Audiobooks

What does the post-pandemic future hold for office workers? Will we drift back to old ways of working, or continue with hybrid/remote working? What do the experts advise on how best to adapt?

Joanna Bale talks to LSE’s Connson Locke, Grace Lordan and Carsten Sorensen, as well as Hailley Griffis, a social media management company executive, who believes that offices will soon become extinct.

LSE iQ is a university podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.

LSE IQ podcast

Has COVID killed the office?

Speaker(s): Dr Chris Bickerton | For most of us today, 'Europe' refers to the European Union. At the centre of a seemingly never-ending crisis, the EU remains a black box, closed to public understanding. Is it a state? An empire? Is Europe ruled by Germany or by European bureaucrats? Does a single European economy exist after all these years of economic integration? And should the EU have been awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2012? Critics tell us the EU undermines democracy. Are they right? In this talk political scientist Chris Bickerton will discuss his new book, The European Union: A Citizen's Guide, which aims to provide an answer to all these key questions and more at a time when understanding what the EU is and what it does is more important than ever before. Chris Bickerton (@cjbickerton) is a University Lecturer in politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow in politics at Queens' College, Cambridge. He has previously taught at Oxford, University of Amsterdam, and Sciences Po in Paris. His books include European Integration (2012) and he writes regularly for Le Monde Diplomatique. Julian Hoerner (@JulianMHoerner) is LSE Fellow in EU Politics at the European Institute. His research interests include the role of national parliaments in the European Union, Eurosceptic parties and the internal coordination of EU policies in the member states.

The European Union: a citizen's guide [Audio]

Speaker(s): Baroness Greenfield | Consciousness is the ultimate miracle - and enigma. However most people take this subjective inner state for granted without ever reflecting on what could possibly be happening in their brain each day of their waking lives. This non-specialist talk will investigate this deeply fascinating question from the perspective of neuroscience, by exploring how objective events in the brain are realised as subjective experience. We follow a day in the life of a generic person (‘you’) as you wake up, walk the dog, have breakfast, work and return to a family with a variety of mental conditions. By the time we see ‘you’ ending your day in dreams, we will still not have solved how the water of objective brain mechanisms transform into the wine of subjective experience: but along the way we will have gained insights into cutting edge neuroscience, as well as contemplating the future of such research, for eventually really understanding consciousness. Susan Greenfield is a research scientist, author and broadcaster based in Oxford. She has held research fellowships in the Department of Physiology Oxford, the College de France Paris, and NYU Medical Center New York. She has since been awarded 32 Honorary Degrees from British and foreign universities and heads a multi-disciplinary research group exploring novel brain mechanisms linked to neurodegenerative diseases such Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford and has currently co-founded a biotech company developing a novel approach to neurodegenerative disorders (Neuro-Bio Ltd). Her latest book is A Day in the Life of the Brain. Frédéric Basso is Assistant Professor in Economic Psychology at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science of LSE, was a fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) in Law, Economics and Management and took the Agrégation in Economics and Management. His work is rooted in the grounded cognition theoretical framework and how laboratory paradigms can transfer to real-world phenomena in order to design evidence-informed policy thanks to field research.

A Day in the Life of the Brain: the neuroscience of consciousness from dawn 'til dusk [Audio]

Speaker(s): Sebastian Mallaby | No post-war figure has loomed over global finance as imposingly as Alan Greenspan, America’s Fed chairman from the booming 1980s until the eve of the 2008 financial crash. And no figure has been more paradoxical: a man who preached the virtue of the gold standard, yet came to embody paper money; a man who posed as a dry technocrat, yet was political to his core. From his debut as an acolyte of the cultish libertarian novelist, Ayn Rand, through his controversial relationship with Richard Nixon and successive presidents, Greenspan was the ultimate Washington wise man, the quiet God in the machine. But when global finance melted down, Greenspan’s reputation melted with it. Drawing on five years of untrammelled access to Greenspan, his papers, and his professional and personal intimates, Sebastian Mallaby has written the definitive study of the preeminent financial statesman of the post-war era. Reckoning both with Greenspan’s monetary decisions and with his approach to financial regulation, Mallaby grapples with the central mystery that Greenspan’s life presents to us. Why did a man so universally celebrated forge a financial system that proved so fatally unstable? And how will his successors protect us from a future crash? Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE. He is the author of a newly published biography of Alan Greenspan The Man Who Knew: the life and times of Alan Greenspan. Charles Goodhart is Emeritus Professor of Banking and Finance with the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics, having previously, 1987-2005, been its Deputy Director. Until his retirement in 2002, he had been the Norman Sosnow Professor of Banking and Finance at LSE since 1985. The Systemic Risk Centre (@LSE_SRC) was set up to study the risks that may trigger the next financial crisis and to develop tools to help policymakers and financial institutions become better prepared.

