Causes and Things London School of Economics and Political Science

Contributor(s): Daniel Bear, Professor Paul Dolan, Dr Elli Gardiner, Dr Vili Lehdonvirta, Dr Luke McDonagh | Does staging the Olympics make a nation any happier? Is police drugs enforcement making matters worse? What does a 40-year legal battle over a pop song tell us about creativity and copyright? Why do people spend real money on virtual goods? And – how do you tell if you’re a maverick? LSE began with a mission to discover "the causes of things" and more than 100 years later it continues to ask – and answer – difficult and intriguing questions. This podcast features five stories about ideas being investigated by LSE academics and what they may mean for society. The researchers explain what drives their inquiries, how they go about them and where their findings will take them next. Causes & Things offers not just an introduction to their work but also a sense of the breadth of the research going on at LSE. In this episode Professor Paul Dolan explains how he is measuring the "happiness effect" of the Olympic Games while Elli Gardiner tell us how a business can maximise the benefits of having mavericks on the team. Luke McDonagh unpicks the story of how a famous pop melody ended in legal disharmony , Daniel Bear gives an insight from London's streets into his research on drugs policing and Vili Lehdonvirta shows how the virtual economy of a computer game operates. For copyright acknowledgements please see lse.ac.uk/videoAndAudio/channels/causesAndThings/copyright.aspx