If true, we get 3 things. None good. 1. The direct negative growth/fiscal impacts of cutting immigration. 2. A Chancellor who prioritises their own personal/ideological obsessions over the UK economy. 3. A PM who through myopia or weakness chooses 1 and 2.

1/4 Across the country - and increasingly across Parliament - concern is growing about the Government's reliance on Palantir for public sector contracts.

Meanwhile healthy life expectancy is between 60 and 61 on average (and much lower in some populations) so increasing normal retirement ages further is likely to push some of those from unconditional pensions to conditional sickness benefits. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Well, since life expectancy has basically flatlined in the last 15 years you'd might think there wouldn't be much case for increasing normal pension age beyond the levels set about a decade ago. ourworldindata.org/grapher/life...

My coauthor Jay Falk's postdoctoral fellowship was terminated by the Trump administration for documenting the hummingbird example in this paper.

#PublicHealth #EpiSky #AcademicSky #HealthInequalities bsky.app/profile/robe...

Do you want to help improve the health of people experiencing homelessness using data? Come work with @lizcamacho-phd.bsky.social, @benjaminbarr.bsky.social and me and join @livunihipr.bsky.social and @livunichil.bsky.social, apply 👇https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSB121/research-associate-grade-7

I'm all for #CountBinFace but with my folklorist hat on, I have to call him out on his 99 policy. No evidence for it, and other alternative histories available. See my free article on the history of ice cream vans .... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

DOGE officially ended over the weekend. One of its crowning achievements was cutting $15M from the federal government’s screwworm monitoring program. Now, the Trump administration is preparing to spend $1B to combat the screwworm outbreak. "Efficiency."

Art question 🎨 What painting, photograph, sculpture, or piece of visual art has stayed with you long after you first saw it? Not necessarily your favorite. The one that lingered.

Many govt ministers, advisers and half the parliamentary party have just not yet clocked that Mahmood's could see 750k people (about three-quarters of those on the 15 year route) lose their legal status by 2029. Mostly black/Asian Commonwealth migrants (eligible to vote!) bsky.app/profile/jame...

Health advantages from higher status emerged in China across all social classes in the early 1700s, from Wolfgang Keller, Carol H. Shiue, and Karen Eggleston www.nber.org/papers/w35396

2/2 Manchesterism and health illustrated www.bmj.com/content/394/...

1/2 For the first time in more than a decade, the UK could be led by someone who can offer a vision of a healthier, wealthier future grounded in evidence and operational experience. @lucindahiam.bsky.social & I explain why @bmj.com www.bmj.com/content/394/...

Holes xkcd.com/3266/

This is really interesting work and has some important implications for anyone who cares about the impact of new treatments and interventions on health inequalities. Whether current NHS spending is reducing inequality is crucial to estimating what happens when we divert some of that to new drugs.

Here is a request to find an organization, university, etc, to host Epi Info, a free to use data and statistics package, widely used in epidemiology and public health. #statistics #epiinfo #dataanalysis #statisticalsoftware

How often do we have to debunk this? The moment you apply RCT results beyond the study population (even at a different point in time) you need transportability assumptions again. Observational studies often have the advantage of using actual field data from the population where decisions are made.

Does NHS spending actually reduce health inequalities? 🏥📈 A new commentary compares two key studies, Anaya-Montes et al. (2025) & Martin et al. (2022), to unpack why they reach different conclusions on how funding impacts deprived vs. high-mortality areas. 🔗 Read more: bit.ly/4f0TwN4

This is a finding with significant policy and business implications (should generate more research to get more specific). Presenteeism is a classic case of something that looks like efficiency (make them work!) and is actually inefficient (bad work and now everybody’s sick including customers).

