ISRF has just finished its annual board meetings in Amsterdam, and they reminded me of my great luck in this job because I again had no bad news to report. The Fellows, the team, the partnerships, the focused research are all in such good form that I felt a bit foolish laying out the details to our academic and foundation boards.

However, the real world issues that the Fellows engage with are challenging and often getting worse. This is also true of the focused research we are organising internally, which cover British universities, machine v. human learning, political economy and race, and redesigning finance for climate justice (REDFIC). I routinely obsess about turning these issues around – reconstructing British universities, ending AI-driven cognitive loss in universities and society, confronting racial capitalism and getting the accelerated transition back on track.

Before I wrote the comments I make at the start of each Academic Advisory Board meeting, I read the version from 2023. The main issues seem frozen in time. That year, I said, high interest rates were relentlessly making state financing and private investment more expensive. The war in Ukraine set the stage for the wars that have come since: Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, the US-Israeli attack on Iran, the slaughter in Sudan. Big governments seem okay with all of these wars of choice on civilian populations. 

Global trade was already breaking into competing blocks, thus increasing trading costs particularly for lower-income countries. I discussed Nigeria’s public debt, and how it undermines the essential development of transport, housing, health, and educational infrastructure –  reflecting a broader issue facing the Global South. The international movement of people had been further entrenched in the minds of European publics as a terrible burden for their wealthy societies. In 2023, solvency for UK higher ed was already in the rear-view mirror, and layoffs were ticking up. The green transition was losing steam even while Biden was still the US president.

Democracy was in global backsliding mode, and the public’s political and intellectual capabilities were not being cultivated: to the contrary, ignorance was widely used as a political strategy. ChatGPT was only eight months old during our 2023 meeting but had already gone from 0 to 60 in hype and hysteria before zooming into outer space.

 And I also described the knowledge crisis, in which inculcated hostility to research –and even to thinking itself--has meant that in Anglophone societies that pride themselves on their dynamism, the old would rule the new and their publics would struggle to develop new capabilities.

Then Labour was elected in 2024, and so was Donald Trump.

Since our May 2025 board meetings, I’ve given about twenty lectures at universities, mostly in the US. I’ve been struck by the pervasive combination of anger and helplessness. People need new ideas about what to do, and more importantly, need a new belief that they can put these ideas into practice. Planning always involves linking vision to implementation. Organisations and movements that do the first but not the second are good at demoralising their participants before they stagnate or die.

I’m in good company in unhappily contemplating a certain helplessness of governments other than the Trump administration, which operates as a tyranny. The pattern in western Europe is governments that have weak planning power, few investable resources, and no narrative of a better future for the majority. One important development since 2023 has been the failure of centre-left governments like Scholz in Germany, Starmer in the UK and whatever Macron is in France to perform on the baseline postwar promise to modernise and rebuild. Their failure to improve overall conditions has been breeding mass cynicism and discrediting democracy. 

Several other trends have become clearer in the past three years. First, under weak democracy, markets breed oligarchic corruption, which is hard to reverse. Second, centrist governments are unwilling to reform taxation so they can tax rather than borrow and therefore avoid being controlled by the financial markets. And third, these rich governments have lost the aims and the means to operate as developmental states. A comparison with the use of, say, government guidance funds for green tech development in China makes the aimlessness of Western countries painfully obvious. 

Finally, whatever people say about the inevitable end of neoliberalism, financial markets are today more powerful than ever. They consolidate their power precisely by dissociating themselves from the underlying society—“who cares if the Strait of Hormuz is closed,” was one widely reported investor comment at Michael Milken’s Global Conference last month. US captains of industry collectively bent the knee to Trump and are using AI as a reason to curtail hiring of university graduates. In other words, the knowledge crisis looms as large in corporate management as it does among authoritarian populists. 

The central question remains the same—can knowledge help with this? Can research help? 

The answer is always yes—one paper and book at a time. However, a major absence today is a model or framework that allows research on a range of topics to identify elements that together point towards a different social order. We need a paradigm shift, which means building our work into a new worldview that people can work towards and in the working, revise.

In the 1980s, Stuart Hall tried to persuade everyone that Thatcherism wasn’t just about market economics or deregulation but was a theory of the whole society. It was a theory of economics, political institutions, education, culture, the family, communications, everything. Hall was right.  But not enough people took him up on the integrative, structural work of building the platform for the alternative, which he called “a new cultural order.”  

Obviously, it’s not too late to develop a coordinated, collective effort. One question that is always working away in the back of my mind is this: can ISRF help take our fractured disciplines and play a role in building an integrated model of a much better kind of society?

 Yes, absolutely. Some practices are already in place.

The first is that ISRF are continuing to support focused, original work on hinge issues—issues where research might open a window to a different reality. We can’t work on a massive scale, so selection is important, and most of that is done for us by the fellows who decide their own projects before we select them.

Second, we continue to develop ways to assemble and integrate individual research results into larger-scale outputs than scholars can’t do on their own. Our conferences, Congresses, workshops, Bulletins, newsletters, and the new Dispatches series are examples. We’re going to expand publishing and dissemination operations as much as we can over the next few years.

A third practice will be gearing up next year. That is to develop a multi-year scenario-building process that assembles data, writes draft narratives of the future, and brings together sizeable groups of people to develop the narratives into paradigms. Our focused topics will be brought together—green post-finance, re-humanised language models and other AI, reconstruction of higher education, re-democratisation, and non-racialised migration systems, among others. We will also convene the expertise of as many Fellows as we can marshal for this kind of thing.

The hardest work will be to develop the systems for getting from our current condition to the desired state, but that’s exactly what we need to do. Our societies need all the help they can get in moving towards plausible alternative ground rules rather than unhappily keeping the regressive current ones. We plan to do all we can.