LSE Blogs

An outgoing foreign affairs editor suggested in 1988 that the newspaper ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’. 𐞸 𐞸 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/05/27/book-review-libera… 𐞸 Maybe outdated for the last wars at least (tbh i don't know, i didn't follow their positions on the Ukraine and the Middle-East wars).

I think learning how to read and understand scientific papers is such a valuable life skill that you shouldn’t outsource the thinking process to AI. I recommend reading this instead, and then trying the concepts you learn from it out in topics that personally interest you by looking at something like Google Scholar or any other search engine for scientific papers or open access journals. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/09/how-to-read-…

"Demographics are destiny." https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbea597263a88… https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-demographi…

The Code: Silicon Valley and the remaking of America by Margaret Pugh O'Mara is a pretty book worth checking out. * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534709/the-code-by-margaret-o… * https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/07/18/book-review-the-co… Also goes into things like why Boston (New England) had some promise but ended up fizzling out (or at least not reaching the same scale as SV).

The U.K. had a lost decade from the Great Recession to present [0][1]. There was a slight uptick in the 2017-19 period and in 2022 but a lot of that was lost due to covid and political instability respectively. [0] - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2022/02/10/understanding-britains-l… [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b94c

Part of the story of men and women is that a women's sexual value is at a peak very early (let's say 18) but a man's sexual value peaks later (at least 30+). The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives. Eva Illouz writes about this stuff eloquently https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/05/24/book-review-why-lo… and says that 30+ women who are still single want more of everything out of relationships than men will give them, including sex.

Nah, you're overdoing it. A lot of farming is already automated, and across the so-called 'Advanced Economies' the replacement rate for workers is too low anyway. We're heading for a demographic crunch with too few workers, especially as all the ageing boomers need care too. for more: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-demographi…

Yes, not only good old Rawls, but many contemporary writers make arguments about the limits of meritocracy. Some books I can recommend: Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/success-and-… https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/28/book-review-succes… Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/the-tyranny-of-merit-m…

> what has the UK done for the EU? You do know that the driving force behind the Single Market was Margaret Thatcher? Much of its legislation was set up initially to benefit the UK, and still does. Quite apart from that, there are plenty of individual pieces of legislation that originate in the UK. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/07/09/british-influence-in-brussel… I am very happy to agree that the UK has never fully felt at home in the EU, but it is definitely wrong to say that our membership was never in the EU's best interest.

See also The Great Leveler by Scheidel: "Deep and long-lasting levelling of both the absolute and relative degree of income and wealth inequality has found its place primarily in conjunction with the ‘Four Horsemen’ of levelling: namely, mass mobilisation warfare; transformative revolutions (such as communism); state collapse; and plague and pandemic episodes" https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/02/23/book-review-the-gr…

To be more precise, they are requiring Google to remove specific results for searches on a person's name. The problem is that Google gets hundreds of thousands of these requests, and over 50% of them are deemed to be invalid - a doctor removing links to a malpractice suit against him, for instance. The search engine must make the call on whether the request is valid or not, based on very vague standards. If they don't remove something and is later found to have been wrong, they could be fined up to 4% of their annual revenue or €20M, whichever is greater (that's under pending legislation) http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2015/12/18/the-final-draft-o…

Many people would be open to the idea that working from home (WFH) decreases productivity if there was solid evidence and a general consensus, rather than mere speculation and differing reports from various companies. From our daily experiences in the tech industry, most people would likely observe that WFH has not led to a decrease in productivity. Instead, factors such as low morale have had a much more significant impact. Issues like layoffs, employee turnover, wages not keeping pace with living costs, mismanagement, a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, lack of prospects for homeownership and family-building, and generally declining life satisfaction weigh more heavily on work engagement than the WFH arrangement. In fact, remote work is often viewed as a perk and is optional—many companies that offer WFH still maintain offices that employees can choose to work from, but few opt to do so. This means that the perk is desired and has a positive effect on morale. In terms of direct counters to the notion that WFH inherently reduces productivity, consider the following sources: - https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statist… - https://timeular.com/blog/remote-working-affects-productivity/ - https://www.business.com/employees/remote-work-productivity/ - https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/intentional-insights/202210/… -…

