John Burn-Murdoch

Thank you!

YouTube video by DrAlice Evans Are Men & Women Scrolling Apart? John Burn-Murdoch

Are Men & Women Scrolling Apart?

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com joins me to discuss gendered polarisation.

- Does this hold worldwide?
- Which groups are most polarised?
- Is this due to economic frustrations or online persuasion?
- What are the possible solutions?

youtu.be/VrOk1-jChdA?...

So the problem — as with immigration — is that if you just use one blunt single word term to gauge perceptions on multifaceted issues, you’re not really measuring anything useful.

The point is the public do have a good idea of crime levels!

The share of people saying they’re worried about violent crime has fallen from 25% in the 90s to 8% today, while the share saying antisocial behaviour is getting worse has risen in the past few years.

Matches up well with reality 🙂

The great crime paradox Disorder is rising in public consciousness. Is it rising in reality?

The great crime paradox https://on.ft.com/4m1CznY

Wait for the follow-up piece next week where I dig into the why! 😅

🙏

This sounds v interesting. Is any of this online?

Super interesting, thanks both!

Is AI killing graduate jobs? [FREE TO READ] Tech is blamed for destroying entry-level roles but economic uncertainty and offshoring are playing a part

New 📈✍️- we're hearing a lot about AI decimating graduate jobs. But the data paints a more complicated picture on what's behind the fall in entry-level roles

With Delphine Strauss, @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & Sarah Lim

on.ft.com/4f1wWmK

Totally agree on gender stereotypes and social media. ICYMI I also thought this was excellent from @katjaschmidt.bsky.social identifying the mediating role played by differences between young men and women in their levels of zero-sum thinking and perceptions of fairness osf.io/preprints/so...

Excellent piece! And thanks for the cites 🙂

Why are young women increasingly left-wing? And how it could change politics

New post:

"Why are young women increasingly left-wing?"

There's been a lot of focus on young men + the right but less on this much bigger political shift amongst young women.

Why is it happening? How could it change politics?

(£/free trial)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/w...

Yuuuup

They’ve been great! We have another piece coming soon using loads of their data across multiple countries

Totally agree on all this. Plenty of research on men generally being slower/worse at switching out of industries with high exposure to automation too: www.nber.org/system/files... www.nber.org/system/files...

Notable thing here for me was how much starker this divergence seems to be than past ones.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing

Thanks both! I’m in touch with Indeed about this — real-time data has never been more valuable!

Yup!

Rising graduate joblessness is mainly affecting men. Will that last? Unpicking the puzzle of increasing junior white-collar unemployment

So if an AI “job-pocalypse” for computer science graduates doesn’t seem to explain the graduate male malaise, what does?

For that answer and more, you can read the full article here: www.ft.com/content/a9ea...

To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean AI is not taking any coding jobs, but at the very least it may be creating as many new openings in tech as it is erasing old ones.

This suggests tech’s hiring contraction of 2023-24 may not have been primarily a story of AI job displacement, but rather the downslope of the sector’s meteoric post-pandemic hiring boom, with recruitment now rebounding from that trough.

But, plot twist:

The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months.

In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.

What’s going on?

At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.

In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.

Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.

NEW:

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.

I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:

Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.

www.ft.com/content/a9ea...

That was my theory going into the piece, but it turned out to be not only false but seemingly the opposite: the biggest employment gains young male grads have made in the past year have been in software and engineering jobs

Certainly agree on that! 🙌

As I say in the piece, I had a lot of sympathy with the wariness about A/C in years past, but with truly lethal heat now far more common the public health case is now much more urgent.

2) The poverty/inequality argument leads to exactly the opposite conclusion.

If we’re concerned that well-off people are using A/C to keep cool (and alive) while disadvantaged people suffer, the solution is for regulation to make A/C or air-to-air heat pumps the default, not to discourage them.