Kittens Are Evil II

The 'Little Heresies' seminars - this is the second publishedcollection of the talks given at them - provide an importantpublic platform to debate the future of public services.Now more than ever it seems vital to challenge the 'receivedwisdom', 'zombie thinking' and old, tired and outdated habitsand practices that continue to infest important aspects of ourpublic services. For, as the authors demonstrate, what appear tobe well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentivesbut frequently cause lasting damage to the social fabric.Private sector management methods, underpinned byneoliberal thinking, were introduced into UK public services byMargaret Thatcher. Many other countries have adopted the sameapproach. And successive governments continue to be dupedinto believing, against plenty of evidence to the contrary, thatNew Public Management, as it is now called, works. It doesn't.In this second publication from the Little Heresies series,nine heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in theirprofessional fields, explain the disastrous effects of wrongthinking and ineffective practice in areas like standardisation,professionalisation and measurement in public services, socalledevidence-based policy-making, money creation and,looking more widely, in the troubled waters of philanthropy andthe third/charitable sector.