The big ideas of 2014

Change your preferences Having difficulty reading this email? View it online       Afternoon all, Over the next week we’ll be looking back at the big ideas that have been developing over the last year. Fighting the Islamic State online, the return of cold war geo-politics, revenge porn, the celebrity-driven charity social media challenge, the return of garden cities, conscious uncoupling and the audience as detective have all been cropping up again and again. Today we’re concentrating on just three: taxi apps, inequality and the drive to get Britain out of the EU. Taxi apps have shaken things up a bit. They have the potential of driving down the price of a taxi. But one, Uber, has had some PR disasters. Spain, India and Thailand have all prohibited Uber from operating. A book about economics came out in 2013 in France to polite but muted acclaim. But the English translation published in April this year met with a very different reaction. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that over time, the value of capital has increased more quickly than income. If you are rich - owning assets like shares and property - your wealth will have increased proportionally more than someone reliant on earning a wage. 2014 has seen significant successes for Ukip. The party won two by-elections to get its first MPs. And for the first time in modern history a British election was won by neither Labour or the Conservatives. Ukip triumphed in May's European elections with 27.5% of the vote. But some say the success of Ukip is really part of the rise of immigration as a political issue. The very last idea we’ll look at on Thursday is the constant intrusion of the work email. An apt ending to this email.