William Davies

William Davies, a sociologist and political economist, 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.

From The Blog
16 September 2022

It doesn’t require a vast leap of psychoanalytic speculation to surmise that feelings may attach themselves to iconic public objects which are really about something or someone else altogether. ‘She reminded me of my nan,’ the mourners say, and the image is of a selfless woman slogging through years of work for others because that’s her lot in life. This probably bears scant resemblance to the actual experiences of Elizabeth Windsor, but a great deal to those of many grandmothers over the past seventy years.

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...

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‘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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