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A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
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Economics: The Free Trade-Off

Note: The following article was written by Shane Nagpal L6B (20NagpalS@students.watfordboys.org) Global trade is not a small side issue. UNCTAD estimated that global trade in goods and services surpassed $35 trillion in 2025, reaching a new record. This makes the question of free trade feel urgent rather than theoretical. A cheap T-shirt, a smartphone assembled across five countries, fruit in winter, coffee before school. The cotton from the T-shirts may be grown in one country, stitched in another, shipped through a third and sold on a British high street by the weekend. Free trade is everywhere. It sits quietly behind the lower prices consumers enjoy and the larger markets firms depend on.  But the same T-shirt can also tell a darker story: a closed factory in Talbot, a steelworker in Ohio, or a farming community hit by retaliatory tariffs. Free trade creates winners and losers. The question is not whether the winners exist. The real question is whether the winners gain enough, a...
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Law: Uber BV vs Aslam (landmark case analysis)

Note: The following article was written by Arjun Santilale L6 ( 20santilalea@students.watfordboys.org) Uber BV vs Aslam serves as a landmark case for employment law in a modern economy. Decided by the UK Supreme Court in 2021, it was established that people who drove for Uber were labelled workers rather than self-contractors. This was important because workers have certain legal rights, which self-contractors don’t. Ultimately, this case serves its importance through understanding that, despite contractual labels, priority is placed on the real working relationship between a company and individuals. To understand the case, it is important to consider how Uber works. Uber provides a smartphone app that connects passengers with drivers who are willing to give them rides. Drivers use their own vehicles and can choose when to log into the app and accept trips. Because drivers appear to have choices over their working hours, Uber argued that it was only a technology platform that allowed i...
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Economics: Will Artificial Intelligence trigger the next productivity revolution in developed economies?

Note: The following article was written by Siddharth Sethi L6 (20SethiS@students.watfordboys.org) Growth led by productivity has long been seen as the driving force to increase living standards. Paul Krugman claimed that ‘productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything’. Since the early 21st century, many developed economies have experienced weak productivity, especially the UK, giving rise to concerns about stagnating wages and improvements to living standards.  Figure 1. GDP per hour worked in US$ within selected developed economies, 1990-2023. Source: The Productivity Institute. Although AI has significant potential to trigger a new productivity revolution, historical experience suggests that technological breakthroughs alone are insufficient. Gains will ultimately depend on complementary investments in human capital and infrastructure, and if institutions ensure that the benefits are shared rather than concentrated in the wealthy.  One of the str...
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Economics: Is a country truly wealthy if it has high GDP, but its citizens are unhappy?

Note: The following article was written by Zain Khwaja L6B (20khwajaz@students.watfordboys.org) Online figures have claimed there are seven types of wealth: spiritual, mental, physical, social, influential, community, and generational. I believe this framework is much too complicated. When looking at countries, both historically and in the present, wealth can be understood through three broader dimensions: material resources, human wellbeing, and social power. In a perfectly theoretical society, it would be almost impossible to have one of these without the other two. For example, a country with a high GDP will likely have greater material resources, which citizens can use to improve their wellbeing through things such as healthcare, education, leisure, or even gym memberships. Material wealth can also provide access to corridors of social power. Yet there are two key hindrances to the idea that high GDP automatically enables wealth in all aspects of life, and therefore complete happin...
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Politics: Do voters primarily act rationally, or are they guided more by identity and emotion?

Note: The following article was written by Zain Khwaja L6B (20khwajaz@students.watfordboys.org) If voters were rational, turnout would be closer to 0. This reflects the view of Anthony Downs, an American economist, who argued that rational individuals vote only when the expected personal benefit outweighs the costs of participation, and when their individual ballot could realistically alter the outcome. Downs proposed the “calculus of voting” in 1957, a formula intended to quantify a personal assessment of the utility of voting: R = (P × B) – C Here, R is the reward from voting, P is the probability of being decisive, B is the benefit if one’s preferred candidate wins, and C is the cost of participation. Therefore, in elections with large turnouts, it is almost always irrational to vote from Downs’s point of view. This is because the probability of one’s vote being decisive is basically close to zero. If P ≈ 0 , the formula reduces to –C , meaning voting only really produces a cost...
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Economics: Split or Steal? The surprising Economic Theory behind the decision-making

Note: The following article was written by Shaunak Punekar L6B (20punekars@students.watfordboys.org) Recently, a YouTube video popped up on my recommended with over 15 million views. The video in question is a clip of a British game show called Golden Balls, or more commonly referred to as “Split or Steal”. The premise of the game is very simple: two contestants each have two balls, one that says “split” and the other says “steal”. There is a prize pot of £13.600 and the contestants are asked to put forward one ball. If both contestants choose to put forward “split”, the money will be split, and both contestants will walk away from the game with £6800. If one contestant picks “split” and the other picks “steal”, the latter will walk away with the whole prize pot of £13600 and the former will walk away with nothing. Likewise, if both choose “steal”, both contestants walk away with nothing. To summarise the video, the contestant on the left (Nick) starts by attempting to convince the con...
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Biology: Antibiotic Resistance - The Most Pressing Challenge Facing Medicine

Note: The following essay was written by Zuhair Bilal L6C (20bilalz@students.watfordboys.org) Introduction  The first true antibiotic drug, penicillin, was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928 and became widely available after the Second World War (Adedeji, 2016). Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been defined by Morier (2017) as the “loss of susceptibility of bacteria to the killing or growth-inhibiting properties of an antibiotic agent”. According to Uddin et al. (2021), bacterial resistance to specific antibiotic drugs emerged in the early stages of the antibiotic era, but was not initially a problem due to the abundance of alternative antibiotics. However, the discovery of new classes of antibiotics had largely halted by 1987. AMR poses a growing threat to modern medicine, which relies heavily on antibiotics to treat or cure bacterial infections. AMR has led to a higher risk of treatment failure, increased mortality, and longer treatment durations (Iván Oterino-Moreira ...
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