John Burn-Murdoch

Is immigration good for a country, or bad? This question always strikes me as unhelpful. It depends on the country. Even if we couch the question strictly in economic terms, things vary. Immigration adds millions to the coffers of some nations, but has a more ambiguous if not negative impact on others. To take some more specific examples: the rise of gun violence in Sweden, attributed by the police to gangs led by second-generation immigrants, is bad. Whereas the fact that immigrants and their…

I have good news and bad news about America’s roads. The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average developed country. Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence su…

When millennials first emerged, blinking, into the adult world in the 2010s, they quickly bonded over shared adversity. First scarred by a rocky labour market in the aftermath of the financial crisis, they then realised that a decade of hard work and careful saving would no longer translate into home ownership as it had done for their parents. It was a grim decade, but at least they had each other, and were united against a common foe in the shape of the wealthy, homeowning baby boomer generati…

Between 1980 and 2019, the world’s most developed countries roughly tripled their real-terms per capita spending on child benefits, subsidised childcare, parental leave and other family-friendly policies. They also saw their birth rates decline from 1.85 to 1.53 per woman. In egalitarian Finland, home to some of the most family-friendly policies in the world, the fertility rate has fallen by a third since 2010. In Hungary, famous for its extravagant payouts aimed at boosting the nation’s number…

When US political strategist James Carville, then a senior aide to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, declared that one of the keys to winning the 1992 election was “the economy, stupid”, he was stating one of politics’ most fundamental truths. Dozens of elections over several decades had reliably shown that voters don’t react well to economic woes and will punish the incumbent party, while a government that leaves the electorate feeling richer stands a good chance of fending off a challenge.…

Last week, a New York Times poll showed President Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by just 56 points to 44 among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points when the two men last fought it out for the White House in 2020. As things stand, the Democrats are going backwards faster with voters of colour than any other demographic. Such startling statistics often meet accusations of polling error, but this cannot be written off as a rogue result. Data from America’s gold-standard national…

In the year ending March 2023, construction began on 72,000 new homes in Houston, Texas, population 7.5mn: more than three times the 20,500 new homes started in London, whose population is considerably larger. In case you’re wondering whether this is another of those “America is booming, Britain is floundering” pieces, it’s not. Swap Houston for Austin, and London for San Francisco or New York, and the disparity would be even larger. Unsurprisingly, these wildly divergent rates of housebuildin…

When Thomas Suozzi won New York’s third congressional district in Tuesday’s special election, it was just the latest in a wave of impressive results for Democrats in off-cycle ballots. Averaged across the 57 contested elections since the 2022 midterms, Democrats are running nine points better than we would expect based on the partisan make-up of the districts in question. Yet at the same time, President Joe Biden consistently trails Donald Trump in the polls. How can we reconcile these conflict…

The extent to which young people tend to vote more for leftwing parties and older people for conservatives is often overstated. For all the talk of Donald Trump’s toxicity to America’s diverse youth, almost 40 per cent of 20-something US voters backed him in 2020, and the same share plan to do so this November. More than a third of young adults voted for the right in the most recent elections in France, Germany and Spain. There is generally an age gradient, to be sure, but its steepness is often…

Nine months from election day, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign must be getting increasingly exasperated. The US economy’s rebound from the pandemic is the envy of the world, but consumers remain gloomy. Job numbers are up and inflation is down, but the president has received scant credit. Attempts to take a firm line with Israel, meanwhile, have done nothing to stem heavy criticism from young voters. It can come as no surprise that Donald Trump leads in the latest polls of all key battleground…

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others? The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford Uni…

One of the most powerful cultural myths of the English-speaking world over the past century has been the belief that if you work hard, you’ll earn enough to buy yourself a house and start a family. For a long time, it held true. Between the end of the first world war and the turn of the millennium, rates of home ownership climbed rapidly in both Britain and the US, topping out at about 70 per cent as young adults flew the parental nest and set up homes of their own. But in recent decades, that…

The industrial revolution was one of the most important events in human history. Over a handful of decades, technological breakthroughs kicked economic output off its centuries-long low plateau and sent populations, living standards and life expectancy soaring. Yet for all its vital importance, there is still disagreement over why all this took off when and where it did. One of the most compelling arguments comes from US economic historian Robert Allen, who argues that Britain’s successes in c…

From the 1990s to the eve of the Covid pandemic, football was in a long boom. The marriage made in heaven between pay-TV and live football in the early 1990s brought vast sums of money into the sport, and, for the following three decades, every time the broadcast rights were up for auction, the winning bid was higher than the last. When Sky first won exclusive rights to broadcast live Premier League football in 1992, it cost them £38mn per season. Seven auctions later, they paid £1.8bn per seas…

The past 12 months have provided a fascinating experiment in the effectiveness of different conservative strategies on immigration. Canada and Britain are large English-speaking countries whose conservative parties each appointed a new, young leader in late 2022, just as immigration levels were surging to record highs amid cost of living crises. The parties — one in opposition, the other in government — faced a choice: weaponise the rising numbers in the hope of supplanting voters’ other conce…

Something weird is happening in America. GDP growth for Q3 was just revised up from an already scorching 4.9 per cent to 5.2 per cent, more Americans have jobs than at any time in history, but the public is up in arms about economic conditions, with consumer confidence dropping to a six-month low. There really is no pleasing some people. With headline indicators in such rude health, we would expect the number of Americans who think they’re better off than this time last year to outnumber those…

A year out from the next US presidential election, there are clouds on the horizon for Joe Biden and the Democrats. Two weeks ago, a survey by the New York Times put Donald Trump ahead of Biden in five out of six key battleground states. Days later, another swing-state poll found Trump leading in six out of seven races. And this week a full state-by-state forecast by Stack Data Strategy had Trump beating Biden in the electoral college despite narrowly losing the popular vote. The headline resul…

Since generative artificial intelligence burst on to the scene last November, the forecast for white-collar workers has been gloomy. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, estimates that the jobs most at risk from the new wave of AI are those with the highest wages, and that someone in an occupation that pays a six-figure salary is about three times as exposed as someone making $30,000. McKinsey warns of the models’ ability to automate the application of expertise. I understand the temptation to w…

Young Conservatives have become an endangered species in the UK. On five separate occasions in the past two months, polls have shown that fewer than one in 10 of Britain’s under-30s plans to vote Tory at the next general election. A survey in late September put the figure at one solitary per cent. It would be easy to assume similar trends are playing out across the western world. The increased blurring of cultural lines across the Atlantic can make it feel like anything that is happening here m…

It doesn’t require a close examination of economic statistics to be aware that US incomes have far outstripped those in Britain in recent years. A few minutes on Instagram or TikTok will do the trick; you’ll be met with a sea of clips of conspicuous American consumption against backdrops of palatial and pristine residences. We get it. But without digging into the data, you would miss a key and under-appreciated nuance: America’s yawning earnings advantage is exclusive to the graduate class. Bri…