Institute for Futures Studies

This paper presents a chapter from the draft manuscript entitled Exploitation & Time and asks whether and how future generations can be exploited given that they do not yet exist and cannot interact with us. It argues that existing accounts of exploitation struggle with this problem because they rely on interaction reciprocity counterfactual comparisons or collective generational agency all of...

Recent debates and research on economic inequality give conflicting results and views on the developments (even when using similar data). This project argues that much of the disagreement reflects differences in the underlying concepts of income and wealth rather than purely empirical disputes. Building on the Haig–Simons definition of income as changes in consumption possibilities, the paper prop...

Genocide is one of the most charged concepts of our time. It is a legal term, but it also carries moral imperatives and can be a political weapon. In the book Genocide: Sweden and the Fight Over a Concept, international law professor Mark Klamberg describes, among other things, how the foundation for genocide as a concept and thus for the UN Genocide Convention was laid in Stockholm in 1940, and h...

Philosophy of Madness is a rising philosophical subfield. There are diverging opinions and many unclarities surrounding its relationship to other subfields, most notably Philosophy of Psychiatry. In a chapter for a forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Zsuzsanna Chappell and I tentatively define Philosophy of Madness thus: In a narrow sense, it is philosophy about madness, done by openly mad p...

This presentation asks whether halving premature death by 2050 is feasible – and explores ethical issues in defining and attempting to reach such a target. Premature death is defined here as death before age 70 years. In an earlier study we examined the large variation in premature death rates before age 70 and trends over the past 50 years, covering ten world regions and the 30 most-populous nati...

What could be more futuristic on Earth than to discuss about mankind’s possibility to become a multiplanetary species in the universe? Tech visionaries like Elon Musk claim that it would become possible to send 1 million people to planet Mars within the next 2 decades. In response to this, 59 researchers, representing multidisciplinary fields from astronomy, biology, engineering, medicine, law, ec...

In an era of climate change and geopolitical turbulence democracy faces many challenges. Drawing on his research and recent book, Climate Change and the Endurance of Democracy (Routledge, open access) , Lindvall will examine how disasters and extreme weather events have historically affected human reasoning and political agency, and how the climate crisis may shape the future of democratic governa...

In this episode Victor Galaz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, dives deep into what artificial intelligence might mean for climate change. AI is often discussed as a potential “game changer” for climate change action. One key issue in this conversation focuses on the growing energy, water and carbon footprint of AI, and ways to mitigate these footprints....

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 fina...

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 press...

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 beha...

'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 divid...

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, pe...

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 ou...

“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 condi...

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 f...

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 deter...

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 i...

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. Unfettere...

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...

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 particula...

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...

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” for...

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...

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...