Category: Economics

  • Motivation – intrinsic or extrinsic?

    Follow my interview on BBC Radio last week, i’ve been thinking more about job quality, and our motivations for work. There’s a really good piece I came across here which outlines some principles around extrinsic motivation (an external driver such as financial reward) and intrinsic motivation. What’s interesting – as set out in the RSA…

  • Overqualified?

    I ended up on PM – the BBC’s flagship 5pm news show last week, chatting to Evan Davis about a report that showed that British workers are more likely than most to be overqualified for the job they do. There’s important questions here about the quality of jobs that are being created as we go…

  • The Day Job

    I don’t say a huge amount about the work I do day to day, but I thought it’d be worth flagging some of what I’ve been up to. I’m an Associate Director at the Institute for the Future of Work, a reseach charity exploring how AI and automation are changing work and working lives in…

  • Future of (a Climate) Denial

    Last Thursday I was honoured to be asked to join a panel celebrating the publication of my great friend Professor Tad Delay’s book on psychoanalysis and the climate emergency, Future of Denial: This was part of the Historical Materialism conference at SOAS, and it was great to speak alongside Richard Seymour, whose own response to…

  • On Napoleons and Caesars, and Hope beyond the Bag of Wind

    It’s not quite been a week since the election in the US. Some I know wanted to stay up to see the result in; I had a suspicion that a few more hours of ignorance-in-bliss might be best. There was no joy in being right. Neither, I have to admit, was I ever particularly excited…

  • Not OK, Computer?

    “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” – AI Training Statement / https://www.aitrainingstatement.org/ Over 11,000 artists, writers, actors, musicians and others in the creative industries have signed the above statement, expressing their opposition…