Peeved Reeves and the health benefits of beers

Morning all,

Well, after the friendly détente of the opening of parliament last week, politics came roaring back on Monday with the Chancellor’s review of her spending inheritance (tl;dr: she was distinctly unimpressed with her predecessor). Just in time for parliamentary recess! James, one of our Research Directors, has everything you need to know about that spending assessment here.

Fear not, there will be no recess for Top of the Charts this week. Keep reading for the health benefits of beers and the secret to great management…

Keep cool this weekend,

Mike

Interim Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

Serious stigma. You may have heard Adam Peaty, who won a silver medal in the breaststroke this week, talking about his struggles with mental health. With economic inactivity due to poor physical and mental health on the rise, anything that helps us improve the population’s mental health is a good thing. But does greater awareness or destigmatisation actually help? This study from Nepal finds that an outreach programme designed to destigmatise mental illness did indeed lead to people being more willing to seek counselling (especially when the interventions were led by women).  On the other hand, there are arguments that we can have ‘too much’ awareness. For example, this study showed that some school-based mental health interventions can increase distress or clinical symptoms. In particular, children exposed to CBT interventions had worse mental health outcomes than a control group – perhaps because a blanket whole-class approach meant that some students learned strategies that were irrelevant to them and actively caused harm? All serious stuff, and no doubt more research will be needed.

Beer is best. Summer has finally sauntered in two months late. ‘Tis the season when people from all walks of life sit in the park sipping ice cold bevs. What better time then, to consider the historical role played by beer in protecting consumers from waterborne illnesses. A new paper does just this, looking at 18th century England, a time in which having rivers full of cr*p wasn’t just a problem for wild swimmers, but a serious threat to life. Indeed, the water was so bad that, as any devout Horrible Histories viewer will know, you were better off drinking beer (what a time to be alive!). The authors find that when beer was scarce (weather events, soil quality and tax increases all would contribute to this), mortality increased. This was especially the case in the summer – a time when waterborne illnesses caused more deaths. So, beer was literally saving lives, and no my surname is not biasing me on this one.

Marvellous managers. As many of us have learnt at some point in our careers, a good manager can be hard to come by (my RF colleagues can stop sniggering right now). This helpful paper assesses the characteristics and impacts of effective managers, with some eyebrow-raising conclusions. So who makes a good manager? First (and my eyebrows remain firmly in place at this point), effective management skills cannot be predicted by gender, age, or ethnicity. So far, so predictable. Second, willingness to lead does not necessarily translate to ability. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than a randomly appointed worker – in part because self-promoted managers are “overconfident, especially about their social skills”. What’s that I hear at the back? You want to know how RF decided upon me as their interim Chief Executive? I’m pleading the 5th.

Mulling mediocrity. Have you heard of the “just-world fallacy”? In a nutshell, it’s the notion that people get what they deserve. This paper tests the familiar theory of ‘meritocratic bias’ – that successful people put too much weight on the idea that their rise is entirely deserved, based on their hard work and talents. Indeed, the experiment showed  that people would – and I love this phrase so much that I am going to quote it verbatim – “maintain their illusion of being meritocratic, by not expending cognitive effort to process information that may undermine their self-image even when incentivized to do otherwise” (i.e. they really REALLY believe they are worth it). On a similar note, I’m currently enjoying a sneak preview of Born to Rule, which – other than having some fabulous number-crunching of Who’s Who entries that we’ll definitely cover when its published – also documents how very successful people tend to overplay how meritocratic their rise to the elite was. Does this matter? Yes it does: people who believe that we live in a meritocratic society tend to be less supportive of redistributive policies to support the poor.

Damn distracting. We have a date for the first Budget of the new Government (30th October, if you’re keen) Perhaps that’s why this paper caught my eye. As the RF team braces itself for another number-crunching all-nighter, it seems useful to consider the impact that “noise exposure, time pressure, and cognitive load” can have on one’s ability to get a job done. The paper looks at the effects of these stimuli on 105 university students. The good news? Although they make for an unpleasant experience, especially excessive noise, these stresses don’t seem to seriously undermine task performance. So you can continue to trust our in-depth overnight analysis despite the deafening din from the Treasury at the pub next door…

Chart of the week.

Our COTW provides some more context to Rachel Reeves’s peeved statement on Monday, where she set out the likely overspend on public services this year (about £22 billion), while also pinning as much blame as possible on her predecessor. Obviously, this moment was as much political as it was economic, but there are some points of substance too. One of Reeves’s (valid, imho) complaints is that the previous Government hadn’t done a full reassessment of how much money it needed to spend on public services since October 2021, despite some serious record-scratch moments in the fiscal landscape since then (sky-high inflation, war in Europe, massive increases in small boat crossings, that sort of thing). In the end, we look set to spend about 7 per cent more (that’s nearly £30 billion) on public services this year than was envisaged back in 2021. Her technocratic sensible solution is to compel governments to do spending reviews every two years, and allow the Office for Budget Responsibility to forecast overspends on any particularly egregious spending assumptions. Like monetary policy, fiscal planning ought to be boring (although hopefully you’re still awake); the risk is that when we don’t do enough of it, the fallout can be dramatic.