John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch
Columnist and chief data reporter the Financial Times | Stories, stats & scatterplots | john.burn-murdoch@ft.com 📝 ft.com/jbm
For sure, though the most important change driving the gap is UK productivity stagnating and wages actively falling. Britain is more exceptional than the US here
New from me: Britain’s graduate earnings premium is falling, cue “too many go to university!” But non-university outcomes are also bad, cue “we must reform vocational routes!” Both miss the point: people used to think education drove economic outcomes, but the economy drives educational outcomes.
Spot on. I wrote about that "hand on a second, I thought we were on the same path" phenomenon a few years back: www.ft.com/content/985a...
New from me: Until recently, the gap between comfortably-off and just-getting-started could plausibly be crossed in a decade or two of hard work. Growth in asset prices means that’s no longer true: even a lifetime of striving doesn’t offer a realistic prospect of feeling you’ve “made it”.
Good recent study looked at something v similar and found exactly that: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... So this is definitely part of what’s happening, but that’s still inconsistent with (or indeed is another example of) the moving yardstick and “different people evaluate differently” issues
1) As explicitly stated in the piece, every region/culture has its own reasons; phones and social media are an additional force that hits ~everywhere 2) I’ve previously written about how the phones and social media theory also fits with India not seeing the same pattern www.ft.com/content/43e2...
Yes but I also have recent articles saying it’s also (mostly?) about weak growth 😉 www.ft.com/content/30a4...
…and with recent work showing Republicans tend to have a much wider ideological distribution than Dems, who cluster around consistently progressive stances bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... So yep “mean left of centre, and a bigger hump on left than right” is what we’d expect
Well, with the aforementioned caveat about forced choice questions leading to wider distributions and more extremes: yes, as it’s consistent with what Pew found (mean significantly left of centre, larger left tail than right tail)
e.g here’s Pew using a similar multi-question methodology and finding similar results: www.pewresearch.org/politics/201...
I wouldn’t focus on the shape of general population distribution (I actually prepped a different version of the chart where everything is simply expressed relative to where the gen pop lies, see below) — it’s just shown to provide context. But perhaps it raises more questions than it answers!
tbf that’s in large part because the individual states have their own minimum wages. Exceptionally few American workers are paid that little
Yep that paper was the basis for my analysis and chart here a few years back: But I now think that’s better understood as “RW media coverage of the very large wage of irregular migration in the Mediterranean in 2015”, esp since public concern spiked hugely at the same time across Europe.
Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...
Main thing I’d had here is that in all the data I’ve looked at, salience generally tracks numbers for *irregular* immigration rather than the work-based flows that have been coming down www.ft.com/content/9598...
This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free. Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.
Attention is on NEETs today, but the problem is much worse. NEETs include stay-at-home parents & jobseekers. Strip those out to focus on people not working, not seeking work, not in education & not parenting: this group of economically & socially dislocated young adults has *doubled* in a decade.
And I did go out of my way to emphasise — in response to a post criticising the ONS — that the ONS data revisions were a good thing! 😅 Which is a drum I have consistently been banging for months, e.g this from Jan on the same topic www.ft.com/content/522d...
Worth noting: • Upward revision applies to entire 2021-2024 series — the *trend* in emigration is *roughly* flat • As infuriating as big revisions are, they mean data is getting better • BUT wild that we ever used a survey to gauge movements into and out of the country instead of counting people!
A study earlier this month found that America’s more fragmented media landscape — particularly the takeoff of cable news — accounts for fully one third of the increase in cultural conflict in the US since the year 2000.
Here’s the same data, but with trust broken down by political views (circles are trust among people on the left, +s the right). It’s not just that the BBC is widely consumed — it also has solid trust on both left & right, whereas trust in the biggest US media brands is hugely polarised.
No single US news source is consumed by more than 25% of Americans, whereas 60% of Brits regularly watch/read/listen to the BBC. A single shared source of truth makes it harder for partisan echo chambers to form, or for divisive narratives to dominate. It’s good for social cohesion and compromise.
In fact, the UK’s top 10% now have lower post-tax incomes than they did 25 years ago. (That contrasts to the overall median, which has risen by about 25%)
Another big factor for the UK is its slide down the income rankings. Would-be migrants want to join a dynamic economy with the promise of high and rising wages. The UK used to fit that bill, but Britain’s top salaries are now well down the list.
NEW from me: Political hostility, high visa fees and (in the case of the UK) stagnant incomes are making the UK and US less attractive destinations for top international talent. That steep decline in the appeal of moving to the US after 2016 is 👀
Wild story. The US Federal Reserve has long used additional data from payroll-processing company ADP to buttress official jobs numbers. During the shutdown this third party data is extra important for filling the gap. And ADP has stopped sharing the data. www.wsj.com/economy/cent...