Research across technology, business, philosophy, science and society. Written for people who want the argument, not just the conclusion.
Explore the research ↓Digitisation has made transactions faster. It has not automatically made the work around those transactions simpler.
A closer look at what happens when payments, orders and customer communication move online, while the business behind them still depends on memory, trust and manual reconciliation.
Read the research ↗The archive is organised around questions. Categories help us find things. Questions help us understand them.
Different disciplines. The same editorial standard: the question must be worth the reader's time.
Companies, markets, strategy, capital and organisational incentives.
02Meaning, morality, knowledge, ambition and the good life.
03How tools reshape behaviour, institutions and power.
04Markets, incentives, wealth, scarcity and distribution.
05Decision-making, motivation, identity and social behaviour.
06Culture, institutions, education and collective behaviour.
07Understanding the present by tracing how systems were built.
08Research that changes what we know about the world and ourselves.
Faster transactions can still create more coordination behind the counter.
Information became abundant. The scarce resource moved somewhere else.
Why relative position matters even when material needs are already met.
The public page is where an idea earns attention. The research desk is where the same idea has to survive evidence, counter-arguments and better questions.
Open the research desk ↗A continuing investigation into how power is accumulated, legitimised, distributed and defended, from companies and governments to status and technology.
Open collection ↗Every piece begins with something we genuinely want to understand, not a headline waiting to be repeated.
Filings, datasets, original papers, government documents and first-party material come before commentary.
A thesis should meet contradictory evidence before it reaches the reader.
A measured fact, an estimate and a working hypothesis should never look like the same kind of claim.
A periodic note from The Idea School Research: one question, the evidence that matters and the idea underneath it.