Richard Reeves is a nonresident senior fellow, working on economic mobility in Economic Studies and the Center on Children and Families. He is also an associate director of CentreForum. Before his move to Washington, DC in the summer of 2012, he worked as director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister. He is a former director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank. Richard is the author of John Stuart Mill—Victorian Firebrand, an intellectual biography of the British liberal philosopher and politician, as well as a series of articles, radio programs and publications on politics and policy. His other principal areas of interest are the theory and practice of coalition building; the development of progressive political thought; policies relating to social mobility; the economics and politics of wellbeing; the formation of character; contemporary gender and masculinity; the future of the workplace; and organizational leadership. Richard is also a successful public speaker and broadcaster. A former European Business Speaker of the Year, he is co-presenter and co-author of The 80 Minute MBA (2009). An experienced media presenter and commentator, Richard has written and presented a number of programs for the BBC, including, for Radio 4, “Anti-Social Housing,” which addressed the failures of the UK social housing system (2009); “Character Factories,” on the importance of character formation for public policy (2008); and the series Political Roots, an examination of the historical and intellectual foundations of modern liberalism and social democracy (2009). In 2005, he presented the four-part BBC2 TV series, Making Slough Happy. Richard’s previous roles include director of futures at the Work Foundation; principal policy advisor to the Minister for Welfare Reform, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, one of the UK’s premier think tanks, and a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London.


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Vague Hopes, Active Aspirations and Equality

Paper Conference paper | | Apr 2014

The term human capital describes a set of skills, strengths and know-how that are valuable—both in the narrow sense of being “commercially valuable” (Lindsey, 2013), and the wider one of contributing to a flourishing, deliberate, purposeful life.As Heckman (2014) puts it: “Skills are capacities to act [emphasis added]…They shapeexpectations, constraints, and information” (p. 6).