By Paul Ormerod We all know now about the empty roads and deserted shops, all quite contrary to the official announcements before the Games began.  No doubt Transport for London used their massively complicated, expensive models of the transport network to deduce that the system would be under massive strain. But a deceptively simple game […]

By Chris Davies The spectacular spectacular with which Danny Boyle opened the Olympics had many things to recommend it.  But alongside the dazzle, wit and downright eccentricity of the whole thing, there were two aspects of the opening ceremony that led me to reflect on the complexity of social systems. The first was Boyle’s history […]

By Greg Fisher Two weeks ago I attended an All Party Parliamentary Group in Westminster which focused on rebalancing boards of directors to ensure they included more women.  A compelling argument for doing this was presented by Nadhim Zahawi MP, who noted that returns on investments in companies with gender-diverse boards stood at around 11%, […]

By Claudius Van Wyk Recently I went to the launch of a report by the UCL–Lancet Commission of Healthy Cities. The report affirmed that the requisite knowledge was in place for transforming a ‘city’ into a ‘healthy city’, however it also acknowledged that how to deliver potential health benefits and how to ensure that they […]

By Paul Ormerod The political map of London is like the United States, with strong geographic segregation.  But is there something more subtle going on? Thomas Schelling is a brilliant American polymath, who deservedly won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005.  One of his most remarkable insights is about segregation in cities, which he […]