PODCAST

Institute for Futures Studies

Institutet för framtidsstudier

Independent research foundation. We conduct research on issues of great importance for our future.

science social sciences

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01:00:44

A conversation with Lea Ypi: Indignity - A Life...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/10/29

We welcome back Lea Ypi, professor and award-winning author of the book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Now she returns to present her new book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined. In this work, she investigates the truth about her family's past by tracing the steps of her grandmother through the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. Indignity is both about

01:14:42

Jason Tucker: Why We Need to Talk About the Global...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/10/20

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is frequently promoted as a solution to a broad range of global healthcare challenges. However, behind this promise lies a more complex reality. The development and deployment of AI in healthcare is increasingly intertwined with geopolitical tensions, power asymmetries, and structural dependencies that carry real-world consequences. This seminar examines the most pressing areas where global politics is shaping the current and future role of AI in healthcare. It does so

01:35:12

Artificial General Intelligence: A Manifesto, with...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/10/13

The race is on to produce artificial general intelligence (AGI)—machines that are at least as intelligent as humans—despite widespread concern that an AGI would pose an existential threat to humankind.The fundamental problem is that much research on AGI is premised on the mistaken assumption that for a machine to be as intelligent as a human requires no more than that it produces intelligent behaviour. So, what is most likely to happen in the near future is that we will create an ersatz-AGI: a

01:46:36

Lea Ypi on Indignity - Can Beauty Save the World? -...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/10/09

'Beautiful world! Where hast thou gone?" asks Friedrich Schiller in his famous poem The Gods of Greece. He laments the loss of harmony in a world divided by injustice both past and present. In this lecture, Lea Ypi reads from her forthcoming book on human dignity. In it, she reflects on the relationship between politics and art by focusing on historical injustice and its legacy in a divided world. Through the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi, she travels from the utopia of classical Greek

01:12:47

Public vs. Private Healthcare in the OECD Area - An...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/10/07

Healthcare systems can be categorised along the public/private axis into two main types: publicly administered systems and systems based on compulsory health insuranceprovided by the private sector. This study compares the efficiency of these two models across the 38 member countries of the OECD, utilising a broad spectrum of performance indicators developed by the OECD secretariat. On average, performance improves with an increase in healthcare budgets; however, further enhancements come at rising

01:32:27

Internet Connectivity and Child Learning: Evidence...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/08/19

By facilitating access to information and educational materials for students, parents, and teachers alike, internet connectivity can help circumvent severe constraints on human capital accumulation in developing countries. At the same time, unequal access to this new technology risks reinforcing educational inequalities. This study investigates the effect of internet connectivity on educational outcomes and inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa. To evaluate whether the expansion of mobile internet has

01:25:52

Healthism, Neurodiversity, and Respectability...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/08/05

“Healthism” is the pervasive ideology according to which each of us is responsible for valuing and protecting our own health and prioritizing health over other values, while society has the right to enforce, surveil, and reward healthy living. Neurodiversity and other forms of cognitive difference are generally understood through the lens of health: they are taken as diagnosable pathological conditions that should be treated or mitigated via medical interventions. Putting these two ideas together,

00:32:52

The Art of the Debate, with Bo Rothstein

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/07/22

Balancing scholarly work with public debate is desirable but not always easy. How does one make a strong impact on the major issues of our time without losing weight and credibility as a researcher? One of Sweden's internationally most well-known researchers, and for many years the country's most frequent political scientist on DN Debatt, shares his experiences.Recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in November 2024.

