Working Paper 2016 no.1(Published in Journal of Professions and Organization, Vol 4 (1):55-69 (2017). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/jow008) This paper focuses on “policy professionals”, i.e. people whinfluence the course of affairs, while their working-life satisfaction comes from getting their message into the media without becoming personally exposed. The key resource of policy professionals is context-dependent politically useful knowledge, in three main forms: “Problem formulation” involves highlighting and framing social problems and their possible solutions. “Process expertise” consists of understandingthe “where, how and why” of the political and policy-making processes. “Information access” is the skill to be very fast in finding reliable and relevant information. These motivations and skills underpin a particular professionalism based in an “entrepreneurial ethos”, which differs from both the ethos of elected politicians, and that of civil servants, and which has some potentially problematic implications for democratic governance.

"Knowing the Game: Motivations and Skills Among Partisan Policy Professionals", Journal of professions and organizations, Advance Access published September 21, 2016, doi: 10.1093/jpo/jow008 Abstract This

Åsa Wikforss - The Future of Humans. Moral Bioenhancement

www.iffs.se Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm University. She is currently working with the research project Knowing One’s Own Thoughts. The greatest problems of the 21st centur

Mind 130(520), 2021 Abstract The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described asconservative changefrom one probabilistic belief orcredencefunction to another in response to new information. ). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists,) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting.

Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Volume 71 AbstractSocial networks play an important role in the employer–worker match, and the social capital perspective has been used to understand how

Sir Partha Dasgupta, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge. ABSTRACT In this lecture I study fertility choice in the face of socio-ecological constraints. I assume that when cho

If we can affect how many people will be born in the future, what does that mean for our decisions today? Would it be bad if much fewer people would exist in the future, as an adaption to climate chan

in Synthese (2020) AbstractWhen an agent learns of an expert’s credence in a proposition about which they are an expert, the agent should defer to the expert and adopt that credence as their own. This

Social Forces Abstract This study investigates two concurrent trends across Europe and North America: the increasing instability of parental unions and men’s rising contributions to household work. Beca

The goals of growth and competitiveness as promoted by the European Union are discussed in the context of forecasts claiming the European population to be declining in size and growing increasingly ol