William Davies, a sociologist and political economist, and contributing editor at the LRB, teaches at Goldsmiths and has written extensively on subjects such as neoliberalism and the ‘happiness industry’. This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain includes several of his essays for the LRB.
One morning in the summer of 2016, a few weeks into the disorientating aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, my wife and I sat in a community centre in Poplar, East London with our baby son. Our three-year-old daughter must have been at nursery. The occasion was a ‘consultation’ hosted by Tower Hamlets Council on the ‘future of Children’s...
Political scientists and psephologists are quick to warn us not to read by-election results as proxies for national outcomes. By-elections are so often an occasion to give the incumbent party a bloody nose. Yet it did feel as if the by-election in Gorton and Denton on 26 February was telling us something, less in the probabilistic way the number-crunchers warn against, and more in an...
The sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin...
In the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well formatted for what had become the world’s most popular interface, the vertical smartphone screen. And while the existing platforms were well designed for watching and sharing videos,...
Before Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy’. In a...
William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the UK’s new Labour government in tackling the country’s many economic challenges.
The political economist William Davies joins Tom to discuss the UK’s high inflation, what government policies could alleviate the crisis and whether next year’s general election will lead to any significant...
William Davies talks to Thomas Jones about the new political polarisation, and what it owes to the online culture of instant feedback. What does politics look like, Davies asks, once the provocation of...
Katrina Forrester and William Davies discuss political crisis, and in particular the crisis of liberalism, as part of our 40th anniversary event series.
William Davies talks to Tom Crewe about politics in the new media age.
William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at how reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere.
Thanks to the work of behavioural economists there is a lot of experimental evidence to show what many of us would have suspected anyway: that people are not the rational, utility-maximisers...
‘What’s on your mind?’ Each day, the 968 million people who log in to Facebook are asked to share their thoughts with its giant data bank. A dropdown menu of smilies invites...
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