can do the same about other people, you can reveal things about people who are like you, or people who are connected with you that they don't want, want known. And there are also positive externalities that come from joining up data, because a lot of the value, a lot of the information value depends on putting data in context. And even something that seems very personal. Like, do I have a temperature right now? Obviously, has positive information value for the people around me. And so to make use of this, to give people, you know, better quality lives better information, we need to think about how do we get data shared in good ways that creates value for people and doesn't invade their privacy? So this debate, I think is in in a pretty terrible state. And I'd be interested to know what you think about this, I think part of problem is that it's always thought about in terms of individual rights, and actually, it's a data captures relationships and context. Todd Landman  12:38  Yes, and you know, so a lot of the human rights discourse is around the right of the individual. But of course, there are group rights and collective rights that are equally as important. So one can look at minority rights, for example, and other collective rights. So there is that tension in human rights discourse in human rights law between the absolute fundamental rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state then vis-à-vis non-state actors, including businesses, but also non, non, not for profit organisations. And then collective rights - does a group of people have a right to maintain a certain set of practices, or certain linguistic tendencies or textbooks in mother tongue language? Which is a it's a whole another podcast about that I'm sure. So yeah, I think you put your finger on a very interesting tension between these things. And I, I guess, I want to pivot to this idea of capitalism without capital. So you, you mentioned the idea about productivity, growing the economy, jobs, and which is good for capitalism, as you say, but a lot of people have observed that actually, you know, companies like an Uber or any other kind of online car provider, or Airbnb, these are property companies without property. These are taxi companies without taxis. So they're actually wiping out any of the kind of overheads by having to run a big fleet of cars. And yet, the markup on that is, is very high. I mean, I went to one of these data centres in London, where they command all of the data needed to run a successful taxi company. And they get 26,000 bookings a day, I think, at the time, and they were optimising to the point that even if one of their drivers was on the way home, they made sure that there was a fair in the car on the way home because that meant that that car was earning money on the way home. So this phenomenon of the capitalism without capital, I mean, it's it's a bit of a misnomer, because it still requires infrastructure. It still requires devices and cars, but it shifts, you know, who owns what, who does what and where the margins sits. So, what can you say about this changing nature of capitalism in the face of this new phenomenon of digital technologies? Diane Coyle 14:39 It's a big question. I think the relationship between the material and the immaterial is really interesting. And the scale of the physical investment needed in data centres, or the energy use is often overlooked, although people are starting to talk about that more. And as you say, some platform companies operate by pushing the need to invest both in whether it's cars, physical capital, but also their own human capital, they're pushing that out to individuals. And what that means is that we're getting under investment, including in human capital, if you're a gig worker, your incentive to invest in your own training, when you're bearing all of the risk of fluctuations in the business is diminished. So that's quite interesting, too. And then we've got this construct of intellectual property or non-material property, hugely valuable, the stock market value put on companies that hold a lot of data or have a certain kind of brand or reputation is absolutely immense. And yet, it doesn't act like normal, old fashioned physical kinds of capital. It's got very different depreciation characteristics, you can, it can lose its value overnight, if there's a hit to reputation, or if a secret gets gets out and get shared. And I think the construct of property, intellectual property, intangible property is just as an individual right to own the property or corporate right to own the property is just highly problematic. And I would much rather we start to think in terms of rights to access - who has rights to access what? And, you know, particularly going back to data, what can, what can who know about somebody? Because part of the privacy issue is that whether it's big tech firms or governments, they're in a position to start joining up all kinds of data about people. And that's the problem. You don't mind your doctor, knowing very intimate details about you and having that data. You don't mind your bank manager, knowing what your bank balances, but you wouldn't want the government to join up all of those different bits of information about you and get that synoptic view, the Stasi, the East Germans had this term glesano which meant transparent people. And that I think, is is a real problem. So I came across this concept that you probably know more about the idea of privacy in public that comes from other parts of social science literature. It operates offline, it doesn't operate online. So can we start to think about those sorts of access rights or permissions rather than absolute property rights? Does that make sense? Todd Landman  17:21 Yeah, that makes sense. And you know, I was thinking about one of the extreme examples of the the intangibles, which is this non-fungible trading regime. So people are creating digital assets, if you will, that are then trading and you know, a digital asset by a famous artists can can sell on the market for for millions of pounds. And it it again, it gets back to some of the fundamental questions you ask in your book Cogs and Monsters about faith in the economy, you know, we think about coins and currency. Why do I accept the fact that you hand me a £10 note, and I say, that's a £10 note, which is worth something, when actually, it's just a piece of paper. So a lot of the economy is based on that transactional faith that has built up over centuries of people trading. And now of course, during the pandemic, cash and coins weren't used as much, we're going to electronic payment. Apple Pay has lifted its its cap on, you know, pounds per transaction. You know, there's a whole new world of financial transaction that feels even more ephemeral than economics has felt like in the past, and what can you say about sort of where are we going with all of this? What What's the new non-fungible that suddenly is going to have value in the market?  Diane Coyle 18:27 I don't really know. I mean, for NFT's, I can't help but believe that there's a bubble element to that. And that people, you know the art market is a pretty rigged market, if I can put it that way. So I think there are people in the market who are trying to create artificial value, if you like around NFT's. But I don't know the answer to your question and it sometimes seems that value has become so untethered, that surely it's unreal. And yet at the same time, there are people who haven't got enough cash to go and buy food, they're going to food banks, and how has that come about? Yet equally, there are intangible things that are really valuable. Trust is an intangible, and we wouldn't have an economy without it. Cultural or heritage assets, which I'm thinking about at the moment. You know, it's not that we assign value to the stones in Stonehenge in some normal economic sense, but, but there is an additional cultural value to that, and how should we start to think about that, and, you know, more and more of the economy is intangible. So we have to get our heads around this. Todd Landman  19:27 More and more, the economy's intangible. I'm gonna have to quote you on that. That's wonderful. I, I think then what the