Institute for Futures Studies

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 contributed to improved literacy and numeracy among children in previously unconnected areas, we geographically match data on the spread of 3G/4G network coverage with literacy and numeracy assessments of over 300,000 children aged 6–16, surveyed in Tanzania and Uganda from 2013 to 2018. To identify the impact of the spread of internet coverage on child learning, we exploit the staggered 3G/4G expansion in the region, drawing on detailed spatial and temporal variation in both network coverage and survey roll-out. Preliminary results for Tanzania suggest, on average, 3–4 percentage points higher test scores among children following the introduction of mobile internet in the local area. For children aged 8–10, the estimated effect is larger – about 8–9 percentage points. The preliminary findings indicate stronger treatment effects in socio-economically disadvantaged groups, with encouraging implications for educational inequality. However, there is also evidence of weaker treatment effects for girls and for children living in female-headed households, highlighting persistent gender gaps in access to and uptake of the new technology.Researchers involved with the project are Pelle Ahlerup, Dick Durevall and Ann-Sofie Isaksson.Research seminar with Ann-Sofie Isaksson, researcher in development economics, based at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests and empirical work cover a broad range of issues, including aid effectiveness, institutional development, education, inequality, gender, and African economic development more broadly.This recording is from a research seminar held at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, May 2025.Moderator: Gustaf Arrhenius, professor of practical philosophy.Research seminars are held at the institute most Wednesdays and are open to the public. Online participation possible. Sign up ⁠here to get invitations⁠. https://www.iffs.se/en/about-us/newsletter/

“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, neurodivergent people are supposed to try to be “healthy,” through pharmaceuticals, behavioral therapy, and the like, and society has an investment in making them be “healthy.” But neurodivergence is not a morbidity in a typical sense, so it is unclear what “health” means in this context. In practice, our societal standards for health for neurodivergent people are defined in terms of what avoids disrupting neurotypical expectations and systems or making neurotypical people uncomfortable. “Health,” for neurodivergent people, is in effect respectability—it is not defined in terms of their own needs or flourishing but in relation to the norms and needs of others. This can be seen from a close reading of diagnostic definitions and official medical “treatment” methods and goals. Trying to “treat” neurodivergent people by making them respectable citizens who are palatable within neurotypical productivity culture is usually likely to backfire; typically bad for their own well-being, and a social loss.Research seminar with Quill R. Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University and fellow at the SOCRATES Institute at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Their work revolves around ethics (including bioethics, sexual ethics, health communication ethics, and science ethics), feminist and anti-oppression philosophy, philosophy of science (especially medicine and geography), philosophy of language, social epistemology, philosophy of place and urban theory, and aesthetics.This recording is from a research seminar held at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, June 2025.Moderator: Joe Roussos, philosopher.Research seminars are held at the institute most Wednesdays and are open to the public. Online participation possible. Sign up ⁠here to get invitations⁠. https://www.iffs.se/en/about-us/newsletter/#neurodiversity

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.

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 sensitivity to that type of concern. Thus, it is a theory about how norms vary across societies and situated behaviors simultaneously. In this talk I will motivate the theory and present some of the rich results obtained in the Global Study of Everyday Norms.Global Social Norms website: https://www.globalsocialnorms.org/Kimmo Eriksson is a professor of mathematics/applied mathematics at Mälardalen University, and has a PhD in social psychology. He leads the global research network Global Social Norms (globalsocialnorms.org).

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 nearly in half as crime rates near modern lows. What lessons can we learn from San Francisco and California's successful decarceration?Welcome to a seminar with Chesa Boudin, the founding executive director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, a policy and advocacy hub. He served as San Francisco’s elected district attorney from 2020 until 2022. During that time, Boudin implemented reforms to ensure that the criminal legal system delivered safety and justice for all. He significantly expanded the office’s victim services’ division; eliminated prosecutors’ use of moneybail; prosecuted police for excessive force; sued the manufacturers of ghostguns; expanded diversion to address root causes of crime, and reduced incarceration significantly. During his time in office both violent and non-violent crime fell by double digits. Prior to his election Boudin clerked for two federal judges and worked for years as a deputy public defender. He is a graduate of Yale college and Yale law school and attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. His biological parents spent a combined 62 years in prison starting when he was a baby.Discussants Camila Salazar Atías, Senior specialist, destructive environments, FryshusetAmina Azhar, Federal Public Defender - Eastern District of CaliforniaCraig Haney, social psychologist, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a researcher on The Stanford Prison Experiment.Moderator: Jerzy Sarnecki, professor emeritus of general criminology at Stockholm University. His research area is mainly life cycle criminology and criminal networks.

