The tortured economists department

Morning all,

If the sheer quantity of OoO emails I’ve received this week is any indication, the dog days of summer are in full swing. I think I just spotted an actual tumble weed rolling through the RF offices… But, fear not: this is just the calm before the end-of-recess, and those of us still in RF Towers are preparing for the flood of events lined up for September, on living standards, planning, growth, tax, among others  – book now to avoid disappointment.

Now, maybe it’s the arrival of exam results over recent days, maybe it’s all the Swifties and the young-at-heart descending on London, or perhaps the innate nostalgia of an August bank holiday, but we’ve gone all adolescent this week. We’ve got a selection of reads digging into the forces shaping, helping and (unfortunately) hurting teens.

Keep reading for the lowdown on gaming, grades, style and vaping. The research hits different – no cap.

Enjoy the sunshine, and the long weekend.

Mike

Interim Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation

So long, London. Congratulations to all the students (including one Brewer junior) who got their results in the last few days – and well done too to all the adults who resisted the temptation to tweet about their historic results. The share of top A-level grades rose very slightly, but there’s been a lot of (warranted) chatter about the worrying growth of grade gaps between different regions. In London, nearly a third (31 per cent) of all A-levels were graded A or higher – in the East Midlands that drops to fewer than one-in-four (23 per cent). (For more on persistent regional inequalities, check out our recent report). But it was encouraging to see that girls continue to be more likely than boys to earn an A* (by 2.2 percentage points) in Economics, hopefully an indication of greater equality in representation of the sexes in my chosen field in years to come (and NB we have two paid training placements for recent graduates from a Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic group – applications are open now).

The Black Dog. And those cohorts of young people getting their exam results recently are the focus of a major The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on youth mental health. Regular readers will be aware that the mental health of young people has been declining steadily since the dawn of the new millennium – and that trend accelerated sharply since Covid. The Commission points out that most people experience the onset of mental illness at 15, and for the vast majority (between 63-75 per cent) their symptoms have appeared by the age of 25. This is, of course, terrible for young people but also for our economy: in 2011, the World Economic Forum reported that, among non-communicable diseases, mental illness was the largest source of loss of GDP worldwide – in case you didn’t already think that we urgently need to help these kids out.

So high school. Machine learning, so they say, will transform every aspect of our lives from medicine to art. But, at long last, this research uses AI to answer the only question that *really* matters – how trendy are teenagers? Using 14 million year-book photos of American teenagers, the authors have quantified “individuality”, “persistence” and “novelty” of adolescent styles between 1950 and 2010. Over time, kids have become more individualistic in their style – especially the boys, who essentially wore a consistent uniform of suits when the data begins in the 1950s. According to the AI, the years with the most stylistic novelty were the mid-1970s, and then 2010 – so kudos to any readers born in the late 1950s or early 1990s. The authors then went on to show that towns where more students sported individual or novel styles were more likely to produce patent-filing alumni. Just don’t let your soon-back-to-school-kids hear that uniform infringements might lead to innovation and success later in life…

How you get the girl. I’m not sure why this particular paper is so keen to pick on teens – I’m just going where the research leads I swear! The research digs into the relationship between good (or not) looks, and time spent playing video games. The numbers don’t lie: good looking adults (and teens) play fewer video games (I’m staying very quiet on this one).  The authors posit that this is because the facially blessed among us face a higher opportunity cost from gaming. Meaning? If you’re desirable, then you’re at an advantage during face-to-face activities – but if you spend that time gaming instead, you’re missing out on those perks and engaging in an activity that offers no such preferential treatment. Side note: the American Add Health Study reveals, in a blow to everyone who likes to say that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that adults who are better-looking actually tend to have more close friends.

Electric touch. Would it be a teenager special if we didn’t mention vaping? A paper earlier this year explored whether taxation of e-cigarettes had any knock-on effects on marijuana use. Surprisingly (and, perhaps, helpfully) they found that increasing taxes on e-cigarettes by $1 led to a 10 percent fall in marijuana use among high school students. And that’s not a typo: the youth didn’t switch from vaping to other drugs – instead, they vaped less and smoked less weed. Although it’s worth noting that this effect seems to be limited to more infrequent users, and there is no observable reduction in the use of ‘harder’ drugs (such as cocaine and opioids).

Chart of the week.

Loathe as I am to leave you on a low note before the long weekend, I’m afraid our teenage special would be remiss if it didn’t point out that, sadly, the kids are really not alright. Among children under 16, there has been a sharp increase in autism and ADHD diagnoses over the past two decades, and the impact is really starting to make itself felt in our safety-net systems. As some analysis by my colleague Louise revealed last weekend, the number of children in receipt of disability benefits in England and Wales has doubled over the past decade, reaching 682,000 or 6 per cent of all children under 16. This is not driven by physical disabilities – four-in-five children in receipt of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) have a main condition relating to learning difficulties, a behavioural disorder, or ADHD. And we shouldn’t see this rising caseload as evidence of a flawed welfare system: it’s the reality of today’s society, with the number of children with a long-term limiting disability or condition up by more than half a million since the early 2010s to 1.2 million in 2022-23, with more than four-fifths of this increase being children with a social or behavioural impairment. Addressing these issues at source, and giving young people and their families the support they need, is absolutely key.