next thing I'm really interested in exploring with you is, is the role of the state and the way I want to enter this really is that you've already hinted at the idea that provision of no-rival public goods where there's clearly you know, a role for the state in that there is also a role for the state in the regulatory environment. And you know, of course, I was very sort of worried about your observation that the state can combine banking information with health information and know something about you in a connected way that re-identification but also that very private revelation about someone's individual circumstance. So what's that balance between the state helping, the state regulating and the state staying away? Because that's a big concern in human rights, we, we often say the state has a has a, you know, an obligation not to interfere in our rights, it has an obligation to protect us from violations of rights by third parties. And it has an obligation to fulfil its right commitments up to available economic capability and, you know, sort of state institutional capability. But boy, there's a tough balance here between how much we want the state to be involved and how much we really say, just stay away. What's your take on that? Diane Coyle 20:38 It's particularly difficult, isn't it when trust in government has declined, and when democracies seem to be becoming rather fragile? So you worry much more about these trade-offs with an authoritarian state, whose politicians you don't trust very much, I think these issues have become more acute than they might have been 25 years ago, I suppose. And at the same time, we need the state more than ever, because of the characteristics of the way the economy is changing. We've had this period since Thatcher and Reagan, when the pendulum in public discourse about economic policy has swung very firmly towards markets first state fills in the gaps corrects the market failure. And yet, we're in a period of technical innovation when we need standards. Just going back to data, we need somebody who will set the standards for interoperability and metadata so that we can enforce competition in digital markets, or technical standards for the next generation of mobile telephony. So we need the standard setting. And because of the non-rivalry, and because of the returns to scale, I think we're all much more interconnected economically than used to be the case. And those phenomena have always existed. They've always been, you know, big economies of scale, and autos and aerospace, but they are now so pervasive across the economy, that almost everything we do is going to affect other people, I think it's becoming a much more collective economy than it used to be. Or just think about the way that the productive companies are combining all of our data to use predictive analytics to do better things for us. So, I, my strong senses is that it's a more collective economy, because it's intangible because it's got this these elements of non-rivalry and scale. And so we're going to have to have a rethink of what kind of policy discourse do we have around that, and it's not markets first government then fixes a few problems. Todd Landman  22:40 Yeah and that idea of the collective economy really moves away from you know, the discipline of economics has often been characterised as residing in methodological individualism. And as long as you understand the individual rationality of people, you just aggregate that rationality and then you get market force, and you get supply and demand curves, you get equilibrium prices, and quantities, etc. But you're actually making a slightly different argument here that the interconnectivity of human behaviour is the interrelationships of one person's choices and the consequences or the as you say, the predictive analytics in a way talking about, well, we expect you to like these sets of products, and therefore you will go buy them, or we expect crime in this region, and therefore we put more resources there. That's a different enterprise. That's a much more holistic enterprise of looking at the, as you say, data in context, and it changes our way of thinking about modelling the economy, but also thinking about remodelling our relationship with the state. Diane Coyle 23:34 I think you're right, you know, we're in a world then of disequilibrium of non-linear, linear dynamics where things can tip one way or another very quickly, where decisions by state agencies will shape outcomes. And give a simple example in my kind of territory, if you've got digital markets that that tip so that there's generally one dominant company because of the underlying economic characteristics, then any decision that a competition authority takes about a merger, or dominant position is going to shape which company dominates the market. You know, if the merger goes ahead, it's one and if it doesn't, go ahead, it may be another one. So they become market shapers. And I think this is why there's more interest now in self-fulfilling outcomes and narratives which started to take off a little bit in economics more in some other disciplines. Because the narrative affects the outcome, it aligns people's ideas and incentives and points them all in the same in the same direction. So I often think about the Victorians and I think they, they had this kind of narrative of greatness, and legacy long-term prosperity, and so they built these huge town halls that you see in cities around the country. Joseph Bazalgette gave us 150 years' worth of capacity in the London sewers. So they had something going on in their heads. That was not the economics that we've had from 1979 up, up until just recently, they weren't doing cost benefit analysis or thinking about equilibrium supply and demand curves. Todd Landman  25:07 Yeah, it's a much bigger vision, isn't it? And you know, there's an observation now that data is the new oil. It's the oil of the future. And I wonder if, in closing, whether you could just say a few remarks about a) do you think it is the oil of the future? And what's that flow of oil going to look like? Is it just more and more data and more and more confusion? Or is there going to be some sort of consolidation, rationalisation and, and deeper understanding of the limits of the data enterprise and the digital enterprise? Or is it just too hard to say at this stage? Diane Coyle 25:36 Economists don't like that analogy at all because oil is a rival good and data is a non-rival good. So we in a very anoraky way say no, no, that's a very imperfect analogy. And I mean of course, the point is that it's going to be ubiquitous and essential. And people still talk about the digital economy. But before long, that will be like talking about the electricity economy. It'll just all be digital and data. But I think there's so much that we don't know. And so much of what will happen will be shaped by decisions taken in the near term, with, you know, the consequences for governance, really, we've talked a lot about the economics of it. But all of this has implications for governance and democracy and rights, which is where you come in. Todd Landman  26:18 Yes, absolutely and that's what we're exploring in this series of, of The Rights Track. So this has been a fascinating discussion, as ever, I really enjoy your insights and precision your use of language and correcting me about the, the rival nature of data that but that's an important correction and one that I absolutely accept. But you've also raised so many questions for us to think about in terms of governance, democracy, rights, individual rights versus collective rights. And this idea of the non-rival public good that will absolutely, our listeners will want to chew over that one for a long time. So for now, can I just thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Rights Track. Chris Garrington 26:55 Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rights Track, which was presented by Todd Landman and produced by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts with funding from 3DI. You can find detailed show notes on the website at www.rightstrack.org and don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts to access future and earlier episodes.