The Man Who Knew: the life and times of Alan Greenspan [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor  Gareth Stedman Jones | Gareth Stedman Jones will discuss Marx, history and nature; challenge ideas of Marx's ‘materialist conception of history’; and explore his debt to Hegel and German idealism. Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and taught at the university for many years, becoming Professor of Political Science in 1997. He is the author of Outcast London, Languages of Class and An End to Poverty? and most recently Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, as well as being the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE. The Ralph Miliband Programme (@RMilibandLSE) is one of LSE's most prestigious lecture series and seeks to advance Ralph Miliband's spirit of free social inquiry.

Karl Marx: greatness and illusion [Audio]

Speaker(s): Michael Jacobs, Professor Mariana Mazzucato | Western capitalism is in trouble. For decades investment has been falling, living standards have stagnated or declined, and inequality has risen dramatically. Economic policy has neither reformed the financial system nor restored stable growth. Climate change meanwhile poses increasing risks to future prosperity. In this joint lecture, Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Jacobs will propose new ways of thinking about capitalism. Drawing on their new book, Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth they will show how today’s deep economic problems reflect the inadequacies of orthodox economic theory and the failure of economic policies informed by it.  They will show how alternative economic approaches can better explain how capitalism works, why it often doesn’t, and how it can be made more innovative, inclusive and sustainable. Michael Jacobs (@michaelujacobs) is Visiting Professor in the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research. An environmental economist and political theorist, his work has focused on the political economy of environmental change. He was formerly General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Co-Editor of the The Political Quarterly, and Senior Adviser to the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, which he helped to found. Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) holds the RM Phillips chair in the Economics of Innovation at SPRU in the University of Sussex. Her book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. Professor Mazzucato is winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis and in 2013 the New Republic called her one of the '3 most important thinkers about innovation'. Professor Mazzucato advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led growth. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE. The Ralph Miliband Programme (@RMilibandLSE) is one of LSE's most prestigious lecture series and seeks to advance Ralph Miliband's spirit of free social inquiry.

Rethinking Capitalism [Audio]

For more episodes visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq. To subscribe on iTunes visit http://apple.co/2r40QPA or search for 'LSE IQ' in your favourite podcast app.

Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the smartest social scientists - and other experts - to answer pressing questions about economics, politics or society. 

In this episode, Jo Bale investigates how big company bosses continue to command ever increasing salaries despite shareholder rebellions, government intervention and public criticism. She talks to Sir Vince Cable of LSE's Institute of Global Affairs, Deborah Hargreaves of the High Pay Centre, Dr Dirk Jenter, Associate Professor of Finance at LSE, Professor Sandy Pepper of LSE's Department of Management and Max Steuer of LSE's Centre for Philosophy. 

To subscribe on iTunes please visit - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/lse-iq-podcast/id1223817465

Or search for 'LSE IQ' in your favourite podcast app or add our RSS feed -http://www.lse.ac.uk/assets/richmedia/webFeeds/lseiqpodcast_iTunesStore.xml

For further information about the podcast visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ https://twitter.com/hashtag/LSEIQ?f=tweets

Why is CEO pay so high?

To subscribe on Apple podcasts please visit http://apple.co/2r40QPA or search for 'LSE IQ' in your favourite podcast app or visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq

Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. 

It is with alarming regularity that reports of prison violence, overcrowding and concerns over the impact of funding cuts are hitting the headlines. With 46% of all prisoners reoffending within a year of release last year, the system could be considered not just expensive and unpleasant, but failing. In this episode, Jess Winterstein takes a look at the prison system in England and Wales and asks, is our prison system broken?   

This episode features: Dr Simon Bastow, LSE Fellow, Department of Management; Professor Nicola Lacey, School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at LSE; and Dr Sharon Shalev, a fellow of the Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and Criminal Science at LSE and founder of SolitaryConfinement.org

For further information about the podcast and all the related links visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

Is our prison system broken?

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a world-leading university, specialising in social sciences, with a global community of people and ideas that transform the world. Our podcasts focus on the social sciences and the world today.

The European Union: a citizen's guide [Audio]

LSE Podcasts

Related tracks