00:37:36

The Global Study of Everyday Norms, with Kimmo Eriksson

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/07/08

Society’s everyday norms specify which behaviors are socially acceptable in which situations. How similar or different are everyday norms in societies around the world—and why? To answer these questions, we conducted the Global Study of Everyday Norms: a preregistered survey experiment with 25,000 participants in 90 countries.The study was designed to test the theory that everyday norms are determined by the concerns that a behavior elicits in a specific situation in interaction with society's

01:06:36

Do Harsher Punishments Deter Crime? With Chesa Boudin

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/06/23

During Chesa Boudin's 2,5 years in office as San Francisco's elected district attorney, incarceration plummeted - the number of people in the county jail fell by approximately 40 percent. Meanwhile both violent and non violent crime rates fell by double digits. Some of these changes may have been accelerated by COVID and police behavior. Did San Francisco create a virtuous cycle where decreasing incarceration feeds into decreasing crime? More broadly, California has safely cut its prison population

01:27:36

Richer and More Equal - A New History of Wealth in...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/05/12

Daniel Waldenström, professor of Economics, presents his book "Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West". The book analyzes wealth accumulation and inequality in the modern west. Using cutting-edge research and new data, it shows that what stands out since the late 1800s is a massive rise in the size of the middle class and its share of society’s total wealth. Unfettered capitalism, it seems, doesn’t have to lead to boundless inequality. The key to progress was political

01:23:55

Futures by Proxy - Anticipatory Governance amongst...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/05/05

Anticipatory action is a key means through which organizational life is experienced, conducted, disciplined and normalized. In this seminar, the various ways in which policy professionals in think tanks, and in similar kinds of organizations, engage in future foresight as a means of imagining and governing futures will be explored. Special focus will be placed on how they make use of resources and tools at hand in the creation of future scenarios, and how anticipatory action, or ‘futures literacy’

01:12:55

More Women in Politics Means Less Corruption, with...

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/29

While a growing body of work suggests that women representatives are less likely to be involved in corruption scandals, we know less about if changes in representation patterns also have implications for citizens’ first-hand experiences with corruption in public service delivery. Research presented at the seminar suggests that women elected representatives reduce street level bribery, in particular when the share of women increases in contexts where relatively few women are elected or when the

01:12:26

The Social Life of Elite Students with Anna Tyllström

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/16

Elite education fosters elite alumni. Earlier studies indicate that peer networks formed during higher education are essential to elite socialization, and that such peer networks form early on during the course of education. Moreover, the composition of such peer networks can be highly consequential, impacting long-term career outcomes such as pay and position.In this research, Anna Tyllström and colleagues study how students’ early peer socialization plays out during the first months of elite

00:47:46

Towards a Critical Theory of Trust with Rainer Forst

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/16

Research seminar with Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Department of Political Science and Department of Philosophy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. His work in moral and political philosophy focuses on questions of justification, justice and toleration.This paper challenges widespread assumptions in trust research according to which “thick” forms of trust emerge in homogeneous communities, or which regard trust and conflict as opposing terms or

01:19:51

The Invention of Modern Conservatism with Emily Jones

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/16

This paper will explore key findings drawn from Emily Jones' monograph, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History (OUP, 2017) and her forthcoming book, One Nation: The Disraeli Myth and the Making of a Conservative Tradition (Princeton). In particular, she discusses how, by taking a generously conceived ‘reception history’ methodological approach to the history of modern political ideologies, we can locate significant moments in the ‘when’ and

01:37:40

Should Experts be Open and Honest? With Joe Roussos

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/15

How should experts behave when communicating with non-experts? In this talk Joe Roussos presents a paper on the science-policy interface, with a focus on communication between scientists and policymakers. The central question of the paper is: should experts communicate strategically, with an eye to the policy outcomes they think are best, or should they rather be open and honest? The paper centers on the cases of climate change and covid-19, high-stakes situations in which there is a significant

01:34:17

Knowledge Resistance and "Bad Beliefs" with Åsa Wikforss

Institute for Futures Studies ·

2025/04/08

In this talk Åsa Wikforss, professor of practical philosophy, discusses the rationality of “bad beliefs”, as defined in Levy (2021): Beliefs that go against easily available expert consensus. Such beliefs may be an expression of knowledge resistance, in which case they are irrational. According to Levy, however, these beliefs are typically rational. That philosophers have assumed them to be irrational, he suggests, is simply a reflection of a much too narrow conception of the relevant evidence. I

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