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03 Dec 09

Blanchflower calls for government action to curb youth unemployment | Business | The Guardian

  • Blanchflower, who was until recently a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee and has long warned of a surge in unemployment and youth joblessness in particular, called for measures such as wage subsidies to encourage employers to take on young workers. He also advocated removing national insurance contributions for anyone under 25 for two years. He predicted unemployment would keep rising "well into 2010" probably to around 3.4 million. "Attempts to cut public spending and withdraw monetary and fiscal stimulus too soon may push unemployment closer to 4 or even 5 million," he added.

    He cited research signalling that youth unemployment raises unemployment, lowers wages, worsens health and lowers job satisfaction 25 years later. "Youth unemployment, especially of long duration, creates permanent scars not temporary blemishes," he said.

01 Dec 09

The power of positive deviants - The Boston Globe

positive deviants = the right kind of weak signal
goes to alex pang's point about ethnography being an important part of futures work...as anybody that follows jan chipchase would know!
this is really important - can be transferred to research approaches esp with design/improvement focus + futures obviously...

www.boston.com/...the_power_of_positive_deviants - Preview

innovation community society future trends essential

  • This initiative is an example of “positive deviance,” an approach to behavioral and social change. Instead of imposing solutions from without, the method identifies outliers in a community who, despite having no special advantages, are doing exceptionally well. By respecting local ingenuity, proponents say, the approach galvanizes community members and is often more effective and sustainable than imported blueprints.

BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Smith: can the internet transform public services?

  • Tom Loosemore, the head of Channel Four’s Innovation for the Public Fund and formerly head of broadband at the BBC, is getting impatient with the speed of progress. After 10 years of thought he has reached the radical conclusion, unpopular with many, that governments should get out of websites. NHS Choices, for example, should be canned. The problems with government websites is that they are stuck firmly in the past, dampen innovation, are terrible value for money, and stop government truly “listening” because moderation of websites is in the end censorship.
  • Instead of building websites government should make data available for other organisations—whether for profit or not for profit—to build into websites with contractual requirements to keep the websites up to date and display the brand of whomever produces the data—perhaps the NHS. Similarly governments should pull out of transaction sites and let other organisations build them. This arrangement is common in the United States, and HM Revenue and Customs has begun to make it a reality here, allowing interaction of its system with other systems.
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