I think there is not enough appreciation to how good this FT visualization is
the original is like this 👇
03.03.2026 13:23
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I think there is not enough appreciation to how good this FT visualization is
the original is like this 👇
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@martamiori.bsky.social and I have been writing, since 2024, about why Labour's 'Reform' challenge and emphasis was based on a misunderstanding of Labour's vote. Here for anyone interested: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...
🚨 New WP w/ @leonardocarella.bsky.social on OSF
doi.org/10.31235/osf...
We usually think that social identities precede preferences
We show the reverse is also true: people update their social identities to match their immigration preferences
Focus: class identity in 🇬🇧 + Christian identity in 🇮🇹
New: Drones are redrawing the map of war in Ukraine.
Relentless surveillance has pushed the battlefield 20km beyond the front, in both directions. Supplies arrive by drone; the wounded leave by robot.
This is the “kill zone” — and the future of warfare.
👉 ft.com/kill-zone
Voila:
Yup! And the extra hit to payroll income is as large as it is in large part *because* graduate earnings have underperformed (the frozen threshold and high interest rates are an attempt to claw back a larger slice of a shrinking pie)
That’s a key caveat to keep in mind any time you see any international comparison of incomes btw — student debt repayments are almost never included in the calculations of post-tax income, so young UK graduate incomes (which are bad enough as it is) will be overstated in those comparisons.
Pre-tax. And even if it were post-tax, it wouldn’t include the impact of student loans as they’re not counted that way. Sadly no good comparative data on student loan regimes/payments over time in different countries.
Ha, happy to join the battle!
Ideally yes (that’s what I did for this deeper dive a couple of years ago, but only possible for UK and US given data constraints www.ft.com/content/570d...), but since the timing of HE expansion has been roughly the same everywhere, it shouldn’t affect how we interpret UK diverging from others
tbf that’s in large part because the individual states have their own minimum wages. Exceptionally few American workers are paid that little
Nice! And yeah I would say *relative* earnings are closely correlated to *relative* status (and to one’s own education level), but absolute earnings are shaped more by the economy/market you enter into.
Oh absolutely — definitely the intuitive approach!
The subhead of my article ("The graduate earnings premium isn’t really measuring what most people think") should arguably have been the headline!
Which place has the highest grad wage premium? US, because it has lots of super well-paid professional jobs and high earnings inequality.
Which places have the lowest grad wage premiums? Sweden and Denmark (~25% each), because they have much lower earnings inequality.
Grad premium holding up well elsewhere is only surprising if one thinks it’s measuring something to do with education. I think that’s wrong.
Everything I’ve seen suggests it’s really more a measure of “how many professional jobs are there, and how well-paid are they relative to lower-end jobs?”
Sadly not available. Remarkably tricky to get internationally comparable data on anything beyond headline economic indicators. Especially dicey here where definitions often differ between countries and even over time within the same country
Such a good piece today from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com which shows that the declining graduate premium is very much a UK problem rather than a general (or inevevitable) consequence of more people going to uni www.ft.com/content/649d...
Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.
Really good piece. The falling graduate premium is a consequence more than a cause of low growth
‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com
Thanks Giles!
unbelievably good from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com @sarahoconnorft.ft.com on the intensification of (knowledge) work under AI
www.ft.com/content/9c6a...
It reminds me a bit of when the Internet arrived, that sense of a cornucopia of content, an infinite bookstore, a neverending toread list. 1/
I’d say it’s positional only when access to healthcare is rationed, which is much more true in the UK than US (and at any rate, the entire point of that piece was that healthcare has very little to do with the life expectancy gap)
And a theory a few others have floated:
- Anglo countries pulling back from social housing provision in late 20th C (famously true of the UK, less clear elsewhere)
Lots of other ways to be fair!
A few I’ve previously written about:
- Anglo cultural preference for home-ownership, and home-owners as organised lobbyists
- Anglo aversion to density
- Rise of environmentalist movements in Anglo countries in late 20th C
- Anglo countries attracting more immigrants
lol
Yep, and turns out certainty and transparency are key to efficiency and keeping costs down.
Totally fair to argue that front page coverage of Mediterranean migrant crisis in non-Mediterranean country means it should be thought of as media-driven rather than [distant] asylum-driven, but I think the latter has to be factored in.
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.
This also helps explain why despite ostensibly having nice neat rules-based zoning systems, parts of the US are closer to the UK’s discretionary system in reality.
Many US cities have layered on loads of additional layers beyond zoning which involve public hearings, legal challenges etc
