Funding further education can be a problem at the best of times and a recent conversation with my old tutor at the LSE would seem to indicate it’s becoming a lot more difficult when it comes to funding research.  It would, for example, to fund study into alternative economic models or the effect of unbridled capitalism on societal evolution and the future direction of humanity.  However, this might not go down so well with a corporate sponsor….

 

Which begs the question as to what degree research in directed with a corporate or political agenda.  In this respect, then, unfettered capitalism will ensure that there is plenty of funds available for research that supports and justifies its continued existence and strangles funding for its would be detractors who might wish to conduct deeper study in this area.

 

Of course, one of the first thing this government was to make university education more expensive thereby ensuring that it was only available to those able to fund it themselves and in themselves are more likely not to criticise the workings of an economic model that enabled them to get there, even if it means that most people can’t.

 

Perhaps it is not so surprising that so few academics have questioned the workings and failings of capitalism at the beginning of the 21st Century.