Max Nathan

VG by @stephenkb.bsky.social, who’s changed my mind on this one

This is a key table to understanding public opinion on migration. *When confronted with the real trade offs* people go for protecting the NHS and the economy over reducing migration.

The problem as per the rest of the thread is many don't believe those trade offs exist.

Met arrested woman after Facebook posts about ex-partner – a serving officer London force sent three officers at 4.45am, who put her in the back of a van and seized her phone and computer

I'd like to live in a city where the cops took bike theft as seriously as they take "being rude to your cop ex-boyfriend". www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Exhibit A – physical geography (plus a bowl haircut and pipe)

I also think we're at risk of losing sight that we're talking about 200 people here. 0.04% of the civil service. An internship is as good a shout as any to improve diversity (let's see if it works), but gov needs to sort other stuff including pay and wider recruitment too. Some thoughts from IfG 👇

Yep. And the rest of it is also VG.

1 in 4 of all UK Nobel Prize winners were born overseas.

Post-tenure scholarly productivity falls way off for most scholars if you're not in a lab field
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

David Miliband: “Gaza Must Be Flooded with Aid, Not Sprinkled with Symbolism” | The IRC This quote by David Miliband, IRC President and CEO, says the crisis in Gaza is man-made, not a natural disaster, and calls for urgent action to let life-saving aid in through land routes. It warns th...

"In the coming days, thousands of Gaza’s children will either be rescued — or allowed to die. That is the choice before us. The fact that it is even being debated shows how far the international system has fallen. There are no two sides to this argument”

www.rescue.org/uk/press-rel...

‘There is nothing to buy’: Gaza’s descent into mass starvation Israel’s offensive and aid curbs tip enclave of 2.1mn Palestinians into famine

Important reporting from Gaza:

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on.

Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts.

1/

HT @londonermag.bsky.social

Record shop’s silent disco blocked due to risk of noise complaints Plan opposed by Metropolitan Police after confusion around previous amplified events

We’ve reached peak NIMBY

www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2025/07/21/s...

Lionel Shriver's Times polemic against both legal and illegal migration even reports that she has now overstayed her residency renewal date in Portugal, so is in "residency limbo"

Just bizarre that this piece doesn’t even mention CORE Econ, which does everything demanded here, was set up in 2012 (!) and is already used by over 500 unis worldwide including UCL, LSE, Oxford, Yale, Duke etc etc

Came here to say this! It’s like CORE never happened (and of course he doesn’t mention it)

NOTE TO SELF: On Katie Martin's "Magificent Seven" Today Engines of growth reshaping the world, but then increasingly becoming rent collectors.

NOTE TO SELF: On Katie Martin's "Magificent Seven" Today
Engines of growth reshaping the world, but then increasingly becoming rent collectors. The fortunes of the “Magnificent Seven”. What happens in the New Reality of Big Tech? And what are the answers to…
braddelong.substack.com/p/note-to-se...

The leaders who make things happen: lessons in governing from community business - Power to Change Community businesses drive change where it matters most—locally. From leading Power to Change to advising Number 10, Vidhya Alakeson knows more than most th ...

'Too often, government is looking for one answer to a problem that it can scale; the perfect pilot that can make a difference everywhere. It still sees change as an industrial process.' Electric blog from Vidhya Alakeson, Deputy Chief of Staff to the PM www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and...

The billionaire and the tax evading gift shops Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital manages a row of high-profile shops at Piccadilly Circus. So why does his team keeping renting them to students who vanish without paying millions of pounds in taxes?

open.substack.com/pub/londonce... Fantastic piece on how scam shops in central London work

Last day to apply to geoinno2026.com👇👇

The Death and Life of Great British Cities Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

From this new paper by Heblich, Nagy, Trew, Zylberberg

www.nber.org/papers/w34029

Table showing an IV regression of 1971 unskilled worker share (col 1) and 2020 log wages (col 2) on 1881 Herfindahl Index and employment. Units are urban settlements identified using a clustering procedure. IVs are predicted industrial concentration and land ownership fragmentation.

UK cities with higher industrial concentration in 1881 had more unskilled workers in 1971, and much lower average wages in 2020.

Graphs showing UK cities industrial concentration in 1881 versus share of unskilled workers in 1971 (panel a) and low wages in 2020 (panel b)

One-industry towns are bad for you

That’s the thing: Brazil is the living, breathing example of what the US should have done to deal with someone who tried to overturn an election loss. It shows it’s possible, and they can’t let that stand.

Excellent news

An article by CASA's Max Nathan @maxnathan.bsky.social (with Henry Overman, Capucine Riom and Maria Sanchez-Vidal) in CentrePiece finds that the BBC's move to Salford boosted local creative industries – but wider impacts were more limited than expected.

Read more: cep.lse.ac.uk/_NEW/PUBLICA...

Where are all the briefcase wankers? The nerd:jock ratio in government is askew

The great question of our age: WHERE are all the briefcase wankers?
economist.com/britain/2025...

Is working from home just a pandemic blip? Not according to the data.

We analysed 1 billion job postings in 20 OECD countries.

The share of jobs advertising remote/hybrid work quadrupled from 2.5% to 11% (2019–2023) and has been stable since

🧵

I am writing a policy pamphlet. Here are all the ways to demonstrate I don't really have a policy answer, that I need to avoid:

a. You call for a "national conversation or debate"
b. You suggest that what is needed is “a change in culture”
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