Anti-ageing in Britain and why tariffs strike a bum note

Afternoon all,

We’re more than a quarter of the way through the 21st Century and things are getting weird – Hollywood is burning, geopolitical tensions have shifted from the Red Sea to the Labrador Sea, and your local A&E bears an unsettling resemblance to a war zone. Happy new year!

In better news, you lot put in an impressive performance for the fiendishly difficult Top of the Charts Christmas Quiz. Congratulations are in order for our two winners Dylan Jones and Chris Padwick who both scored an impressive full marks.

We’ve got some real TOTC classics for you to ring in my penultimate edition – keep scrolling for talk on tariffs and dishwasher discussions.

Have a great weekend,

Mike

Interim Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

Miserable minors. If you thought we were going to start the gloomiest month of the year with some nice, uplifting reads, I’m afraid you were sorely mistaken. Instead, this comprehensive update from BBC In Depth highlights the state of child mental health. Official figures now show that one in five children and young people (ages 8-25) in England have a mental health disorder. But how much is due to circumstance (climate breakdown, economic stagnation, social media etc) and to what extent is it caused by a lack of resilience among Gen Z? No conclusive answer is offered, but everyone agrees things cannot continue as they are. We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the labour market (and life) consequences of rising mental ill-health among young people, and how that is impacting our benefits system. Even if the rise in economic inactivity isn’t quite as high as the LFS would have us believe, there’s still clearly a big problem here to solve.

Guitars, gutted. Trumps tariffs are a hot topic, and this fascinating read explores how they could impact the American musical instrument industry. The piece shows it’s more complicated than the “produced domestically = good; produced abroad = evil” story that becoming vogue stateside. The iconic Fender guitar company has taken advantage of globalisation to manufacture its famous instruments in five countries across the planet, meeting different specifications to serve different markets. That lets Fender make more money while Americans can buy more affordable guitars. America imports more instruments than it exports because A) they’re a luxury good and it’s a large market in the richest country in the world and B) the instruments that are manufactured state-side tend to be high-end, so are more likely to be purchased by a fellow Yank. Tariffs wouldn’t affect these premium models, but would raise the cost of entry-level instruments made abroad, making them unaffordable for low-income buyers, and eroding the industry’s future consumer base. The global interconnection of goods trade is a bell chord that cannot be easily unrung unstrum.

Divvying up domestic labour. What does the work from home revolution mean for our working lives? Well, it depends on who’s working from home and how much, as this paper finds. The study found that just one member of a couple working from home increases their shared leisure time, or time spent on joint childcare for parents. There’s also a positive correlation between WFH intensities – as in, partners seem to try and align their work locations (either both in the office, or both at home). But WFH habits also influenced hours worked. Fully remote workers worked fewer hours than onsite workers, while hybrid workers worked *more* hours. Dual-earner couples revealed a particular dynamic. If a woman switches to hybrid working while her male partners goes remote, then the woman tends to work a bit more, reducing hours inequality between the partners. But where women work fully remotely, while their male partner is hybrid, then hours inequality goes up, with women working almost 4 per cent fewer hours. (If both partners go hybrid, their shared work hours increase by 5.1 per cent). It seems that some of the biggest winners from the WFH revolution (which some male Chief Execs are unhappy about) could be women.

Desperately inventing dishwashers. The inventor of the dishwasher said “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself” (kudos to Josephine Cochrane for that one). But what happens if access to inventive careers is unequal? Well, people tend to invent the things *they* want, and need, and would buy. So, our tech progress will look pretty unequal if it excludes the people washing the proverbial (and literal) dishes. The implication of this is highlighted by this research which shows that innovators that are rich or male (which is, lets face it, most of them) are more likely to start businesses that cater to their peers. And this has real consequences for low-income households, and for women: the research estimates that it contributes to a whopping 19 per cent cost-of-living gap between genders. Reducing access barriers for female innovators would reduce this gap considerably, paying dividends not just to them but across society, reducing cost-of-living inequality and even boosting overall growth.

Visualising voyages. You know how much we love a chart, and this article from the brilliant London Centric doesn’t disappoint with a chart-tastic summary of the capital’s transport trends (and I don’t even live in London). Central London is ditching cars in favour of public transport, while the opposite is happening in the outer reaches. Overall, car ownership is declining, with fewer than half of Londoners in their 20s holding a full driving licence. In fact, all types of travel remain lower than pre-pandemic levels (average trips have dipped below two per day), which is great news for those who don’t love getting crushed on their way into work. Monday is the go-to WFH day, while Wednesday is the new wild night out, with a considerable increase in late-night bus journeys. But we should end with a word of warning – this breathing room might be short-lived if TfL can’t find money in their coffers to fund further investment as London continues to grow.

Chart of the Week

I hate to break it to you, but we’re all getting old. Well, almost. This week’s chart, taken from new RF research, shows that we’re not all ageing at the same pace. Broadly speaking, older places are ageing fastest. The typical age of residents of Argyll, Western Scotland, has gone up by nine years since the turn of the millennium to 51 – ageing three times faster than the UK as a whole (whose median age is 41). Meanwhile, major cities (where young people tend to be concentrated) are actually getting younger. Salford is the Benjamin Button of modern Britain – the typical age of its residents is now three years younger (at 34) than two decades ago. But eagle-eyed readers of the London Centric article above will know that there is a twist to this tale – a haggard dame among the L’Oreal-lathered conurbations of this country, if you will: London. Our capital has been ageing over the past decade at a similar rate to British small towns. For this, we can blame a baby bust, and Brexit. The capital’s birth rate fell twice as fast as the national average between the 2000s and the 2020s (although with more births to older women, as this FT piece explores). More recently, young migrants coming into Britain post-Brexit have increasingly moved to other major cities (net annual migration of 25-30-year-olds is up from 6,000 a year in 2002-2018 to 15,000 in 2019-2023), while inflows have fallen marginally in London. These geographically varied demographic shifts will put pressure on local services – from social care demand in coastal areas to emptying schools in London. Something to ponder in the Spending Review run-in…