NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem

For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.

By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world. There’s something of a paradox at play here.

On the one hand, pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.

NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?

Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.

This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵 First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?

On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures.

NEW:

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.

I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:

Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay. In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.

Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.

NEW with @KuperSimon

The prevailing narrative around increased injuries and player workload in elite football is wrong.

Players don’t play more football than in the past. What has changed is a sharp rise in intensity of play.

Not more minutes, but each minute exerts more load. Of course, that doesn’t mean a reduction in playing time wouldn’t help. But if one wants to solve the problem, it helps to know the cause.

Fixture schedules are barely busier than in the past, and squad sizes have grown to mean no rise in minutes per player regardless...

NEW 🧵

The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border. Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers.

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic. 2) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record.

NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.

What should we make of this? Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.

But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left. Here’s my original analysis from last year: ft.com/content/29fd9b…

My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left

This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...

But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.

Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.

More here ft.com/content/e8ac09…

The recent political polarisation of Silicon Valley is really striking.

25 years ago most big tech and VC execs were moderates. Then the whole sector shifted gradually leftwards up until 2020, and now suddenly we have a sharp divide into Democrat-backers and Trump backers. Chart is from my column this week exploring how the politics of corporate bosses have evolved over time ft.com/content/29426c…

“The NHS has too many managers” latest

https://twitter.com/alijanemoore/status/1846091404214141300

Many of the NHS’s difficulties can be traced back to the deep cuts in manager numbers.

Fixing this doesn’t just unblock waiting lists, it also gives doctors more time to be doctors, and alleviates the stress and poor morale that come from having to do things that aren’t your job

NEW: we may have passed peak obesity 🎉📈📉🙏

In what might be one of the most significant trends I have ever charted, the US obesity rate fell last year. My column this week is about this landmark data point, and what might be behind it ft.com/content/21bd0b…

It’s really striking how the Corbynite left has migrated to the Greens.

The result is a curious coalition between the older and more Nimby environmentalist base, and the new hard left/progressive influx.

These are quite different people with quite different politics! In 2019, one in ten Green voters was from the most progressive/left segment of voters; now that’s one in four.

Big difference in policy preferences, priorities and pressure on the leadership, as we’ve seen in e.g reaction to Denyer’s Biden statement.

That incredible Noah Lyles victory in chart form.

Lyles was in last place until *50m*, and then surged past the field to take it on the line. A blue streak.

Thompson led from 25m to 95m, but not when it counted. Granular timing data via @jgault13 and the Olympics website

https://x.com/jgault13/status/1820190130868826340

Essential chart from the new mega report on the general election by @Moreincommon_

The vast majority of people — including Reform voters — said the Tories lost because they were incompetent, not because they were too left or right wing. And to the extent that people thought they were either too left or right wing, equal shares gave each answer.

There’s one very clear message and anything else is a distraction.

Full report here: moreincommon.org.uk/media/e3in12zd…

Under-appreciated stat from last week’s election:

Labour won its lowest ever share of the vote in deprived areas (<50% for the first time), and its highest ever share in affluent areas.

The result is a dramatic flattening of the class gradient in Labour support. Here’s the same thing laid out as a timeline so you can see specific elections.

Interesting how Blair 1997 and Corbyn 2017 had similarly steep class gradients.

And shows how Starmer’s landslide was quite different to Blair’s.

The lack of enthusiasm for Labour at this election really is striking.

Among those who plan to vote Labour tomorrow, the party is much less well-liked than in 2019, 2017 or 2015 (no data before that).

Quite a flimsy voter coalition that could unravel in the absence of results. The Conservatives weren’t especially popular with their backers in 2019 (mainly a vote for Brexit and against Corbyn), and this was a big part of why they fell so far since then, but Lab voters this time are even less enthusiastic about their party than Tory voters were in 2019.

NEW 🧵: how Britain became gripped by the worst homelessness crisis in the developed world Here the column in full

Now let’s get into the detail:ft.com/content/24117a…

NEW:

There has long been a gap between people’s views of crime locally (not a big issue) vs nationally (it’s terrible out there!), but there are signs this is now happening to economic perceptions too.

My finances? Going okay. The economy? Awful.

What’s going on? My column this week asks whether the media (both mainstream and social) and its incentives to maximise engagement could be playing a key role ft.com/content/8cd76c…