Akita prefecture in Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world. But ensuring the economic security and managing the health of elderly populations poses tremendous problems throughout the Western world. We need to think innovatively about ageing and the role of the elderly, particularly as growth in labour productivity has slowed.

The UK has one of the most complicated tax regimes on the planet. Failure to simplify the tax code stands in the way of welfare reform more broadly; reform of welfare and tax must go hand-in-hand. We can no longer sustain lavish welfare expenditures that offer no paths to skill development or prospects for employment.

The concept of the veil of ignorance is an essential element of social contract theory. Developed through the philosophy of Locke and Hobbes, the veil found a modern champion in John Rawls in 1972 in his masterwork, A Theory of Justice. The veil of ignorance is a critical element of design of social policy and of ensuring an equitable and mobile society based on ability and effort.

The explosion of standards and of 'best practice' is usually viewed as a good thing. But not everything is suitable for standardisation. How do we know what is and what is not? What are the dangers of premature standardisation?

From the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, knowledge and thought in Western Europe and principles of the scientific method took enormous strides from which we all benefit today. But, in many spheres, these Enlightenment principles are under threat, sometimes in surprising ways and from unexpected sources. These threats and defending thought and reason against them matter tremendously.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, we need to reexamine what is a bank. Rather than assuming banks should be basically unchanged from their pre-crisis settings, has something fundamentally changed about banks and banking? What does that mean for regulation of banks and the financial system?

Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Syria, ISIS, The Ukraine. Conflicts are changing and are occurring for different reasons. What does that mean for stability of the global system? And for the structure of military capability in the post-Cold War order? More boots, more boats or more bombs? Or more collaborate diplomacy – and collaborating with whom?

Moving to a knowledge economy will change the knowledge that people need; that should change what we educate people for and what we educate them in. But to what? What should drive modern tertiary and pre-tertiary curricula? Whom should we ask and how should we decide? And how do we pay for it all?

It has become widely accepted that we now live in a more uncertain world. We do not; the future is just as uncertain as ever it was; no more, no less. But volatility and complexity have increased, as have ambiguity and 'equivocality'. Yet approaches to decision-making have not kept up. What can we do; what should we do in business or government to adapt to the greater 'risk'?

Our ability to cram more circuits on to a chip (the stuff of Moore's Law) appears to be diminishing. Gordon Moore's 'self-fulfilling prophecy' appears, therefore, to be reaching its physical limit. What happens when that limit is reached? What will it mean for our expectations of ever-accelerating progress?

How we approach measurement is changing. Advances in metrology and metering technologies are one cause. But also how we count and account and what we account for are changing, though nowhere near as radically as they need to. What would a rational measurement and account agenda look like, what would be its goals and how would we reach them (or start to do so)?

Britons are famously skeptical of the EU, often with justification. The UK is considering life outside the EU. From a British perspective, what has gone wrong with the EU project and why? Is Britain leaving the EU feasible? Is it desirable? What would be the consequences of leaving? What would be the prospects for changing the EU from within if the UK were to stay in the EU?