Activity

The Manifesto’s central narrative was of economic rebalancing away from the financial sector, to reanimate the productive economies of the regions through public investment, renationalization, environmental protection and egalitarian social spending. The focus of Labour’s industrial strategy is a N…

[...] Government no longer ‘delivered’ public services, but ‘procured’ them. New Labour’s major structural legacy lay here, in hollowing out swathes of public assets and service provision for the benefit of rent-seeking firms, through the expansion of Private Finance Initiatives. Under these scheme…

So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive.

The directives to increase metric…

When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product. Time spent is considered…

Get wealthy and solve the world’s problems—this was the message that I absorbed early on. You couldn’t do one without the other, the argument went, so don't feel bad about becoming rich. The profit motive is the only way that we can possibly solve problems at scale.

I truly believed that. And it…