Perspectives

Perspectives are essays on big ideas by leading writers, each given free rein and a modest word limit to reframe an issue of great contemporary interest.

The series is edited by economist and author Diane Coyle (Bennett Professor of Public Policy and Co-Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University), who is the author of many books, including Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is and What It Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2021), Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy (Princeton University Press, 2020), GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, revised edition 2015). She is also the founder of Enlightenment Economics, an economics consultancy.

If you have any questions about the series, please email perspectives@londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk.

The Service Organization: How to Deliver and Lead Successful Services, Sustainably

"The Service Organization" explores significant challenges that leaders will recognize, and turns them into solvable puzzles by providing practical advice and tools that reimagine what the organization does from the perspective of its customers. ... More

Good To Go? Decarbonising Travel After the Pandemic

A comprehensive overview of the transport system, looking at how it has developed, at how it will need to evolve to meet our need for travel – sustainably and economically – and at what our options are for meeting those needs. More

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?

This book, simply put, maps out how to design transport for humans. There is a new way forward that does not measure success only via speed, journey time and efficiency – often not the way that passengers think about a good trip. More

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

This book is a guide to building a digital institution. This updated and expanded second edition explains how a ... More

Why You Dread Work: What’s Going Wrong in Your Workplace and How to Fix It

Ever felt that lurking sense of Sunday night dread? It’s not just you. In this warm and empathetic guide to the modern workplace, Helen Holmes tackles ... More

Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters

The Grenfell Tower tragedy was the worst residential fire in London since World War II. It killed seventy-two people in the richest borough of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Like other catastrophic events ... More

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere? (revised edition)

In this revised and updated edition of Wolmar's entertaining 2018 polemic, he sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks ... More

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony

The way that money works now is, essentially, a blip. It’s a temporary institutional arrangement agreed in response to specific political, technological and economic circumstances... More

Gaming Trade: Win–Win Strategies for the Digital Era

While trade still plays a fundamental role in achieving economic targets and promoting growth, it is also, in the modern era, an instrument of state strategy in the contest for international influence and power. More

Technology is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics

"Technology Is Not Neutral" offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account. More

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us (revised paperback edition)

Technology is changing money and this book looks at where it might be taking us. Technology has transformed money from physical objects to intangible information. With the More

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

This book is a guide to building a digital institution. It explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience. More

Driverless Cars: On A Road to Nowhere

Wolmar's entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits. More

The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics

Trade is being weaponized – and this isn’t good. As politicians on both sides of the Atlantic raise the stakes, trade is increasingly a tool of coercion to achieve ... More

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money that We Understand to Money that Understands Us

Technology is changing money and this book looks at where it might be taking us. Technology has transformed money from physical objects to intangible information. With ... More

Britain's Cities, Britain's Future

Why did Britain’s cities – once the engines of the industrial revolution and the envy of the world – decline so dramatically? What is fuelling their tentative revival? And what needs to be done if ... More

Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy

Britain does not have a coherent transport policy, and conventional transport economics has reached a dead end. A transport policy should incorporate ... More

Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy

Transport is key to our daily lives and yet it is a most neglected field of politics. Britain has never had a coherent transport policy. More

A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier

The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier. Greater well-being and better health should be the goals, rather than ... More

Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier

Consumers in Britain face a curious mix of taxes and duties that are messy, opaque and out of date. They are also unfair: the poorer you are, the more More

Housing: Where's the Plan?

Housing is a fundamental necessity, and yet it is generally acknowledged that we have a ‘housing crisis’ in the UK... More

Identity is the New Money

This book argues that identity is changing profoundly and that money is changing equally profoundly. More

Why Fight Poverty?

Julia Unwin’s book Why Fight Poverty? asks a provocative question. Calls to end poverty date back centuries. Even in prosperous modern times, despite the huge transformation of society, poverty has persisted. More

Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis

Andrew Sentance’s book Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis focuses on the economic challenges facing the West, among them the shift of geopolitical power to Asia and the aftermath of the crisis. More

Reinventing London

In Reinventing London Bridget Rosewell asks how London's economy might be developed after the financial crisis. More

The BRIC Road to Growth

In The BRIC Road to Growth Jim O’Neill calls for an urgent overhaul of global economic governance to reflect the reality of the economic power of the BRIC countries and others, especially Korea. More