I didn’t do much blogging in 2014 (resolution to do much more in 2015), but these are the the big issues I spent time thinking and learning about this year:

• Combining profit and purpose — the creative tension at the heart of what we do at BGV is between good financial investment decisions and good social impact decisions. We think a lot about under what circumstances and using what instruments it’s ok to make money while addressing social problems. There was lots of wider discussion about this (particularly in the tech world) in 2014, which is good for everyone I hope.
• Inequality — to be honest I only got a few chapters in to Piketty but I read a lot of the debate and watched him give a number of talks. The data shows what I see and feel anecdotally — we’re living in increasingly unequal times and something has to change.
• Race against the machine — perhaps related to the inequality debate above is the growth of automation. I can’t help thinking that lots of jobs we take for granted today will have gone in five to ten years time. Perhaps that’s a good thing and the jobs that we create instead will be far more fulfilling and worthwhile, but it will cause upheaval along the way.
• Tech addiction — I’ve watched lots of people teetering on the edge of addiction to their connected devices. I catch the tube a few times a week and can’t get over how many people are glued to their little screens.
• MINT countries — I’ve always been fascinated by globalisation and the decisions that lead to countries becoming prosperous. At the beginning of the year, the talk was about Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. I visited Mexico and Turkey for the first time and could definitely see huge potential. The politics of all four countries are precarious though.
• Europe — you can’t avoid the debate about Europe in the UK, UKIP have seen to that. I’m massively pro-European — it’s transformed my life for the better but I do see that the bureaucracy of the Commission and the Council is pretty awful.
• Political parties’ decline — when I was at Demos I predicted that the main political parties would decline and that a party that didn’t then exist would win the election after next. 2015 is that election and I think I was wrong (my guess is that Labour or the Conservatives will pull through saved by first past the post system), but it could be close.
• Transport — finally I realised that I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of transport this year. Whether it’s self driving cars, drones, the hyper loop, electric vehicle infrastructure — they’ve all got me thinking about a future that is very different to the present. Sadly it’s also been a year for rethinking aviation — while it’s still the safest way to travel, too many aircraft have been lost and resistance to new capacity is now so strong that I think it’s more likely that a new approach might succeed.

• Doing interviews for the Winter 2015 BGV cohort — so many talented people with great ideas.
• GoodGym’s fifth birthday party — that’s gone quick!
• Finding that The George has had a very nice refit and is now serving some very good beers.
• Thought the Programmer’s Price in the New Yorker about the rise of agents for engineers was interesting — not that I’m a big fan of the tech industry becoming like the entertainment industry.
• Watching Crossing the Bridge about music in Istanbul (we’re going for a quick break there soon).

Grayson Perry’s ‘Who Are You?’ is the first thing I’ve watched on Channel 4 in a while and it was very good. The conceit is to bring portriats of ordinary contemporary Britons into the white, rich, male historical figures of the National Portrait Gallery in London and it really works. You start to realise quite how brilliant an artist Grayson is — the Ashford Hijab I thought was particularly beautiful.

Then there’s the contrast with the one white middle aged political figure he does bring into the collection — Chris Huhne — as fallen rising political star. The difference couldn’t be more stark. Huhne’s identity is unknowable — even in the extreme circumstances of public humiliation and two and a half months in prison he still doesn’t crack so Grayson portrays him as a broken vase. Of course, it’s on TV and perhaps that’s why Huhne doesn’t show any sign of contrition or remorse. For a politician it’s a badge of honour not to waiver, not to change your mind. But compared to everyone else that Grayson portrays in the show, the politician comes across as a remote and tragic figure. Unfortunately the front benches (and most board rooms) are full of similar characters. And until that changes, I can’t help thinking that the gulf between ‘leaders’ and ordinary people will remain.

A little while back, Douglas Coupland had a great piece in the FT Magazine. He wrote about how he thought the internet was changing the way he thought — how his brain no longer bothered to retain trivia and occasionally — conditioned by phones, tablets and screens — he’d find himself looking for the time in the top right hand corner of a book. As Coupland says when we go to look something up on our phones we’re really saying, “Let me instantaneously consult with the sum total of accumulated human knowledge. It’ll take just two shakes.” But he isn’t totally negative about this trend, “I wonder if nostalgia for the 20th-century brain is a waste of time. WhiIe I may sometimes miss my pre-internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back.”

I’m with Doug — I think the internet has affected my brain but not in an altogether bad way and I think we’ll see lots of new tools that help us adapt to the change. I’ve been using Timehop for a while and although I wrote it off as a bit of fun when I first heard the idea (I think from their investor Andrew Parker) I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the possibility of digital memories since. Timehop is super simple. Each morning it shows you what you tweeted, where you checked in and any photographs you took on the same exact day for the past few years. It’s made me use social media in a slightly different way. I’ve started checking in on Swarm more often and it’s made Instagram more meaningful for me. I use social media more as a memory box than I used to.

I think there’s lots of potential for tech for good here too. See What I Mean are exploring the idea of memory boxes by customising their speech to image software with images and photos from a person’s past and then using them as a communication aid during the earlier stages of dementia.

It could be that rather than eroding our memories, technology could enhance them.

I’m a pretty big fan of Russell Howard and his Good News show so it was a lovely surprise to see Good Gym featured as the ‘It’s not all doom and gloom’ story this week. The show is on iPlayer for a few more days — the Good Gym bit starts at 26 mins 50 secs in.

You can’t really avoid the Scottish Referendum this week whether or not you live there. But I think the response to the surge for ‘yes’ from London’s politicians has missed the point. This isn’t just because people care about independence for Scotland — it’s a chance for them to stick it to Westminster.

Mure Dickie has a good column in the FT Magazine today:

In my ideal world, nation states would actually fade in importance and emphasis shift to a wider range of political units that would allow genuinely global co-operation on issues such as climate change and truly local decision-making for individual communities.

Until politicians in Westminster (and other national governments) understand that people want them ultimately to have less power, we’ll see a lot more political turmoil and chaos.