Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event with Tom Kibasi on Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. The Final Report of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice.
The UK economy is broken. It no longer provides rising living standards for the majority. Young people face an increasingly insecure future. The gap between rich and poor areas is widening. Meanwhile the rise of giant digital companies, the advance of automation, and catastrophic environmental degradation challenge the very foundations of our economic model.
This important book analyses these profound challenges and sets out a bold vision for change. The report of a group of leading figures from across British society, it explains how the deep weaknesses of the UK economy reflect profound imbalances of economic power. Its radical policy agenda for the 2020s includes new missions to drive productivity and innovation, an overhaul of our financial system, and reforms to improve wages, job quality and the redistribution of wealth.
Ten years after the financial crisis, as the UK confronts the challenge of Brexit, this is an urgent and compelling account of the reforms needed to build a new economy of prosperity, justice and environmental sustainability. It will set the terms of political and economic debate for years to come
Tom Kibasi is Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice and a principal author and editor of the Commission’s final report, ‘Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy’. Under Tom’s leadership, IPPR has had significant impact in areas ranging from the real choices on Brexit, recasting the relationship between tech and society, and the funding and reform of the health and care system. Prior to joining IPPR, Tom spent more than a decade at McKinsey and Company, where he was a partner and held leadership roles in the healthcare practice in both London and New York. Tom helped government institutions with healthcare reform across a dozen countries in five continents and served international institutions, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and international foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Tickets cost £5. The doors will open at 6:45pm where there will be a bar with a selection of drinks to purchase until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.
Professor Ian Goldin, Director of Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, will identify the economic impact of migration and examine how the contribution that migrants make has been overwhelmed by the politics. As Chair of the www.core-econ.org initiative to reform economics, Ian will locate the economics of migration within the broader need to reform economics.
The advent of super-resolution microscopy has created unprecedented opportunities to study the mammalian central nervous system, which is dominated by anatomical structures whose nanoscale dimensions critically influence their biophysical properties. I will present our recent methodological advances 1) to analyze dendritic spines in the hippocampus in vivo and 2) to visualize the extracellular space (ECS) of the brain. Using a two-photon–STED microscope equipped with a long working distance objective and ‘hippocampal window’ to reach this deeply embedded structure, we measured the density and turnover of spines on CA1 pyramidal neurons. Spine density was two times higher than reported by conventional two-photon microscopy; around 40% of all spines turned over within 4 days. A combination of 3D-STED microscopy and fluorescent labeling of the extracellular fluid allows super-resolution shadow imaging (SUSHI) of the ECS in living brain slices. SUSHI enables quantitative analyses of ECS structure and produces sharp negative images of all cellular structures, providing an unbiased view of unlabeled brain cells in live tissue.
Abstract:
This presentation explores two workforces at the bottom of the coercive apparatus of the colonial state in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are police constables, and village watchmen, also called chaukidars. The two workforces presented a stark contrast. The colonial constabulary was always a thin presence in Indian society, while a much larger workforce of chaukidars existed throughout the countryside. However, chaukidars were never absorbed as direct employees of the government in the way the constables were. While constables were paid salaries out of the budget of the provincial government, chaukidars were paid salaries out of a locally raised chaukidari tax. Constables had a substantial number of upper caste workers in their ranks. All chaukidars were lower caste workers. In this presentation, I will explore how this segmentation of security work emerged in the apparatus of colonial policing and what it reveals about the nature of the colonial police.
About the Speaker:
Partha Pratim Shil is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is interested in labour history and state formation in South Asia.
The last decade has seen a surge of interest in economic inequality and widely read books about its social and political consequences by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, and Larry Bartels. Yet most scholarship focuses on incomes, neglecting the massive inequalities that exist and are widening in the ownership of assets: from residential to financial wealth.
In this talk, Professor Ben Ansell, building off his ERC project WEALTHPOL, will examine the potential impact of wealth inequality on contemporary politics, from standard economic debates such as taxation to the rise of populist parties.
Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, LSE and Director of the LSE India Observatory, will discuss his new book, with Himanshu of JNU, Delhi and Peter Lanjouw of the Free University of Amsterdam, How Lives Change: Palanpur, India, and Development Economics. Using a unique data set consisting of seven full (100%) surveys of one Indian village, one for every decade since Independence, Nick will reflect on the past, present and future, both of India and of development economics, seen through the experience of Palanpur in the years since Independence.
This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, book sale and signing, all welcome.
Please register at: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2651
This is a joint event with The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Blavatnik School of Government
The talk will argue that modern economic theory has led to the confusion between profits and rents, and hence the distinction between value creation and value extraction.
