Malcom Gladwell v. Barry Schwartz
Two excellent TED talks. Malcolm Gladwell says more choice is making us happier: Barry Schwartz says more choice is making us miserable:
Two excellent TED talks. Malcolm Gladwell says more choice is making us happier: Barry Schwartz says more choice is making us miserable:
Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad: I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only [...]
Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really [...]
The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July. Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured [...]
British campaigners against European Union plans to outlaw imperial measures like pounds and ounces have claimed victory, according to news reports today. The self-styled ‘metric martyrs’ say they have say they have won the battle to keep Britain imperial, after confirmation from the European Commission’s industry commissioner, Gunther Verheugen, that dual marking of goods in [...]
It must be frustrating being the President of the European Commission: a whole lot of responsibility but very little power. When Jose Manuel Barroso meets George W Bush at the White House next week he may be able to offer some advice to a US President who has just lost control of Congress and is [...]
Nick Cohen writes in The Observer about the unwillingness of the British government to do something about tax avoidance by the super-rich, which he sees as “debauching British society”. Meanwhile new figures from the TUC show that since 2000 the pay of company executives has increased 17 times faster than average pay. It is true [...]