On Episode #61 of the Book Talk Today podcast we are joined by Sam Gilbert. Sam is an affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. He is also an expert in data-driven marketing being part of the fintech startup Bought By Many as the chief marketing officer. Today we will be discussing his most recent book, “Good Data: An Optimist's Guide To Our Digital Future”. We discussed:

Institute for Government/Bennett Institute Review of the UK Constitution launch event. From Supreme Court interventions to accusations of ‘dead parliaments', from the Brexit impact to the pandemic response, a tumultuous period in British politics has put the UK constitution under huge strain and undermined public faith in how the UK is governed. Calls for change have come from all sides. Should the UK's constitution be codified? Does parliament have enough power to hold the Government to account? Are the courts going too far in diluting government power? Does the role of the House of Lords and the monarchy need rethinking? Is devolution working – and do we need more of it? How do governments deal with the public and can trust be restored? While the last five years have brought the Constitution's sustainability into question, they have also created a real opportunity to reinvigorate UK democracy, restore trust in the political system and improve the way that government works. But without a clear vision for the future, the UK risks yet more constitutional confusion and conflict. Over the next 18 months, the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, backed by a distinguished advisory panel, will undertake an impartial, non-partisan review of the constitution before setting out recommendations for change for this and future governments to follow. This event launched this major joint project, exploring how well the UK constitution is working and the problems that now need to be addressed. On the panel to discuss the UK constitution and the problems faced, were: Dr Halima Begum, Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust The Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC, former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; current Member of Parliament for South Swindon Professor Ciaran Martin, former Chief Executive of the National Cyber Security Centre; now Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University Baroness Smith of Basildon, Shadow Leader of the House of Lords This event is chaired by Bronwen Maddox, Director of the Institute for Government. Professor Michael Kenny, Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, provided some opening remarks on the review. #IfGBennettInst

