MikeCrang

This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning microliterature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

Read 'em and weep. (www.nber.org/system/files...)

How Inherited Time Impacts the Lives of Young Chinese Through her research, the sociologist Xu Lingling has discovered how those from rural and lower-class backgrounds are at a disadvantage for getting ahead — because of how much more time it takes them ...

Through her research, the sociologist Xu Lingling has discovered how those from rural and lower-class backgrounds are at a disadvantage for getting ahead — because of how much more time it takes them to catch up.

Never forget: At breakneck speed we are leaving the stable Holocene climate in which human society developed and thrived. Weather extremes are outside historical experience. Sea-level rise is accelerating. Dangerous tipping points are ahead.
Graph: ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

Nottingham suspends music, language and nursing courses University says financial uncertainties continue as government’s proposed student levy will ‘wipe out any benefits’ from rising tuition fees

@uniofnottingham.bsky.social permanently suspends all teaching of Modern Languages, Music, Plant Biology, Microbiology, Theology, Agriculture, Food Science, and, ironically, Education. And that's not even the complete list. #Nottingham

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

Save languages at the University of Nottingham c.org/fWNV5PrpGZ

His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies As much as the Trumpists claim to disavow the War on Terror, they walk a path paved by the most powerful vice president in US history.

"Any discussion of Cheney's works must begin with the 2021 assessment of Brown University’s Costs of War Project that found, conservatively, that the War on Terror killed between 897,000 and 929,000 people across five of its battlefields." www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Human Geography at Leicester is facing closure. Staff contracts are to end in June 2026; students are to be relocated to other universities, or taught out by a maximum of two (!) teaching-only staff. Other departments and subjects are facing closure, too. Please join the demo!

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Geo: Geography and Environment by Farhana Sultana (2025) entitled: 'Repairing epistemic injustice and loss in the era of climate coloniality' with an orange banner at the top. Climate change intensifies existing inequities, disproportionately impacting marginalised populations, particularly in the Global South and Indigenous communities. This is maintained through inequitable global climate governance, policies and solutions. The paper argues that climate coloniality, the complex entanglements of colonial legacies with contemporary climate and ecological changes, operates through systemic knowledge-based marginalisation or epistemic injustice, serving as a key mechanism in the uneven production and distribution of climate harms. Beyond the more commonly discussed material dimensions of loss and damage, epistemic injustices arise from silencing critical voices and devaluing knowledge systems. The paper extends the scope of loss and damage debates by drawing attention to epistemic losses: the erasure of worldviews, ontologies and practices that are vital for just and sustainable climate futures. It critically examines the intersections of power, pedagogy and praxis in (re)producing epistemic injustices, while simultaneously revealing counter-narratives of refusal, resurgence and relationality. By engaging Indigenous and Global South scholarship, the paper underscores the need to decolonise knowledge systems that reproduce dominant climate narratives and heed the epistemological alternatives offered by land- and kinship-based knowledge systems. Advancing climate justice depends on confronting epistemic injustice as both a form of loss and a condition of possibility: centring Global South and Indigenous perspectives is essential for cultivating pluriversal, decolonial and just climate frameworks and futures.

New in Geo:

'Repairing epistemic injustice and loss in the era of climate coloniality' by Farhana Sultana

This paper critically examines the intersections of power, pedagogy and praxis in producing inequitable climate knowledge, global governance, policies and solutions.

doi.org/10.1002/geo2...

In Memoriam:

Cheney Haunted By People He Didn't Manage To Kill In Iraq War

CDC Figures It Easier To Start Tracking People Without Measles ATLANTA—As the agency struggles to manage a measles caseload that has erupted to its largest size in decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated Monday that at this point, it would ...

CDC Figures It Easier To Start Tracking People Without Measles

A Greener Future for Heritage and Tourism Putting People, Nature and Place at the Heart of the Conversation The Green Party this weekend adopted a comprehensive new Heritage and Tourism Policy at its Autumn Conference — setting out a bold vis...

Philip Nelson from the UK’s @greenparty.org.uk outlining very welcome understandings of #heritage. Also positive for #climateheritage contributions to sustainability as well.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/greene...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Remarkable online access to a remarkable and rarely findable book

Covid 2020: Where cruise ships went to die When Covid-19 took hold, cruise ship operators struggled to stay afloat. One option was to scrap older vessels – giving one photographer a unique perspective.

The story behind Umit Bektas photo of cruise ships sent for scrap at Aliağa in Turkey, during COVID
www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

“Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.” - Elif Shafak

China Agrees To Purchase 11 U.S. Soybeans

Snowfall decrease in recent years undermines glacier health and meltwater resources in the Northwestern Pamirs - Communications Earth & Environment The recent decline in glacier health and reduced runoff generation in the Northwestern Pamirs is primarily driven by substantially lower snowfall and snow depth since 2018, according to land-surface m...

Perhaps echoing suggestions that the Karakoram-Pamir anomaly of having stable glaciers rather than retreating ones, may have ended after 2018
www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Massive Glacier Collapse Reported on Mount Ismoil Somoni in Tajikistan - The Times Of Central Asia A large section of glacier broke away from Mount Ismoil Somoni in Tajikistan’s Tajikabad district on October 25, according to Asia-Plus, citing the Committee

So this doesn't sound good 'Massive Glacier Collapse Reported on Mount Ismoil Somoni in Tajikistan... the detached ice mass measured approximately two kilometers in length, 25 meters in height, and 150-200 meters in width'
timesca.com/massive-glac...

A story in Private Eye, headlined "Minority representation on TV causes outrage". The article reads: "There has been widespread support for prominent Reform MP Sarah Pochin after she complained about the over-representation of minorities on television. Said one angry viewer, "She's right. Every time you turn on the telly there's another Reform MP being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg." She added, "I respect their way of life and their strange customs, but Reform MPs comprise only 0.7 percent of the House of Commons. Yet Nigel Farage is on Question Time more than Fiona Bruce." "I'm not prejudiced. Some of my best friends are swivel-eyed loons, but enough is enough. There are too many people with angry red faces on television."

Private Eye nailing it.

Please consider signing this in support of Farhana Sultana!

Ukrainka
From 'Travelogue 2 - A thousand days of longing’

Letter of Support for Professor Farhana Sultana As scholars within and beyond academia, we write in solidarity with academic freedom of expression with our colleague, Dr. Farhana Sultana, an internationally recognized scholar and tenured Full Profe...

As an alumni of Syracuse University, it's appalling that they are capitulating against a right-wing campaign against Professor Farhana Sultana for exercising her first amendment rights. Do consider signing this letter calling on Syracuse University to reinstate her docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Screenshot of the Viabundus website.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments.

#medievalsky

www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

and the link to communal forms of living was powerful but buried

This sort of mapping of Sweden has a long pedigree, that you might find of interest. Try a classic Sigurd Erixon mapping of material culture and cultural regions --
www.isof.se/download/18....

"The king, observing with judicious eyes,
The state of both his universities,
To one he sent a regiment, for why?
That learned body wanted loyalty:
To th’ other he sent books, as well discerning
How much that loyal body wanted learning."

The Conservatives would not deport as many people as Idi Amin.

They would deport *more*. www.ft.com/content/9a1d...

In the figures you see from those submitted in 2024, ESRC success rates at 7-11% which is depressing enough, but of the same order as the THES published a few months back