Using case studies – from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, will demonstrate how the current rules of the system reward extractors over creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality rises. To move to a different system – with growth that is more inclusive, sustainable and innovation-led – it is critical to rethink public value and public purpose in the economy.
Please register at: www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/value-everything-rediscovering-purpose-economy

‘Triboreacted materials as functional interfaces in internal combustion engines and medical implants’
Reducing CO2 and particulate emissions to halt global warming and improve the air cleanliness in developed and developing nations is urgent. A similarly large challenge is the provision of medical implants that will serve the ageing population. Both challenges are underpinned by the need to understand important functional interfaces.
This talk will focus on the engine and the hip and will present how an understanding of the interactions between tribology and chemistry/corrosion play a crucial role in the interfacial friction, wear and integrity. The integration of state-of-the-art surface science with engineering simulations in both of these areas enables engineers to create optimised systems with improved performance

Newspapers often feature studies that sound too good to be true and often they aren’t – they are myths.
Some myths may be harmless but the phenomenon affects most kinds of research within evidence-based science. The good news is that there’s a new movement tackling misleading and unreliable research and instead trying to give us results that we can trust.
Using his research in to human pheromones as an example, Tristram will discuss how and why popular myths, including power-posing, are created and how efforts have been made to address the ‘reproducibility crisis’.
Tristram Wyatt is an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and formerly Director of Studies in Biology at OUDCE. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He’s interested in how animals of all kinds use pheromones to communicate by smell. His Cambridge University Press book on pheromones and animal behaviour won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014. His TED talk on human pheromones has been viewed over a million times. His book Animal behaviour: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Open to all. The talk is designed for researchers from all disciplines and is open to the public.
The economic case for limiting warming to 1.5°C is unclear, due to manifold uncertainties. However, it cannot be ruled out that the 1.5°C target passes a cost-benefit test. Costs are almost certainly high: the median global carbon price in 1.5°C scenarios implemented by various energy models is more than US$100 per metric ton of CO2 in 2020, for example. Benefits estimates range from much lower than this to much higher. Some of these uncertainties may reduce in the future, raising the question of how to hedge in the near term.
Simon Dietz is an environmental economist with particular interests in climate change and sustainable development. He has published dozens of research articles on a wide range of issues, and he also works with governments, businesses and NGOs on topics of shared interest, such as carbon pricing, insurance and institutional investment.
In mammals the cell-autonomous circadian clock pivots around a transcriptional/post-translational feedback loop. However, we remain largely ignorant of the critical molecular, cell biological, and circuit-level processes that determine the precision and robustness of circadian rhythms: what keeps them on track, and what determines their period, which varies by less than 5 minutes over 24 hours? The origin of this precision and robustness is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the basal hypothalamus, the principal circadian pacemaker of the brain. The SCN sits atop a circadian hierarchy that sustains and synchronises the innumerable cell-autonomous clocks of all major organs to solar time (and thereby to each other), by virtue of direct retinal innervation that entrains the transcriptional oscillator of the 20,000 or so component cells of the SCN. I shall describe real-time imaging approaches to monitor circadian cycles of gene expression and cellular function in the SCN, and intersectional genetic and pharmacological explorations of the cell-autonomous and circuit-level mechanisms of circadian timekeeping. A particular focus will be on “translational switching” approaches to controlling clock function and the surprising discovery of a central role for SCN astrocytes in controlling circadian behaviour.

Join us at Teddy Hall next week for a fantastic event on the ‘Neuroscience of Dance’ brought to you by the Centre for the Creative Brain!
Science, dance and wine – what more could you want for a Saturday afternoon?
A few (free) tickets are still available, so be quick!
https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/discover/research/centre-for-the-creative-brain
– GPES Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University
Automation, AI and robotics are changing our lives quickly – but digital disruption goes much further than we realise.
In this talk, Richard Baldwin, one of the world’s leading globalisation experts, will explain that exponential growth in computing, transmission and storage capacities is also creating a new form of ‘virtual’ globalisation that could undermine the foundations of middle-class prosperity in the West.
This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book signing, all welcome.
Currently limited tools exist to accurately forecast the complex nature of disease spread across the globe. Dr Moritz Kraemer will talk about the dynamic global maps being built, at 5km resolution, to predict the invasion of new organisms under climate change conditions and continued unplanned urbanisation.