Institute for Government/Bennett Institute 'Review of the UK Constitution' launch event. From Supreme Court interventions to accusations of ‘dead parliaments', the Brexit impact to the pandemic response, a tumultuous period in British politics has put the UK constitution under huge strain and undermined public faith in how the UK is governed. Calls for change have come from all sides. Should the UK's constitution be codified? Does parliament have enough power to hold the government to account? Are the courts going too far in diluting government power? Does the role of the House of Lords and the monarchy need rethinking? Is devolution working – and do we need more of it? How do governments deal with the public and can trust be restored? While the last five years have brought the constitution's sustainability into question, they have also created a real opportunity to reinvigorate UK democracy, restore trust in the political system and improve the way that government works. But without a clear vision for the future, the UK risks yet more constitutional confusion and conflict. Over the next 18 months, the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, backed by a distinguished advisory panel, will undertake an impartial, non-partisan review of the constitution before setting out recommendations for change for this and future governments to follow. This event launched this major joint project, exploring how well the UK constitution is working and the problems that now need to be addressed. On the panel to discuss the UK constitution and the problems faced, were: Dr Halima Begum, Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust The Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC, former Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; current Member of Parliament for South Swindon Professor Ciaran Martin, former Chief Executive of the National Cyber Security Centre; now Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University Baroness Smith of Basildon, Shadow Leader of the House of Lords This event was chaired by Bronwen Maddox, Director of the Institute for Government. Professor Michael Kenny, Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, provided some opening remarks on the review. #IfGBennettInst

This episode discusses the potential of digital technologies to change infrastructure priorities in developing countries. Experts from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) consider what counts as infrastructure, whether ‘leapfrogging' is a useful term, emerging digital divides, and the impact of foreign (particularly American and Chinese) tech giants in this space.This fourth episode in the Crossing Channels podcast series is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features guest experts Dr Stephanie Diepeveen (Bennett Institute), Professor Stéphane Straub (IAST), and Dr Rehema Msulwa (Bennett Institute).Listen on your preferred podcast platform including Spotify and Apple podcasts.  Episode 4 transcriptThe Crossing Channels podcast series is produced by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and IAST. Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse #CrossingChannelsAudio production by Steve Hankey.Podcast editing by Annabel ManleyMore about our guests:Dr Stephanie Diepeveen is a research associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, as well as a research fellow at Overseas Development Institute. Her research focuses on digitalisation and politics. She recently published the book, "Searching for a New Kenya: Politics and Social Media on the Streets of Mombasa", which investigates the democratic value of street-based and online public debates.Dr Rehema Msulwa is a Research Associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her research is on the intersection of policy and the design and delivery of capital-intensive infrastructure projects. She has engaged and worked with government bodies, research institutes and consultancies in several countries, including the UK, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.Stéphane Straub is Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, where he is the head of the Behaviour, Institutions and Development group. He works on issues of infrastructure, procurement, and more generally institutional development in the context of developing countries. He has held academic positions in the US, the UK and France, has been a lead Economist with the Sustainable Development Practice Group at the World Bank in Washington DC (2016-17), and is a consultant for several international institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Union, and the Asian Development Bank among others. He is currently president of the European Development Network (EUDN).

Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Professor Coyle co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. She is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. She has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Professor Coyle was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year Honours. Her new book, "Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be," is available now.

Hope versus fear in artificial intelligenceIn this third episode of Crossing Channels, experts from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), including why we need to care about it, who is responsible for it, and whether there's a double standard for AI and humans.Host Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Dr Jean-Francois Bonnefon and Professor Daniel Chen from IAST, and Professor Diane Coyle from the Bennett Institute.Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts Episode 3 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/. Tweet us your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Audio production by Steve Hankey.Podcast editing by Annabel ManleyMore about our guestsDr Jean-Francois Bonnefon is the Scientific Director at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), and a Research Director for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also the President of the European Commission expert group on the ethics of driverless mobility, Head of the Artificial Intelligenve and Society programme of the Toulouse School of Economics Digital Center, and Chair of Moral AI at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute. His research interests are decision-making and moral preferences, and the applications of this in the ethics of self-driving cars and other intelligent machines.Professor Daniel Chen is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, a Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, and a Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include AI and the Rule of Law, with an overarching focus on normative commitments and the justice system. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the World Bank DE JURE (Data and Evidence for Justice Reform) programme, which aims to update how legitimacy and equality in the justice system is measured and interpreted.Professor Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Diane is also a Director of The Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council. Her research interests cover economic statistics, the digital economy, competition policy and digital markets, and the economics of new technologies.Rory Cellan- Jones (host) is a former technology correspondent for the BBC. His  40 years in journalism saw him take a particular interest in the impact of the internet and digital technology on society and business. He has written multiple books, including his latest “Always On” which was published in 2021.  