If you are interested in potential reasons why Americans (and increasingly more of us non-americans) are so binary in their arguments, I found the following article interesting. Basically it says that America have always had a kind of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally. And this is combined with the certainty one gets with suspicion. If you suspect someone of being an enemy then you know for certain what their reasons are and you do not need to seek further information. Empathy in the wider sense of understanding what another feels goes against this. Conflicts get resolved peacefully when both sides find shared ground. Paranoia and suspicion remove any idea about even trying to find shared ground. We see this from all sides from the liberals and the conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other side as doing it not them! Originally from 1964 https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-pol… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931 e.g Applied selectively to 2022: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/01/26/how-the-paranoid-style-of…

Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example: 1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1]. 2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2] 3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3] Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement. There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports. Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on. Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able…

I don't work in IT, but in the medical field. We have the advantage/disadvantage of working in many teams during our training (around 20-30). There are varying cultures in teams, and what I found was that teams with high levels of criticism / conflict generally functioned the poorest. Patient care was delivered despite the dysfunction and toxic culture, but it also created an environment where staff were unhappy, fearful of mistakes, and avoidant. The best and most effective teams I worked in had a less hierarchical structure, but were led strongly, with good team working and communication. That's anecdote, but there's evidence that certain team styles lead to more effective work [1], and suggestion that serious failures of organisations relate to cultural workplace toxicity and leadership [2]. I've seen in the thread a slight strawman argument that 'people too timid to say what they think about something leads to poorer working' or similar. I totally agree with that, but good communication is not what we're talking about here, and people can be clear, confident and respectful. [1] https://www.civilitysaveslives.com/theevidence [2] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/30566/

I read this article the other day, "There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review" [1] about how there's four schools of thought about how to reform publishing and peer review. Each of them independently are fairly well received and makes sense in itself, at least among my academic circles. However, there are tensions between them, so it's hard to come up with a solution that's universally satisfying to even the majority of stakeholders. This article about ArXiv is clearly in the "Democracy and Transparency school" as categorized article, but it doesn't yet address the other three camps. The arxiv article proposes machine-readable semantics, easier sharing and discoverability, papers + supplementary materials + reviews all open; this floods the world with even more publications with varying quality, so it's even harder to identify good quality work; and when things can be more easily aggregated by machines and measured with the alternative metrics proposed, it often leads to a more powerful winner-takes-all system that can be gamed (there's now a subtle game of increasing citations that appear on Google Scholar); finally, with an increase in submissions and materials that go along with submissions, it puts an even greater strain on the review system. These problems are not unsolvable, but almost every idea I've seen proposed so far has only been in a single camp, and there's side effects that harm the goals of the other three camps. So I'd love to see more…

> As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start. I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't. So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and no. In theory, cryptocurrencies can really provide an effective and economical channel for money transfers to help alleviate poverty through remittances. However, there are two principle problems. Firstly, coins such as Bitcoin remain too volatile, in fact ten times more volatile than major currencies (Baur & Dimpfl 2021). This means that if migrants were to use such channel they would be exposing themselves to extreme risks. But, more importantly users of bitcoin may find themselves victims of speculative attacks, as the cryptocurrencies’ value remains completely speculatively constructed. Secondly, as with international bank transfers, cryptocurrencies need a bank account to buy and sell it. As explained above, having a bank account is not a given and represents a high barrier to entry for many of the poorest migrants. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2021/04/29/cryptocurrencies-an-inn…

It's been getting steadily albeit very slowly worse for years. The Conservative government has been following a variant of the privatization handbook for over a decade now: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-privatizatio… Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procurement-law/ Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now. Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket. Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.

it obviously depends on the firm in question. Of course there are smaller firms who are extremely successful and pay great wages, but in general large firms can leverage economies of scale and access to capital that small business does not have. Your average salary at Google for the same sort of experience is higher than at a small startup, Volkswagen pays you better than most other companies in the region, working at a large Japanese multinational pays better than working at a small local company and so on, in particular if you include benefits like pensions and training and the investments those companies make in their workforce. Which is why they tend to attract a lot of talent. There's also an important aspect of specialisation, which tends to occur in large firms more than in small firms and boosts overall productivity. The firm size - wage gap is very well documented https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2018/07/16/why-do-large-compani…

