Focus: our research themes
The focus of our research is the future, which is unknown and unknowable'; that is, it is uncertain.
We acknowledge and seek to accommodate uncertainty in its causative forms of volatility, ambiguity, complexity, aleatory and epistemic risk as well as ontologic uncertainty.
Q.
How, when our research themes cover such a vast spread of human knowledge and experience, is it realistic to claim to be focused?
A.
By having clear conceptual threads running through what we do. Let us explain.
Focus: our broad research themes
Time & space
As Augustine of Hippo discussed 1600 years ago in his towering work Confessions, we all understand time; however, explaining time is a very different proposition. Since the time of Augustine, our concept of space has changed unrecognisably; the vastness of Augustine’s heavens, was as great physically as he interpreted it to be metaphysically.
Everything we do occurs within the dimensions and contours of time and space. As Orwell pithily summed up: “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Neither time nor space is as simple as they each appear at first glance. This depth of concept matters practically in many ways.
Science & technology and society
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
The meso world: Institutions
Since the 1930s and the work of Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch, economics has, almost universally, been divided in to macroeconomics and microeconomics. The is certainly the division of most departments of economics globally; it is the division students learn in their formative years of study. However, it leaves a hole in the field of economics that problematises sociologist James Coleman’s famous ‘aggregation problem’. The answer to this problem is mesoeconomics — the world of humans acting together within institutions of their making.
Reason, inference, knowledge, uncertainty & belief in a social world
What is reason? What is belief? What is special about a justified true belief? And who, or what, is the arbiter of truth? Do different people have different truths — is truth subjective? These are usually treated as esoteric problems of philosophy, but how we answer — or, more particularly, how we go about answering — these apparently esoteric questions has an enormous impact on how we frame our response to the world and the challenges we face within it.
People, behaviour, & action
The social sciences are about people, what they do and why they do it. It is about people individually, as groups, in organisations, in societies, in nations and between nations. Ultimately, all social sciences rest on a bedrock of theories of action. Sometimes these are explicit — think Talcott Parsons in sociology; more often, especially in political economy, they are implicit. And that is where the problems start, but certainly not where they end. What, for example of MacGilchrist’s challenge of attention and how human attention, as a neurological function, distort our views of our world?
Government, states & conflict
Since their emergence in the world created by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to end the Thirty Years War in Europe, nation-states have become the currency of international relations. When political solutions to disagreements fail, governments may commit their states to war — “the continuation of politics by other means” in Clausewitz’s immortal phrase. But as historic ethnic and national allegiances rise in people’s consciousness, conflict — war — is no longer an affliction only of states. The world looks ever more complicated.
Change, disruption & progress
For much of recorded history, change was incremental, punctuated only by war, plague or famine. However, since the Industrial Revolution, change has been continual, if episodic; it became dependent on new technological innovation. In the micro-processing age, the age of the new technological revolutions, change has become continual and ubiquitous, even unavoidable.
The natural world
Homo sapiens undoubtedly dominate the planet on which we live. But we share it with more than 6800 species of mammals alone. Estimates of the total number of species on Earth range from 1.7 million (based on current taxonomic records) to as high as 100 million (Robert May, 2010), depending on the criteria applied.
The public sphere, political economy & public policy
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
. . . and supporting those broader themes
Capture, crises, contradictions & carbon
At least in the popular imagination, the essence of the problems of capitalism are reflected in the reliance of the discipline on human greed. However, economics has always had a complex relationship with greed that predates even the modern writings on political economy. If Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations launched political economy as a modern discipline, it must be read in the context of his earlier and contemporaneously better known The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In micro-economics, the term of art is ‘rent-seeking’; within welfare economics it is ‘capture’. But that is far from the end of the story.