Why have economists ignored nature for so long - and now they have discovered it, are they measuring it correctly?This episode tackles the issue of incorporating nature into economic measurements. These include whether there is still a trade-off between economic growth and the environment, what is still missing from economic measures, and how to get academics and policymakers to work together. This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features expert guests Dr Matthew Agarwala and Dr Cristina Peñasco from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and Nicolas Treich, from the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.Episode 2 transcriptFor more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/. Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.Audio production by Steve Hankey.Podcast editing by Annabel ManleyMore about our guests:Dr Matthew Agawala is an economist at the Bennett Institute, and project lead for their Wealth Economy project. He is interested in wealth-based approaches to measuring and delivering sustainability, wellbeing, and productivity. This is motivated by the belief that 21st century progress cannot be described by 20th century statistics. Dr Cristina Peñasco is a University Lecturer in Public Policy at POLIS, a Centre Fellow at Centre for the Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG) hosted at the Department of Land Economy, and an associate researcher of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her research brings together work in environmental economics, innovation policy and energy economics in green and energy efficiency technologies, with a focus on the policy instruments enabling the transition to low-carbon economy.Nicolas Treich is a research associate at Toulouse School of Economics and INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment). His work focuses on decision theory, environmental economics, and, more recently, on animal welfare.

Is economics fit for the modern world?That's the basic question posed in Cogs and Monsters, the new book from Diane Coyle, one of Britain's most eminent economists and our guest this week.Part critique of her own profession, part manifesto for a better, more up-to-date economics, Diane's book goes beyond the standard criticisms of economics and gets into the the really big issues - not least, what should the role of an economist actually be? Should economics describe the world as it is, or as it should be? How can economists deal with a world of AI, big tech and big data?Diane is as well qualified as anyone to answer those questions, having worked a Treasury economist, economics editor of the Independent, professor of economics at the University of Manchester and, since 2018 as the head of the interdisciplinary Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She is also the author of no fewer than nine books, including the Weightless World, The Economics of Enough and ‘GDP - a Brief but affectionate history'. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

TRIGGER WARNING: THERE IS A VERY SHORT CLIP OF THE FIRST EMERGENCY CALL AND SOUNDS OF THE NIGHT NEAR THE BEGINNING OF THIS PODCASTIn this first episode, Gill Kernick and Matthew Price go back to June 2017 when Gill witnessed the terrible fire at Grenfell that killed 72 people.  As she watched the fire rip through the building she felt helpless. She knew, as a consultant advising high hazard industries on how to prevent disasters, that this should never have happened.  With the help of Guillermo Rein, who is a professor of Fire Science at Imperial College London and Diane Coyle who is an economist and co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, Gill and Matthew examine the complexities of building safety and look at the myth that regulations keep us safe.

Crossing Channels is the new podcast series produced by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and Institute for Advanced Study to give interdisciplinary answers to today's big questions. Experts from both research centres will discuss different approaches to explore complex challenges and offer policy solutions.  This first teaser episode hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones  with co-director of the Bennett Institute and Bennett Professor, Diane Coyle, and Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, former Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, Paul Seabright, discusses the thinking behind the Crossing Channels podcast series and the debates listeners can look forward to joining.Subscribe to the Crossing Channels podcast feed, download each episode at the start of the month,, download each episode at the start of the month, tweet us your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse, and read more about our research at bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and iast.fr.This episode is produced by Steve Hankey (audio) & Annabel Manley.

When you hear the word "economics," do you hit the snooze button? Yet, how we structure our economies, whom they serve, and even what we decide to measure has an enormous impact. A few changes could mean the difference between a world we've sucked dry and one where we all flourish. We talk through the unknown outcomes of a post-COVID economy and why we need to move beyond GDP with Diane Coyle, co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, who conducts interdisciplinary research on key policy challenges of our times. What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and The Podglomerate.