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 and institutional change that enabled citizens to become educated, better paid, and to amass wealth through housing and pension savings. Among the lessons for the future is to pursue tax and social policies that raise the wealth of people in the bottom and middle rather than cutting wealth of entrepreneurs at the top.Daniel Waldenström is Professor of Economics and Director of the Taxes and Society research program at IFN, Sweden. His research focuses on economic inequality, taxes, fiscal policy and economic history.This recording is from a research seminar held at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, February 2025.Moderator: Gustaf Arrhenius, professor of practical philosophy.Research seminars are held at the institute most Wednesdays and are open to the public. Online participation possible. Sign up here to get invitations.

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’ is taught as a central component in organizational governance.Research seminar with Christina Garsten, Principal of SCAS and Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm and Uppsala University. Since 2022 she is President of the European network of institutes for advanced study, NetIAS.Recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, March 2025.

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 absolute increase in women’s representation is relatively large. Using newly collected data on the share of women in 128 regional level parliaments in 10 European countries and four rounds of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey (2010–2021), results show that on average, the proportion of women in regional parliaments is strongly associated with citizens’ self-reported experiences of bribery across all countries and years.Furthermore, results show that the level of bribery in public service provision dropped more sharply in regions that experienced a greater absolute or greater marginal increase in women’s representation. These results may be understood in light of women candidates placing priority on well-functioning and low corrupt public service provision and the important signals of inclusiveness, non-discrimination and decreased tolerance towards corruption that women’s representation conveys to civil servants.Research seminar with Lena Wängnerud, professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg. Her work involves topics such as representative democracy with a focus on gender equality. Recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, in March 2025.

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 business education. Drawing on structured interviews with students entering high-ranking bachelor programs in business studies, they find that the first few weeks, or days even, at university seem essential to students’ social integration, and identify four stereotypical socialization tactics, i.e. strategies that constitute separate sets of behavior and thoughts about social life, placed on a continuum between academic and social focus. They also find these tactics to be heavily gendered: while male respondents are over-represented in groups applying super-strategizing and loning tactics, female students tend to crowd in the middle categories of balancing and swotting, working hard to balance academic and social expectations during the first intense months of higher education.As this is a work in progress, spanning several social science disciplines, Anna Tyllström and colleagues presented the work at the seminar to brainstorm together with audeince around the potential relevance of these findings, and also around framing and outlet.Recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in November 2024.

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 where trust is generally seen as a value. The paper suggests a distinction between a general (non-normative) concept and various normative conceptions of trust, depending on context. With regard to the justification of trust, a distinction between particular and full justification is introduced, and the justification of trust is linked to relations of justification between trusters and trusted. Finally, trust in conflicts emerges where such relations exist among the parties of a conflict, often by way of institutional mediation. Research seminar recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in december 2024.

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 ‘how’ in their construction, but gain insights into both the historical contingency and relational nature of political ideologies, as well as the significant role that history and historical reconstruction had in the invention and reinvention of conservatism for much of its history.Emily Jones, Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester.This research seminar was recorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm in April 2025.

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 demand for science advice. Joe Roussos frame the discussion around a provocative 2018 paper by Stephen John, titled “Epistemic trust and the ethics of science communication: against transparency, openness, sincerity and honesty”, and argue in favor of a specific form of honesty (about scientific uncertainty) and against some forms of openness or transparency, although not for strategic reasons.Joe Roussos, researcher in philosophy at the Institute for Futures Studies. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics, with a thesis entitled Policymaking under scientific uncertainty. He often works on issues related to scientific modelling, or using the results of models, and focuses largely on climate science.#LSE #philosophy #sciencecommunicationRecorded at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden, February 2025.

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 argue that Levy’s attempt to rescue bad beliefs from being irrational fails, and that there are reasons to think that in the central cases bad beliefs tend to be irrational. However, Levy’s reasoning highlights an important detection challenge when it comes to studying knowledge resistance in the wild: A bad belief may be the result of knowledge resistance but it may also be perfectly rational given the subject’s prior beliefs. The challenge has consequences for the standard experiments on motivated cognition, as carried out by Kahan and colleagues, suggesting a confound in the experimental design. Preliminary data from new experiments carried out by a team from the RJ program on knowledge resistance suggest the confound is very real.This recording is from a research seminar held at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden in March 2025. Åsa Wikforss, professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University and member of the Swedish Academy. Her research involves topics such as the philosophy of language, the nature of belief, and consciousness.Moderator: Gustaf Arrhenius. Research seminars are held at the institute most Wednesdays and are open to the public.