NEW: Long-term childhood poverty in Britain rose sharply after austerity reforms 📈
The study, by @sbeduk.bsky.social (Departmental Lecturer in Comparative Social Policy) & Anna Yong found that more than 1 in 5 children born after 2013 experience poverty for at least half their childhood.
UK's shadow workforce is paid as little as 65p an hour. Who cares for the carers?
6m unpaid carers provide vital support to sick, disabled, old.
1.4m receive Carer's Allowance of £86.45 a week. More likely to be prosecuted for tiny errors in claims.
Govts don't value humanity.
The “big beautiful bill” greatly expanded SNAP work requirements for parents
In my paper with @jasonbcook.bsky.social, forthcoming at JPUBE, we ask what similar, existing requirements do
SNAP work requirements for parents deny vulnerable parents SNAP benefits and do not increase their employment
Findings like these would motivate targeted assistance, especially with rent arrears, the introduction of a taper rate in place of the limit or, above all perhaps, a more adequate scheme to support carers no matter their earnings 2/2
The figure shows reports of economic insecurity plotted against earnings from paid work. Earnings increase from left to right. At zero, earnings cross the Carer's Allowance limit of around 150 GBP per week. Past this limit, a carer loses eligibility for the allowance. Carers who never report receipt of the allowance in the survey experience less and less insecurity when their earnings are higher. For those with a history of benefit receipt, instead, insecurity doesn't decline smoothly. Arrears, the inability to save regularly, and money worries all spike past the earnings limit set by the allowance.
For unpaid #carers, earning more does not always lead to economic security.
Motivated by the recent #Carer's #Allowance scandal, I have a new working paper @usociety.bsky.social on how much insecurity carers experience, for how long, who's most exposed and why:
osf.io/preprints/so... 1/2
David Autor (@davidautor.bsky.social) just wrote a very kind and thoughtful review of "The Means of Prediction" for the Journal of Economic Literature (@aeajournals.bsky.social):
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
A bar graph showing the percentage of hours spent caring per week , UK, 2018-20 and 2023-25, showing there has been an increase in the proportion of people providing care for more than 20 hours per week.
Our analysis of national survey data (2018 to 2025) found 1 in 6 UK adults – equivalent to 8.9 million people – provided unpaid care in the period 2023–25.
Learn how caring varies across groups, intersects with work and health, and about unpaid carers’ support needs ⬇️
https://bit.ly/3Mzj4ql
Repositioning care in economics: concepts, measurement, and policy implications url: academic.oup.com/oxrep/articl...
"Expanding Paternity Leave: Effects on Beliefs, Norms, and Gender Gaps"
Read the latest @nber.org working paper by Camille Landais and co-authors Henrik Kleven, @ansolassen.bsky.social, Philip Rosenbaum, Herdis Steingrimsdottir & Jakob Egholt Søgaard
www.nber.org/papers/w34862
Screenshot reads: She and other publishing specialists question whether LeapSpace’s limited reach is worth the cost. Users will need either an institutional subscription (based in part on the institution’s size and amount of research) or an individual one, which costs $32 a month. Many libraries are already struggling to afford existing subscriptions. And if users want to read the cited content, they will need a separate subscription to that content’s publisher—akin to paying for multiple video-streaming services.
The inevitable next stage of academic publishers profiting from academics' work is here - scraping it for AI then charging subscriptions for access to the AI summaries, and then again for the citations. Academic content assetization as we called it in a recent paper. www.science.org/content/arti...
A new article from The Conversation explores the effects of Denmark's policies on mothers' wages: tinyurl.com/39s6ukkc
Two JMF articles are featured: one examining fathers' wages, one testing how paternity leave affects the gender wage gap:
tinyurl.com/mtnwhymt
tinyurl.com/ntrtxyh5
New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem!
In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference.
www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...
New #OpenAccess
Bringing economic & family sociology into the digital era, @yanghu.co.uk & @yueqiansoc.bsky.social analyze longitudinal data from @usociety.bsky.social to reveal how the use of online banking shape couples' money management and financial decisions
doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcag002
New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...
☀️Happy to be back with a new article in @jmfncfr.bsky.social! W/ Saverio Minardi we explore how parental loss during childhood was linked to family formation in adulthood. This was my last contribution to the ERC funded project GENPOP.
Check it out Open Access: doi.org/10.1111/jomf...
New publication in the Journal of Public Policy!🚨
⚖️It shows how feminist advocacy pushed for a reform entitling mothers and fathers to equal parental leave in Spain.
👉This also unveils that descriptive representation matters because it can open access for feminist groups.
doi.org/10.1017/S014...
🧵 NEW: Our report 'Listen and learn' sets out how the Government should improve Universal Credit (UC) for the 15 million people who rely on it.
13 years after its roll-out began, it’s time to get UC right.
We've co-produced recommendations with @changingrealities.bsky.social participants 👇
Very happy that our review article (with the @annualreviews.bsky.social) on „Austerity and Populism“ is now available as preprint: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... - with @sattlersthomas.bsky.social
We've got ISSUES. Literally.
We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?
arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563
A 🧵 1/n
This is a brief reminder that the Call for Streams for the 24th ESPAnet Annual Conference is now open.
The deadline for submissions is the 16th of January 2026.
More information at: www.iseg.ulisboa.pt/event/24th-e...
In our research on socioeconomic background in academia, we ran a survey. Over 2,000 faculty members responded (thanks if you were one!)
Social & cultural capital showed up time and again as key issues.
A few findings you might be interested in...🧵
screenshot of my post
Big new blogpost!
My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.
--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
Recently accepted by #QJE, “Republican Support and Economic Hardship: The Enduring Effects of the Opioid Epidemic,” by Arteaga (@caroartc.bsky.social) and Barone (@vickybarone.bsky.social): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Echoing this: Child poverty shouldn't be reduced to an accounting exercise. But when it is, we should at the very least factor in the costs of keeping children in poverty, costs affecting the public budget of tomorrow.
www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2025/10/06/t...
I can’t envisage a child poverty strategy which garners any credibility without fully scrapping the two-child limit.
Unconvinced? Check out (even better share) this summary of the peer-reviewed evidence base @kittyjstewart.bsky.social @aaronreeves.bsky.social
largerfamilies.study/publications...
Really appreciate this review of our book (w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social)
"By insisting on the term “automation,” Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding."
"…a demystifying, often hilarious lexicon that cuts through the fog of hype."
Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University Martha Kenney and Martha Lincoln Abstract This article examines the expansion of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) into higher education. We argue that genAI’s incursion into university systems represents an effort by Silicon Valley to capture lucrative new markets for their products, as well as enhanced credibility by association. Drawing on our experience as faculty in the California State University (CSU) system—the first university system to contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu system-wide—we assess the rhetoric that justifies and legitimizes genAI contracts in higher education. We suggest that the uncritical adoption of genAI in higher education poses problems for labor conditions, the integrity of intellectual property, and student learning on campuses, particularly under the conditions of austerity that are commonly found in public universities.
New preprint alert! 🚨
“Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”