The UK is a net contributor to the EU so the UK government could choose to fund all current commitments and still be better off. As another commenter has posted [1], this had already been debunked in December last year [2]: This claim is based on the UK being a “net contributor” to the EU budget as a whole. The size of that net contribution varies, but according to analysis [..] about 0.6% of nominal GDP. Models of impact to the UK economy on Brexit vary. [..] even the more optimistic assessments of the UK’s economic performance following a Brexit [..] model an immediate loss in GDP for the transition years following a Brexit. The size of that loss is substantially larger than the current net contribution of the UK to the EU budget. [Brexit] is a sure-fire short term loss, wiping any free money for R&I investment until at least a decade down the line – according to the most optimistic scenarios. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12081215 [2] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2015/12/05/debunking-the-myths-about…

Why blanket punish and make every single development on the waterfront more expensive because of a single Warriors arena project that was eventually moved to Mission Bay? All of these little costs, process hurdles add up and make housing more expensive. The broad point is that these citizen anti-growth initiatives, which might have a single poorly-designed and consulted project in mind, end up having very long-term and consequential impacts on housing prices across the board. This 2014 study examined 7,300 land parcels in the Bay Area and found that if you increase the number of independent reviews for a construction project by one standard deviation, average land prices increase by about eight percent. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/07/01/regulatory-constraints-on-… I agree and am concerned about how the point of the economic cycle we're in affects the profile, goals and objectives of people we attract to Silicon Valley. You tend to get more true believers at the low points in the cycle versus the gold-rush folk we're seeing now. What do you think is the best way of dealing with this? We can either build a lot more housing or drive away jobs and companies if we think they're too greed or speculation-driven.

>> On the other hand, I found reading it as a child in the 80s a great disappointment. At the time I was learning about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. It was painfully obvious to me that the Seldon theory of psychohistory was impossibly simplistic. Human society and culture is just too unstable and susceptible to disruption for long term predictions of the kind the plot relies on to be viable. I would disagree on that one. Of course, it would be impossible to predict particular events - like Harry Seldon does in the book - but I find it completely possible to foresee general trend in the future. For example, Immanuel Kant predicted the rise of an European Union back in the 18th century [0]. For example, I'd take the prediction that at some point in the future, technology will be so advanced to make travelling across the Earth or remote working completely seamless and costless, so people will have the ability to access to the same kind of jobs or activities wherever they are based, resulting in an homogenisation of the whole planet. You could argue that this trend started already when travelling in plane and internet were made affordable to most. But yeah, the potentiality of prediction in the book are completely exaggerated, with Seldon being able to time the major events. On the other hand, it my be realistic if he can set up a secret group of telepathic people to influence the future and prevent anything to disturb his visions. [0]…

i agree but it’s not due to or about AI but more about polarisation of society in general: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/psychologylse/2023/06/08/building-bridges-how-…

Well, different trade offs there. On the plus side, sounds pretty simple. On the other hand... Digital certification from the gov sounds a lot like "digital ID", which has run into considerable resistance in the UK and EU in just the last few months. As a general observation I find most EU citizens I interact with much more trusting of government than ... well, any other group of folks I have interacted with (I have the privilege of having lived and worked in S. America, N. America, sub Saharan Africa and now an EU country). If it does not fly well here, I don't think its general solution that most people would be comfortable with. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2025/10/09/britcard-uk-digital-id-s…

Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-abdication-h…

And here is a review: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/30/book-review-nihili…

The London School of Economics is taking the risk of civil war seriously, with many observers and experts having expressed concern. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/taking-warnings-of-civil-war… ”Elon Musk’s comment about the inevitability of civil war in Britain might have been flippant. But similar concerns have been raised by journalists and academics within established democracies that over the possibility of civil conflict escalating to civil war”

Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word? No, it did not "water down the word." It is the stated position of Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian people are indistinguishable from Russians, with no identity of their own. To that end, his forces have been kidnapping Ukrainian children and "repatriating" them to Russia since the invasion began. Some homework for you: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine-fact-chec… https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-still-stealing-ukraini…

The person says some of what I think much better than me: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/02/17/does-authors… I am afraid that there is massive and systematic and harmful fraud in research: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research… as only one example. There are many many others. Very little work in entire fields is actually valid. I think that the way that authorship is currently practiced has a lot to do with this fraud. Academics with ethics and goodwill can no longer effectively police the system. A large number of academics do not even want the system to be policed.

Educated people in anonymous polls are afraid to express their opinion? https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2016-eu-referendum And statistical correlation based on census data? https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/educational-attainment-brexi…