Why does so much land sit empty while housing need keeps growing?
A conversational look at why waiting, holding, and delaying have become the sensible choice in UK housing — and what that means for getting unstuck.
Tag Archives: Politics
Lets Rethink Housing: When did we stop treating a house as a home?
When did we stop treating a house as a home?
A conversational look at how UK housing quietly shifted from somewhere to live into something to invest in — and why that change still shapes everything that followed.
Lets Rethink Financial Services: Why Regulation Matters
If financial markets aren’t as complex as we’re told, why do they keep failing? A UK-focused look at regulation, short-term gains, long-term costs, and why we keep relearning the same lesson.
Lets Rethink Financial Services: Incentives, bonuses, why sensible people do odd things.
We’ve mentioned incentives a few times now, so we probably need to stop pretending we’re not going to talk about them.
This is usually the point where people brace themselves, because they assume this is about greed, bonuses, or “bad behaviour”.
It isn’t really.
It’s about something much more awkward.
It’s about how we behave when rewards are involved — especially when we’re trying to do a decent job inside a system that measures us in slightly odd ways.
Lets Rethink Financial Services: How shareholding quietly changed.
We still talk about shares as if buying one means backing a business.
You put some money in.
The business does well.
You wait.
At some point — ideally years later — you share in the rewards.
Most people would recognise that description. It feels… reasonable.
And the awkward thing is: it’s not wrong.
It’s just not the whole story anymore.
Because we still use the same language — ownership, confidence, value, long term — even though the behaviour attached to those words has changed rather a lot.
So this is less a history lesson, and more a “hang on… when did that shift?” conversation.
Lets Rethink Financial Services: They may not be as complex as you thought.
You were probably told that finance is complicated.
That it’s all maths, charts, Greek letters, and people much cleverer than you.
That’s convenient.
Because it means you’re not supposed to ask questions.
The truth is:
financial systems aren’t hard to understand — they’re hard to explain honestly.
So instead of textbooks and equations, here are films, games, and stories that do something far more dangerous:
They show you how the financial services behave when no one’s watching.
Lets Rethink Policy-Making: What All of This Was Really About
This post brings together the themes explored across the series — punishment, incentives, unintended consequences, and cost — to reflect on what policy does once it becomes a system. It asks how evidence can sit alongside values to design laws that work better in the real world.
Lets Rethink Policy-Making: Illegal Drugs – Cost of Losing the War.
Has the War on Drugs delivered what it promised? Looking at fifty years of UK policy, this post explores drug use, harm, and public cost — not to win an argument, but to ask whether “being tough” turned out to be an especially expensive way of managing a persistent human behaviour.
Lets Rethink Policy-Making: Illegal Drugs – A cheaper alternative.
Let’s Rethink Policy-Making: Filthy Lucre
What happens if we stop pretending the illegal drugs market will disappear? Using conservative figures for England & Wales, this post explores how costs, criminal profits, regulation, and incentives interact — and why redesigning where money flows may matter more than repeating moral arguments.
Lets Rethink Policy-Making: Illegal Drugs – Who’s Been Getting Rich.
Let’s Rethink Policy-Making: The Filthy Lucre.
What happens when the public cost of managing illegal drugs is larger than the market itself? Looking at England & Wales data, we explore why drug use persists, how costs accumulate across health, crime and social services, and why pretending demand can be driven to zero may be one of the most expensive policy assumptions we make.
