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THE NEW BATTLE OF IDEAS: HOW AN INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION WILL RESHAPE SOCIETY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Paul Collier*
Affiliation:
Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, United Kingdom St Antony’s College, Oxford, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

Type
Notes and Contributions
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of National Institute Economic Review

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