Expert debate at the London School of Economics, the world-leading social science institution. Read commentary research on social, political and economic issues.
Visit blogs.lse.ac.uk → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2015 – Oct 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 9Tech Industry & Business 5Open Source 3Science & Space 1Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
The assumption that Adam Smith accepted inequality as the necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy is wrong, writes Deborah Boucoyannis. In reality, Smith’s system precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximise the wealth of…
The public sector is often seen as sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector. This assumption lies at the basis of much of the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. In this interview and her new book, Mariana Mazzucato argues against this assessment and in…
Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how…
The state of California has some of the most expensive housing in the country. In new research, Kristoffer (Kip) Jackson investigates why homes in the Golden State have come to cost so much. He finds that it's down to how land use is regulated; each new land-use regulation reduces a Californian city's housing supply by
In this article Andrew Sayer revives some concepts - ‘unearned income’, ‘rentiers’, ‘functionless investors’, and ‘improperty’ - to explain why the very rich are unjust and dysfunctional. We need to challenge the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators, he argues. In light of the news that the…