In this episode we ask an expert on expertise what she knows for sure. Dr Anna Alexandrova is a Reader in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and the principal investigator for the ‘Expertise Under Pressure' group at CRASSH. Her latest research is co-authored with people currently in severe financial hardship, and combines their insights and lived experiences with conventional academic approaches to articulate a more authentic, democratic understanding of what it means to truly ‘flourish' – work which could have significant impact on the government's current wellbeing agenda. At a moment when expertise, globally, is under extreme pressure how can we make space for different ways of knowing? Is it reasonable to expect cast-iron certainty from our public experts? And what did Dr Alexandrova learn as a teenager that has shaped her whole career? Follow Anna Alexandrova and the Expertise Under Pressure team on Twitter via @ExpertiseUnder Anna's writings can be found on her PhilPeople profile (https://philpeople.org/profiles/anna-alexandrova) and her webpage (https://sites.google.com/site/aaalexandrova/). Her 2017 book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being is now available in paperback: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780197598894 You can find out about her ongoing work on responsible science of wellbeing (https://twitter.com/BennettInst/status/1409434292430770176) by following the Bennett Institute for Public Policy @BennettInst. Some recent articles include “Wellbeing and Pluralism”(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00323-8), “Happiness Economics as Technocracy” (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/abs/happiness-economics-as-technocracy/ED0C177E734BCAF9458CF4755775B603), “Mental Health Without Wellbeing” (https://philarchive.org/archive/WREMHWv1). And read more about national poverty charity Turn2Us and the co-production research work mentioned in this episode here: https://www.turn2us.org.uk/Working-With-Us/Co-production-and-involvement-at-Turn2Us

Economist Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy, Cambridge University. She co-directs the Bennett Institute, where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Her work has touched innovation, technology and intangibles; sustainability, inequality and measuring beyond GDP. We discuss the challenges of the current narrowness in economics both in terms of the diversity of people it attracts and the paucity of wider ranging interdisciplinary thinking. Diane's 1997 book (The Weightless World) was prescient over many technology, innovation and intangibles trends but sustainability was a missing hole. We discuss sustainability and what she felt she missed and what she had right. Diane critiques degrowth ideas while noting the challenges which catalyse that type of thinking. We chat about measurement challenges in an intangible world and how while GDP might have measured more usefully in the past but that in the present it misses many areas of value. In passing, Diane critiques happiness indices and elements of the human development index. We address the UK's productivity challenges (but don't expect we have solved it?!) and conclude it is not only a measurement challenge. We discuss inequality and “superstar earners” across all sectors and possible solutions. Diane over-rates / under-rates: Universal Basic Income, a Job guarantee policy, Industrial Policy, Arrow's impossibility theorem, running the economy hot; and the New Zealand Prime Minister. We discuss minimum wage and tax policy. Win-win investment ideas and end with what a productive day looks like and advice for would-be economists. Transcript and Video available here.

Sam Gilbert discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Sam Gilbert is an affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. An expert in data-driven marketing, he was employee number one and chief marketing officer at Bought By Many, an award-winning fintech start-up named as one of Wired's hottest start-ups in Europe and ranked in the Sunday Times TechTrack100 list of the UK's fastest growing companies. Previously, he was head of strategy and development at the data company Experian and head of consumer finance at Santander. He lives in Copenhagen. West Highland Line: https://www.scotrail.co.uk/scotland-by-rail/great-scenic-rail-journeys/west-highland-line-glasgow-oban-and-fort-williammallaig AnswerThePublic.com: https://answerthepublic.com/ Danish Summerhouses: https://www.howtoliveindenmark.com/podcasts/danish-summerhouse-dollhouse-expect-youre-invited-danish-summer-home/ The Zuckerberg Files: https://zuckerbergfiles.org/ Judith Shklar's Liberalism of Fear: https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf Novels of Magnus Mills: https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/magnus-mills This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

TRIGGER WARNING: THERE IS A VERY SHORT CLIP OF THE FIRST EMERGENCY CALL AND SOUNDS OF THE NIGHT NEAR THE BEGINNING OF THIS PODCASTIn this first episode Gill Kernick and Matthew Price go back to June 2017 when Gill witnessed the terrible fire at Grenfell that killed 72 people. As she watched the fire rip through the building she felt helpless. She knew, as a consultant advising high hazard industries on how to prevent disasters, that this should never have happened. With the help of Guillermo Rein, who is a professor of Fire Science at Imperial College London and Diane Coyle who is an economist and co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, Gill and Matthew examine the complexities of building safety and look at the myth that regulations keep us safe.Sponsored by JMJ Associates - A Mother Come Quickly Production. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

As Scotland and Wales head to the polls next week, pro-independence and anti-unionist sentiment is growing in both these nations. This raises the very real question about how much of a threat is the United Kingdom under? Both Brexit and COVID have exposed some of the fault lines but the devolution of power twenty years ago is also contributing to much of the fragility of the Union. Not that it was a bad move but that Whitehall is struggling in its ability, or will, to govern for all of the four territories. A new report, Union at the Crossroad,  published by The Constitution Society delves into these issues. One of the authors, Professor Michael Kenny, director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, discusses what they have found.

