Description: a blog from a well-read European trying to make sense of the world
a celebration of intellectual trespassing by a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....
It’s remarkable how few titles are available to help the concerned citizen (or official) make sense of the “reforms” which have deluged the public sector in the past few decades – whether privatisation, restructuring or austerity. There are, of course, thousands of academic books – but they have a weird focus on arcane and incestuous matters and simply don’t ask the sort of questions most people are interested in….
Last year I spent a lot of time trying to identify what we had learned from 50 years of efforts to improve our public services (see Change for the Better? A Life in reform ) T he key group act ing as a bridge between the public and the (extensive but generally arcane) writing on the subject are j ournalists too many of who m choose to titillate readers with tales of blunders and corruption. Whether they mean it or not, this only serves to develop cynicism and fatalism