Big ideas can be bad ideas – even in the age of the thinktank

By Mark Mazower. Forget the US model. British academics should aspire to offer more than just intellectual fig leaves for policymakers. First there was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. More recently, we had Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Cass Sunstein's Nudge: for years, it seems, big ideas have been heading our way across the Atlantic. It is hard to think of many similarly catchy slogans that have gone the other way of late – Tony Giddens' notion of "the third way" may be one. Read more...