As I approach formal retirement from my academic job, I’m still thinking about ideas in my main theoretical field of decision theory. But I’ve largely lost interest in publishing journal articles, leaving the chore of dealing with Manuscript Central and other robotic systems to my younger co-authors in the case of joint work, and not […]
Academia
(A piece I wrote for the Guardian) A couple of weeks ago, just before my 70th birthday, I completed the Mooloolaba standard distance triathlon (1,500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run). There was nothing exceptional about my performance, placing 1,509 out of 1,730 overall and 14th out of 18 in my 65-69 age category. But not […]
A journalist from the Wall Street Journal wrote to me a week ago to ask what the numbers that I use in the opening pages of my book Limitarianism would look like today. In particular, she asked whether I could calculate for her the “lifetime equivalent hourly income” of Elon Musk’s current assets today. Short […]
The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University has launched the Bibliographic Database of International Scholarship – a project dedicated to exploring Karl Polanyi’s preeminent intellectual legacy and current influence worldwide. This new resource acts as a hub for Polanyi-inspired research across disciplines, providing scientific monitoring of emerging Polanyian scholarship and a knowledge transfer tool for everyone interested in […]
I have to admit that I am not at all sure of the date of International Women’s Day. It seemed to be every day of the past week or so. Which perhaps ought to be the case every damn week. So it seems timely to tell you about the current issue (Volume 35) of Women’s History […]
It’s the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and any lessons from that event seem to have been forgotten by most. Political leaders of all stripes, from centre-left to far right have been keen to promote nuclear power as at least a partial solution to the problem of replacing coal and gas. The peak […]
Jürgen Habermas has died, at the age of 96, and traditional and social media are full of obituaries and memories. For outsiders, it is maybe hard to gauge the omnipresence of his name in West Germany,* but his influence on democratic theory more broadly speaking is well-known. When I entered university, people would mention it […]
It has been like this for weeks and weeks. And not just in the UK, but across much of Western Europe.