Politicians and civil servants are hungry for data to help design effective policy. How do we best collect and communicate this evidence - to support good governance and public accountability?  Joining David to explore interactive dashboards, misinformation and what’s not in the data are:  Professor John Aston - former chief scientific adviser to the Home Office, now Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life Dr Laura Gilbert - Chief Data Analyst at No. 10 Downing St Professor Diane Coyle CBE - Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy *** Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.  

We are off air for the month of January, while we prepare for our upcoming new series on genetic technologies. While we are off air, we are delighted to be able to share with you this bonus episode, recorded at as part of the online launch of our annual report in November 2020. This episode features host Dr Rob Doubleday, who sat down with the Bennett Institute of Public Policy's Professor Diane Coyle to discuss productivity in the UK. CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast will be returning with a new series on 5 February 2021.

The future is becoming harder to predict thanks to climate change and a global pandemic. But a large part of what the future will look like is in our own hands. The biggest challenge to creating a better future may be political rather than scientific or technological. In this episode, Diane Coyle, professor of public policy, Laura Diaz Anadon, professor of climate change policy, and architectural engineer, Ruchi Choudhary, join us to talk about how we can build a future that might not be anything like the past.We cover topics like innovation, GDP, and how the uncertainty created by climate change can help propel policy and economic decisions. Plus, we look at some of the benefits that come with building a greener future together. In this episode: 0:00 - Intro03:50 - What a sustainable future could look like07:15 - What economic, political and institutional changes do we need? 09:45 - Informing behavioural change11:15 - Recap point13:05 - How important is innovation in resolving climate change? 17:55 - The importance of measuring wellbeing. 19:50 - What metrics speak to policymakers? 23:17 - International coordination. Distributing the burdens of climate change27:05 - Recap point30:39 - What impact will COVID have? 35:35 - What will be the legacy of 2020? What changes are here to stay? 40:00 - Circling back to what a sustainable future might look likeThis episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod. Please take our survey. How did you find us? Do you want more Mind Over Chatter in your life? Less? We want to know. So we put together this survey. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.Thanks very much.Guest Bios: Professor Diane Coyle (@DianeCoyle1859) (@bennettInst)https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/team/diane-coyle/ Professor Diane Coyle is the inaugural Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity, and has been a government adviser on economic policy, including throughout the covid-19 pandemic. Her latest book, ‘Markets, State and People – Economics for Public Policy' examines how societies reach decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources. Research Interests: Economic statistics and the digital economy: lead researcher on the Measuring the Modern Economy programme at the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence. Competition policy and digital markets. Economics of new technologies. Natural capital; infrastructure.Professor Laura Diaz Anadon (@l_diaz_anadon) (@CEENRG)Professor of Climate Change Policy and Director, Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG)Prof. Diaz Anadon has three main areas of research: The...

Climate change is likely to affect almost every area of our lives… but how did we get to this point? When and why did we first take notice of climate change? And why has climate change evaded our collective attention and action for so long?We talked with professor of human geography, Mike Hulme, science historian and journalist Dr Sarah Dry and environmental economist Dr Matthew Agarwala to try to figure all of this out. Along the way, we discovered new ways of thinking about climate change, from a tragic story where the issue is constantly caught between opposing forces, to more hopefully thinking of it as a source of generative change and innovation. This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan and Naomi Clements-Brod. From the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Zero.Please take our survey. How did you find us? Do you want more Mind Over Chatter in your life? Less? We want to know. So we put together this survey. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.Thanks very much.In this episode:0:00 - Intro 03:15 - What was the starting point for human made climate change? 08:30 - Recap point10:10 - The economics of climate change and modelling for the future.14:45 - The tragedy and politics of climate change16:05 - The concept of values20:25 - Recap point22:10 - Can we find a single answer or a single story to solve climate change? 25:50 - The concept of the wealth economy28:00 - Denialism and climate optimism 32:35 - What we've learned from COVID33:35 - Recap point35:20 - Has democracy helped, or hindered climate change? 37:15 - Are there any reasons to be optimistic? 40:45 - In the next episodeGuest Bios: Dr Sarah Dry (@SarahDry1)I write about the history of science. I have written about Victorian fishermen and risk, epidemics and global health policy, the life and loves of Marie Curie, and the history of Isaac Newton's manuscripts. That last project has just been published in paperback: The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton's Manuscripts.My latest book is Waters of the World: The Story of the Scientists Who Unravelled the Mysteries of our Seas, Glaciers and Atmosphere–and Made the Planet Whole. It tells the stories of the scientists who have uncovered the mysteries of our oceans, atmosphere, icesheets and glaciers, and in doing so, helped us see the earth as an interconnected globe. https://sarahdry.com/home/Dr Matthew Agarwala (@MatthewAgarwala)Matthew Agarwala is an environmental economist interested in wealth-based approaches to measuring and delivering sustainable development. The pace of globalisation, innovation, and social, environmental, and economic upheaval leaves no doubt: 20th century statistics can't capture 21st century progress. Matthew joined the Bennett Institute's wealth economy...

