Toxic fumes, promotion barriers and gaping gaps in economic research

Morning all,

We thought we’d do something a little different this week, with a special edition for Black History Month. When the question of what historical colonisers owe to the historically colonised has come to the fore, it is important to take a step back and consider the forces and the inheritances which shape our lives. Big thanks to the Black Equity Organisation and The Black Economists Network for their advice on what to cover.

The big economic news this week is the Chancellor’s confirmation that she will be redefining public sector debt to allow more room to borrow to invest. The full details of her new rules are promised for early next week, before (finally!) the Budget itself on Wednesday. Do sign up for our morning-after-the-night-before debrief on Thursday (only online tickets left now I’m afraid). I will be going straight from that to a few days of leave, so the Budget special edition of TOTC next week will be from our fiscal-whizz James.

Have a great weekend,

Mike
Interim Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

Plotting progress. Let’s start with the basics. This high-level, national stock-take assesses where we’ve got to on ethnic equality, as well as sizing up the economic advantages of ensuring that everyone gets a fair shake. The UK’s ethnic minority population is growing and many economic gaps (such as inactivity) are shrinking – but there is work left to do. Among employees of a similar profile, ethnic-minority workers still earn 10 percent less than white counter-parts. But it’s important to remember that there are major differences in where people work: Black workers are significantly overrepresented in (low paid) caring personal-service occupations (almost 16 percent, compared with 7 percent for the whole population), for example. There’s loads more detail and some good data visualisation, so do check out the full report if you want to dig into divergent outcomes across work, education and health.

Homogenous higher-education. Zooming in from all society to academia, this analysis (with snazzy animated charts) from Nature breaks down the bleak reality that the proportion of academics from most minority ethnic groups who work in the sciences dwindles at each stage of British academia – from undergraduate to postgraduate study, up to academic employment and professorship. At a more granular level, Black Caribbean researchers are among the least represented among the ranks of British academic scientists. Why does this all happen? Nature points to differences in family background among students choosing their area of study, but also blames structurally biased institutions (and it’s not just universities: Black researchers win fewer research grants than any other ethnic group). This analysis spans a range of sciences, but for a more economic perspective, check out this analysis of (the lack of) ethnic diversity in British economics.

Environmental emergency. From economic outcomes to climate. A revealing report from Greenpeace and the Runnymede Trust shows how what the authors dub “environmental racism” determines who really pays for the climate crisis and other environmental harms. As well as the injustice on a global scale, we can see evidence much closer to home. In 2013, a nine-year-old called Ella Kissi-Debrah, a Black girl from Lewisham, passed away after repeated breaches of legal pollution limits near her home. It was the first time air pollution was listed as a cause of death in the UK. Ethnic minorities are more likely to live near waste incinerators, industrial sites and heavily polluted roads. The report contrasts planning decisions made in Cambridge, where an incinerator was rejected for not complementing the historic buildings, while in Edmonton (where 65 per cent of residents are people of colour) polluting infrastructure has been given the go-ahead. But this goes beyond pollution. This research finds Black people are nearly four-times less likely to have access to green space at home. This echoes our analysis which found that one-in-four children from low-income homes have no garden, rising to four-in-ten among children from BAME backgrounds.

Traffic tickets. Racial inequalities have different origins and play out differently in different countries, so we shouldn’t naively extrapolate from the US experience to our own. But this new paper provided a very striking deep dive into the experiences of road users in the Chicago metropolitan area, using data on how the experience of 46 million road journeys diverged for people of different races. The stand-out finding is that drivers who are Black were much more likely to be stopped by police officers than those who are White, but there is hardly any bias among those given a ticket by a speed camera. On my travels through the Musk-verse (other platforms are available), I saw some criticism of this paper, because traffic stops can be carried out for reasons other than speeding. But the racial gaps are so large for the traffic stops (check out figure three to see what I mean) that it would be hard to conclude that racial profiling wasn’t playing a part when police officers made these stops.

Economics and equality. We try to keep a lid on navel-gazing here at TOTC towers, but it was hard not to notice this week that the pool of contemporary economic research focused on the Black British experience is…somewhat shallow. Precisely how shallow was near-exhaustively (but very succinctly) addressed a few years ago by a team including the IFS’s research director, Imran Rasul. Their paper from 2020 quantifies half a million (global) academic publications from the disciplines of economics, sociology and politics since the 1960s to assess their engagement with race. You may not be surprised to hear economics isn’t top of the leader board: a consistent 2 per cent (or thereabouts) of economics publications have been race-related over the past 50 years, lower than in political science or (especially) sociology. The real kicker is that the authors show that economists themselves overestimate how much race-related research is happening. And if any of the economists among you want a framework for approaching things differently, this introduction to Stratification economics provides a new economic model for studying inequalities between groups.

Chart of the week

Housing plays a crucial role in determining family incomes and living standards across Britain. Some obsess about house prices, but the metric that really matters for people is how much of their income is spent on housing (otherwise known as the ‘housing-cost-to-income ratio’, or HCIR). The average  individual spends around £1 of every £7 they have on housing – most of that is either on the mortgage or on rent. But, as our Chart of the Week shows, this figure varies hugely across people from different ethnic backgrounds. Those from White British backgrounds spend the lowest share of their income on housing, at 12 per cent. But many other ethnicities, including those from Chinese, African and Arab backgrounds spend at least twice as much of their income on housing. These astronomical HCIRs –Arab families spend a third of their income on housing, on average – are a major drag on living standards: housing is an essential cost that can crowd out spending on everything else, and differences in housing costs partly help to explain why income gaps (after housing costs) between people from different ethnic backgrounds persist. Our new project is digging in to why these gaps exist, and whether they are reflected in the quality of people’s homes. We’ll have an answer in early 2025.