https://www.fairbrother.org/contact daily 0.75 2024-12-02 https://www.fairbrother.org/pagecv daily 0.75 2025-04-10 https://www.fairbrother.org/trust-1 daily 0.75 2020-03-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1520682082063-ZGNJ6UE4V2MKKBOMAS0H/Trentino TRUST - Trust Along with researchers in China and Canada (led by Cary Wu from York University in Toronto), I am part of a project on “The dynamics of trust before, during, and after the COVID-19 outbreak”. This is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In collaboration with researchers in Sweden and Canada, since 2017 I have also been working on a project entitled Three Worlds of Trust: A Longitudinal Study of Welfare States, Life-Course Risks, and Social Trust (PI: Jan Mewes), funded by Sweden's Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We are seeking to understand how major life events may undermine or foster social trust, and how they may do so differently in different social contexts. In previous research, I've found mixed evidence for the influential thesis that the foundation of trust is equality. Within the U.S., for example, Isaac Martin and I found that trust is higher in states with more equal distributions of income, but trust has declined no faster in states where income inequality has grown more than average. The jury's still out on this relationship. https://www.fairbrother.org/environment daily 0.75 2025-04-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1520681294469-GBNCF4TLDMTBBLGNPOXS/Environment ENVIRONMENT - Environment I believe that the earth is in deep trouble, because too many people and firms can foist the environmental costs of their lives and actions onto others. I also think that we already know what public policies would solve most environmental problems. Governments don't adopt such policies, however, because environmental protection is a low priority for the public, who do not trust in environmental solutions. A lot of people think saving the earth will cost a lot, when the truth is that it will save us (our health and economies) a lot. Too few people understand that governments can do a lot of good by raising the price of pollution to the polluter -- that is, by taxing pollution. Much of my current research is aimed at unpacking this problem. This work is currently supported by two grants. One, from the Swedish Research Council, is for a project called In Search of Decoupling. The other is from Formas, and is about finding popular solutions to climate change. My work in this area was previously supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, with a grant about “Political trust and the environment: Understanding public attitudes towards environmental taxes and other policies”, and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, with funding for a project on Climate ethics and future generations. https://www.fairbrother.org/teaching daily 0.75 2025-04-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1520661530799-I9C9OZ0DZ8SEA0MAGZT2/IMG_1461.jpg TEACHING - Teaching My teaching philosophy is largely to structure courses around assignments that I make as engaging as possible: everything else I do aims at helping students to produce the best possible work on a topic of interest to them. At Uppsala, I have taught economic sociology at the Masters level, and introductory sociology to undergraduates in the psychology program. Previously, at the undergraduate level, I taught political economy, qualitative comparative research methods, and survey experiments. At Bristol I also used to take 2nd-year students on field trips to the Mediterranean (first Mallorca, later Barcelona). I developed a Masters course in environmental policy and politics, and for a time I directed Bristol's MSc program in Environmental Policy and Management. That program was originally the brain child of my good friend and former colleague Adam Dixon (now the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Adam Smith's Panmure House, Edinburgh); over time my good friend and former colleague Sean Fox then made it better. At the Barcelona Summer School in Survey Methodology, for several years, I gave an annual short course on Analysing comparative longitudinal survey data using multilevel models. https://www.fairbrother.org/methodology-1 daily 0.75 2020-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1520683617577-OSDPJ9938ZWCZYD9DLJ7/IMG_2753+copy.jpg METHODOLOGY - Methodology Social scientists often analyze data using models--of which there are many different kinds. One class of models -- known variously as multilevel, random effects, hierarchical, or mixed models -- are now a major tool for social science data analysis, but we're still figuring out how to make the best use of them in different kinds of studies. I'm a frequent user of these models, and I have in some cases been able to write papers with advice for others, based on what I've learned from using them myself. For example, I've written about how to analyze what I call comparative longitudinal survey data: survey data collected in a set of societies multiple times, but where the specific people surveyed change each time. Particularly in my guise as a methodologist, I'm an active member of the European Survey Research Association. I'm currently on the board as one of the prize coordinators. I'm a former visiting researcher at the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology in Barcelona. https://www.fairbrother.org/globalization daily 0.75 2022-04-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1566804186906-WS7ITHK2JMRBKHYD8TVJ/Fairbrother-Freetrader-V2-final-revision.jpg GLOBALIZATION - Globalization From the perspective of today, it's easy to forget that until a couple decades ago the governments of most countries made serious efforts to restrain rather than encourage many kinds of economic globalization -- and then suddenly that changed. Why? I've looked at this question by studying the establishment of free trade in North America -- Canada, Mexico, and the United States. My view is that many critics, who say globalization has been a top-down project imposed by elites, are basically correct. But they have badly misunderstood many things about globalization, about the people who have made globalization happen, and about how they have done so. I'm trying to help the critics and the advocates understand each other better. My last major paper on globalization, which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 2014, won best article awards from the American Sociological Association sections on Political Sociology and Global-Transnational Sociology, and an honorable mention from the Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology. In the autumn of 2019, I have a book coming out from Oxford University Press on this issue. Here’s what early reviewers have been saying about it: "This excellent study dissects the role that businesses, economists, and political elites each played in constructing hyper-globalization. Fairbrother eschews easy generalizations, yet provides a unified and convincing account that challenges accepted theories." -- Dani Rodrik, Harvard University "Fairbrother identifies the real pro-globalization coalitions at work in the global economy." -- Mark Blyth, Brown University "Fairbrother's work will give us a great deal to think about." -- Sarah Babb, Boston College https://www.fairbrother.org/about-1 daily 0.75 2024-02-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1520684792948-DW2C9C0VO08O8P90K8XS/Malcolm ABOUT https://www.fairbrother.org/about daily 1.0 2025-04-10 https://www.fairbrother.org/other daily 0.75 2018-03-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a0d4e352aeba564a048702b/1521312718959-ZCI991SUCOGKL44DW95S/Tunisia OTHER https://www.fairbrother.org/read-me-om daily 0.75 2026-04-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5052176b84aeb45fa5cfcc83/1377097104716-HDI53XJVV0DKZ24A3T68/51e453dee4b06abd3403c22e.png Read Me https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5052176b84aeb45fa5cfcc83/1377096775448-0L7B4Q54H1VLOGFF1DPR/synthetica+%2820130821%29.jpg Read Me https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5052176b84aeb45fa5cfcc83/1377096507573-1MU42OOOOGIM9URAJ9D9/515c4225e4b0afec1218b21e.png Read Me https://www.fairbrother.org/classes-alt-om daily 0.75 2026-04-01