On Monday, 9 November, the Cambridge Zero Policy Forum - an initiative of Cambridge Zero and the Centre for Science and Policy - will release its report on a Blueprint for a Green Future. In advance of the report's launch, CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast host Dr Rob Doubleday spoke with some of the report's authors about the report, their research, and their thoughts on a pathway to a green recovery. This live virtual event was recorded as part of the Cambridge Climate Change Festival. Throughout this recording you'll hear from: • Dr Robert Doubleday, Executive Director, Centre for Science and Policy (Chair) • Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Director, Cambridge Zero • Dr Anna Barford, Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow in Pathways to a Circular Economy, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership • Professor Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor, University of Cambridge • Cordula Epple, Senior Programme Officer, Climate Change and Biodiversity, UN WCMC • Professor Sir Richard Friend, Cavendish Professor of Physics • Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Diageo Professor in Organisation Studies, Cambridge Judge Business School • Dr Jennifer Schooling, Director, Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction • Dimitri Zenghelis, Special Advisor: The Wealth Economy, Bennett Institute for Public Policy For more information about the report, please visit https://www.zero.cam.ac.uk/ -- CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast is hosted by CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday, and is edited and produced by CSaP Communications Coordinator Kate McNeil. Our series on Science, Policy & a Green Recovery is produced in partnership with Cambridge Zero. If you have questions you would like us to address in a future week, please email enquiries@csap.cam.ac.uk. Music and sound effects used in this season of CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast are courtesy of FreeSound.org. This episode features sound effects from PannChie and smacks999.

In this episode, Professor Diane Coyle, former adviser to UK Treasury and co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, discusses everything from whether we can measure the size of an economy, and how much we still get wrong, to the economic impact of Covid-19 to whether economists can and should do more to explain the economy to non-economists.

During the first lockdown there was a surge in volunteering and community activism, most obvious in the work of ‘mutual aid' groups. As the Bennett Institute for Public Policy observed, mutual aid is a manifestation of social capital in the community, which means it is strong in some areas but not in others. There is strong social capital in Finsbury Park, North London. Terry Conway launched herself into a mutual aid group in the ward and found that the response deepened connection with community, even for long-standing residents. https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/social-capital-and-response-covid-19/

Public services in the UK have faced unprecedented challenges over the past decade which the COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying. Already under pressure budgets are being stretched further and the introduction of new technologies and services models is being accelerated to meet the demands of the new normal. This presents an opportunity for a fresh look at productivity in public services – how we measure and value it, how it links to productivity in the private sector and broader concepts of well-being, and what innovative practices and policy interventions we can adopt in public services to support increased national prosperity. In this podcast we discuss these issues and how we need to adapt as a country to drive productivity and improve well-being during the recovery. Panelists: - Professor Diane Coyle, co-director Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge - Dr Elvira Uyarra, Reader in Innovation Policy and Strategy at Alliance Manchester Business School - Professor Andy Westwood, Vice Dean for Social Responsibility in the Faculty of Humanities and Professor of Government Practice, University of Manchester - Donna Hall, Chair of the New Local Government Network and Honorary Professor of Politics

Professor Diane Coyle, CBE, is an economist and co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Her current focus is on the digital economy and competition policy. She is the author of more than 15 economics books, and creator of the popular 'Enlightened Economics' blog. In this episode, we talk about the effects of digital monopoloes. How different are they from other kinds of monopoly? Is there anything new or concerning about their use of big data and algorithm-tailored adverting? And should we try to break them up? You can read more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/diane. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this; we're just starting out and it would really help listeners find us! If you want to support the show more directly, you can also buy us a beer at tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!