Caring robots, curing cancer and the long-road to democracy

Afternoon all,

Well, that will certainly be a 5th of November to remember (and I don’t mean me talking all-things-Budget with the Treasury Select Committee). We’ve decided to take the long view on American democracy for Chart of the Week, but our award for Best Election Chart has to go to John Burn-Murdoch (who else – don’t miss him at an RF event later this month) and his jaw-dropping analysis of what’s proved to be a bad year for incumbents.

Meanwhile, the world continues to spin. We’re pretty chuffed to be launching a new project next week: Unsung Britain will focus on the experiences of low-to-middle income families across the UK, and how they’ve changed since the 1990s. Come and join us for the discussion on Wednesday, with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook, Abigail McKnight and Polly Toynbee.

Have a great weekend,

Mike
Interim Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

Age of austerity. It’s been more than fifteen years since David Cameron declared the dawn of “the age of austerity”. Spending cuts and a shift towards conditionality have since reshaped British social security. How have the people at its sharpest edge fared? Researchers at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the LSE have been speaking to the same cohort of benefit recipients for twelve years, and have reflected on that time. It’s a mixed picture. While some found employment and security (no thanks to DWP, so they say), others have been ground down by conditionality and the need to repeatedly prove their entitlement. The fear of sanctions is pervasive – gripping both those who fell foul, and those who managed to avoid it. As one person put it: when sanctioned “you find yourself focusing more on looking for food…rather than looking for work”. There was also widely held scepticism about work placements, with people often pushed to accept less-flexible, lower-paid work at the expense of pursuing additional training or applying for more highly skilled roles. The report is a powerful reminder those receiving support from our social security system are not simply numbers in a caseload to be managed, but individuals with families, histories and hopes.

Enby earnings. An important indicator of the growing prevalence of “non-binary” gender identities (fondly phoneticized to ‘enby’, or ‘N-B’ by some) has been their recent appearance in some large-scale surveys. Canada’s 2021 Census provided one of the first nationally representative data sets of this type. It identified 25,000 non-binary people aged 25-59, revealing contrasts with both binary-transgender and cisgender populations.  In Canada, at least, non-binary people tend to be younger and more highly educated: 46 per cent of those assigned female at birth have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 38 per cent of cisgender women. But these educational advantages haven’t translated into economic security: non-binary people earn 50 per cent less than their cisgender counterparts (mainly those assigned female at birth) despite their higher education levels, with this gap being a whopping 65 per cent at the bottom of the income distribution. The study also revealed health disparities, with a staggering 58 per cent of non-binary people (assigned female at birth) reported to have at least one mental health condition like depression or anxiety – a rate six-to-eight-times higher than cisgender people.

Cogs that care. TOTC has always been wary of robot dystopias and utopias. But we love reality-based research, such as this this new paper examines the consequences of having robots in care homes in Japan. Using data from about 860 nursing homes, the paper finds that adopting robot technology increases employment and improves staff retention – although it does reduce the monthly wages for the regular nurses, because they have less to do. It’s better for the patients too: robots improve care quality, with some care homes finding that the presence of robotic monitors helped to reduce the rate of physical accidents by 30 per cent. And this is not the only reassuring robot research coming out of Japan. This paper (focused on manufacturing) found that when robots got cheaper, productivity *and* employment rose in response. So, robots might be good for labour market participation, and productivity-driven real-wage growth in the long run. Who says we don’t bring you good news?

Cancelling cancer. And even more good news: we have the power to virtually eliminate cervical cancer by vaccinating against the virus which causes it. When scientists discovered in the 1980s that a virus called HPV (human papillomavirus) causes cervical cancer by damaging cells’ ability to stop harmful mutations, it paved the way for a vaccine. School vaccination programs in England have led to 87 per cent fewer cases in vaccinated groups than unvaccinated ones, and both the UK and Australia are now on track to eliminate cervical cancer within a decade. But cost remains a major barrier for middle-income countries, which neither qualify for international funding nor can afford to buy vaccines in bulk. That means countries like China only offer the vaccine in certain cities. But even this is an approach worth pursuing: researchers have estimated that achieving 80-100 per cent vaccination rates globally could prevent nearly 50 million cancer cases by 2100.

Planetary peril. Worried about events across the pond this week? Why not take a break from your concerns to consider all the other crises on our doorstep! Check out this jaw-dropping forecast from RAND. It suggests the world could be destroyed by {deep breath} AI, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, rapid climate change, severe pandemics or super-volcano eruptions – at basically any moment… The good news is that the risk of asteroid impact or super volcano eruptions will, apparently, decline over the next ten years. The bad news is that everything else is getting more likely…

Chart of the week

Amid many hot takes on the US Election, COTW is more of a slow burn, showing the total votes cast as a share of the US population over the past two centuries (so not just ‘turn out’, since our chart also reflects how the franchise has grown over time). A few things stand out for me. First is how women gaining the (national) right to vote during the interwar years transformed the popular vote – worth remembering that a significant proportion of the global population still don’t have these basic rights. Second is how few votes third-party candidates ever receive – though they can still carry an outsized impact (see the precursor to Trump, George Wallace, in 1968, and Ralph Nader in 2000, who some Dems still haven’t forgiven for helping George W. Bush over the line). Third is how the share of votes cast this week is well down on the record voter share achieved amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Fewer than seven-in-ten US adults voted earlier this week – although voting in the UK General Election this year was no more popular. As the year in which 3.7 billion people (across 72 countries) had the chance to vote draws to a close, we should remember that, while some results may not go the way we want, we should never lose sight of people’s right to exercise their preference at the ballot box.