Dung beetles in the British Isles are a vital part of their associated ecosystems but have been historically rather overlooked probably due to their chosen habitat. Now our native dung beetles are finally beginning to get some of the invertebrate limelight due to an emphasis on ecosystem services and a much more environmentally friendly farming future. However we are lacking on a great deal of base data about these vitally important species and surveying is the one of the best ways to get information. This means getting into dung and discovering these unsung heroes
Carlos Lopes will deliver an overview of the critical development issues facing the African continent today. He will talk about a blueprint of policies to address issues, and an intense, heartfelt meditation on the meaning of economic development in the age of democratic doubts, identity crises, global fears and threatening issues of sustainability.
This talk will be followed by a book signing and drinks reception, all welcome.
Professor Dave Carter reveals how understanding intercellular communication could improve healthcare.
Economics is in crisis. On one hand, behavioural economics is now well-established, but on the other hand, most economics models are still based on rational expectations with constraints, called “frictions”. The standard program adds more and more constraints to rationality in hopes that this will approximate real behaviour, but this may never work. It is increasingly clear that heterogeneity (the fact that people and institutions are diverse) is essential to understand problems such as inequality. There is a major effort to address this challenge, but the models that do this are technically complicated and rapidly become intractable as they become more realistic. Finally, there is a fundamental challenge due to the fact that we have very little historical data available to fit models for a complicated and evolving economy.
Complexity economics offers solutions to these problems. It advocates modelling behaviour in terms of heuristics and myopic reasoning, as observed in behavioural experiments. It advocates the use of simulations, making it much easier to incorporate heterogeneity in a tractable manner. Finally, it advocates using highly granular data, that accurately captures heterogeneity, to fit the models. Professor Doyne Farmer will present examples where this approach has had success, including applications to technology forecasting, economic growth and climate change, and present a vision of what it can do in the future.
In our first of two seminars on the future of work after automation Dr Brendan Burchell will investigate the potential for a five-day weekend society.
Machine-learning and robotics technologies promise to be able to replace some tasks or jobs that have traditionally been performed by humans. Like previous technologies introduced in the past couple of centuries, this possibility has been met with either optimism that will permit liberation from the tyranny of employment, or pessimism that it will lead to mass precarity and unemployment.
This presentation will draw upon both qualitative and quantitative evidence to explore the possible societal consequences of a radical reduction in the length of the normal working week. Drawing upon the evidence for the psychological benefits of employment, we look at the evidence for the minimum effective dose of employment. The paper also considers why the historical increases in productivity have not been matched with proportionate reductions in working time.
About Brendan Burchell:
Dr Brendan Burchell is a Reader in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Dr Burchell is director of graduate education for the Department of Sociology and director of the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Research Centre. He was recently Head of Department for Sociology, as well as a Director of Studies and a Tutor at Magdalene College.
Dr Burchell’s main research interests centre on the effects of labour market conditions on wellbeing. Recent publications have focussed on unemployment, job insecurity, work intensity, part-time work, zero-hours contracts, debt, occupational gender segregation and self-employment. Most of his work concentrates on employment in Europe, but current projects also include an analysis of job quality, the future of work and youth self-employment in developing countries. He works in interdisciplinary environments with psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and other social scientists.
Dr Burchell’s undergraduate degree was in Psychology, followed by a PhD in Social Psychology. His first post in Cambridge was a joint appointment between the social sciences and economics in 1985, and he has been in a permanent teaching post in at Cambridge since 1990.
Register:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-of-work-after-automation-towards-a-five-day-weekend-society-tickets-61028132788
The 11th Annual Human Welfare Conference is entitled ‘Innovate: Balancing Interests in Resource-Constrained Settings’. The conference will focus on solutions being developed at various scales to improve human wellbeing in areas as diverse as poverty alleviation, education, health, and social welfare. The goal is to offer diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives on tackling the most pertinent issues facing our society today. Invited speakers include academics and practitioners, with experience working in government, NGOs and the commercial sector in fields as diverse as health, food, investment and education.
This is a joint event with the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food
Dr Mike Hamm will explore the opportunity for regional food systems in-and-around cities for mutual benefit. He will approach a number of issues – including vertical farming, bio-geochemical cycles, water use, new entry farmers, and healthy food provisioning – embedded in the notion of city region food systems with reference to supply/demand dynamics.
This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome
Is competition in the digital economy desirable? Does it currently exist? Is it possible? Is there anything policy can do?
This talk addresses all of these questions and presents the recommendations of the Digital Competition Expert Panel which was chaired by Jason Furman and recently presented its recommendations to the government.
Like the wind, knowledge can be difficult to see or grasp, but if well-harnessed, it can help us do extraordinary things. In this talk, Dr Penny Mealy will discuss how novel analytical tools are providing new insights into the use of knowledge in society, and highlight implications for economic development, inequality and the transition to the green economy.