The real 'Lord of the Flies' is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.Collection: Friendship
Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender' equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.Collection: Equality
Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment.Collection: Education
But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.Collection: Friendship
I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.
Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
During the Enlightenment, there were brilliant thinkers who realized that, if you assume most people are naturally selfish and you construct the market around that, sometimes it can actually work for the common good. I just think that in many cases, it went too far.
There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.
What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.
One of my rules for life is: 'When in doubt, assume the best,' because in the end, most people are pretty decent.
My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.
We so often tend to think our democracies are ruled by procedures and laws, but they are also governed by implicit rules and assumptions and one of them is the ability to feel shame - that you can be shamed.
If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.
But the underdog socialists' biggest problem isn't that they are wrong. They are not. Their biggest problem is that they're dull. Dull as a doorknob. They've got no story to tell; nor even the language to convey it in.
It's actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings.
A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.
I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.
I've been thinking that school, or certainly the traditional English public school model, is like a prison, in that you can't get out and it is hierarchical. As a result they have a lot of bullying. On the other hand if you mix ages and academic ability this is less of a problem.
Poor people aren't making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
A lot of journalists help us to better understand the world by zooming out and sometimes zooming in on a really important case but sort of helping us to get a grasp of what are the structural forces that govern our lives and our societies and that is incredibly important.
Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.
I've solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to - email, browser - and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further.
Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It's about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.
So I think that good journalism helps you to zoom out, to focus on the structural forces that govern our lives. And I think that good journalism is also not only about the problems, but also about the solutions, and the people who are working on these solutions.
I think it's rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent.
I always eat bread and almost always peanut butter and apple syrup, sometimes cheese. I hardly ever ate out as a child. When I did it more as a student, it felt strange to be served.
My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.
A Dutchman can't easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.
It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.
There's always selfish behavior. There are lots of examples of people hoarding. But we've seen in this pandemic that the vast majority of behavior from normal citizens is actually pro-social in nature. People are willing to help their neighbors.
We'll all remember 2020 as an historic year. And for decades, people will be able to say, remember 2020. Remember when things were really tough. Who did we rely on? I think that could impact a whole generation.
It matters so much that from a very early age we encounter different kinds of different people, because that's what real life should be about as well.
One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.
The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it's around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.
Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.
News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.
Since 1963, the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.
Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.
As a species of animal that evolved to make connections and work together, it feels strange to suppress our desire for contact. People enjoy touching each other, and find joy in seeing each other in person - but now we have to keep our physical distance.
Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.
Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.
Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip'ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.
I first read 'Lord of the Flies' as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature.
Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone - internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition - was developed by researchers on the government payroll.
True innovation takes at least 10 to 15 years, whereas the longest that private venture capitalists are routinely willing to wait is five years. They don't join the game until all the riskiest plays have already been made - by governments.
Government isn't there just to administer life support to failing markets. Without the government, many of those markets would not even exist.
The most daunting challenges of our times, from climate change to the ageing population, demand an entrepreneurial state unafraid to take a gamble.
In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model.
Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years.