Eight people who participated in a protest at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, were sentenced on Tuesday to between 50 and 100 years in prison. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Mona Khalil, Lebanon’s most well-known sea turtle conservationist, died of her wounds today after being injured by an Israeli strike I feel sick

something tells me that nothing short of bringing back apartheid would satisfy the administration

“You aren’t being nice enough to white Afrikaners—who we prioritized for resettlement in the US as refugees—& so, because we care more for white people’s lives than Black people’s lives, we’ll end our support to you, making a surge in new HIV infections all but inevitable, to teach you a lesson”

Mona Khalil passed away today, Friday, nearly two weeks after she was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. Mona, the owner of the Orange House, devoted herself to keeping Mansouri Beach a safe nesting ground for sea turtles, and refused to let the war force her away from it. 👉 youtu.be/ddltsMY2LY0

This dataviz is just amazing visquill.com/gallery/uk-a1

The Brianna Ghey situation increasingly feels like if Matthew Shepherd's parents had gone around saying it was a drug deal gone wrong tbh.

What’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.

School funding & educational attainment in adolescence: a longitudinal ecological study of English local authorities from 2015 to 2023-L Akanni, M Black, D Bennett, Y W Chua, H Creese, O C Ukoumunne, G J Melendez-Torres, D Hargreaves, @benjaminbarr.bsky.social, D Taylor-Robinson tinyurl.com/56djfv8a

New paper from @allybrown.bsky.social, based on his PhD research, in the Journal of Critical Public Health. Really interesting analysis of how health inequalities can be framed (strategically) as part of broader, devolution agendas. Congratulations, Ally! journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/jc...

"Collectively, available randomized controlled trials provide weak support for an ultraprocessing-specific effect of UPFs on body weight regulation and cardiometabolic function that is independent of established nutritional determinants." New piece in Science from Magkos, Forde and Robinson.

sociology policysky

The impact of the USAID shutdown on Africa, as seen from space and on the ground. M. Nicolini and I study the effects of the aid cuts by linking GODAD data on USAID projects to satellite-based measures of economic activity and IPC food insecurity indicators. 👉 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 1/11

Alan Milburn's important interim report has attracted welcome attention to the plights facing the more than a million 16 to 24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEET).

Hi All. Perhaps something useful from me. I'd like to announce that drlate, a Stata module for doubly robust estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and the local average treatment effect on the treated (LATT), is now available in SSC.

For this paper we took 1760 samples from 44 farmhouse yeast cultures, and found 577 unique yeast strains. www.garshol.priv.no/blog/440.html The question of how many strains there are in there that we never found has bothered me for years. By chance, I found a way to get at the answer. Thread.

I’ve seen some poorly understood summaries of the Manchester story, so I thought I’d explain what was going on when Burnham arrived, the politics of it, and a little about what’s happened since as.ft.com/r/d7e11a31-2...

Young people are not a “snowflake generation”, they face deep and systemic barriers to work, education and training. The evidence heard by the #WorkandPensionsCommittee is clear: young people want to work, succeed and contribute, but too often the support they need simply isn’t there.

More mental health in young people has risen from around 15-17% in 2000 to as high as 27% in 2026. That more than a an alarming 1 in 4 young people. This mental health crisis among young people should be top of the government agenda. wecovr.com/guides/uk-yo...

What @sundersays.bsky.social is politely saying here is that Michael Gove's Spectator is running puff pieces for neo-Nazis.

Last week, there was widespread indignation at the revelation that some researchers in STEM might not be reading the papers they cite. Here's a recent example of the standard state of affairs in Medicine and Health, published in @bmj.com, one of the world's leading medical journals! 1/5 🧵

My piece in @theconversation.com - on the study of arts engagement & aging - was heavily delayed to give the authors a 'right to reply'! Their rebuttal (see pic) appears directly below my piece. I didn't know this would happen & was not given a chance to respond, so I will respond here! 1/10 🧵

Britain’s voting system is broken. 70 MPs are backing an amendment to finally review it. But to make an impact, we need many more. I’ve urged my MP to support it with this tool. Can you contact yours too? actionnetwork.org/letters/ask-...

***How to get disability statistics you can trust*** New post on Inequalities: My last post described the 'disability statistics disaster' - now I explain how to fix it inequalities.substack.com/p/disability...

"Everyone needs food" A collaborative exhibition Digital story by SPHR trainee Cat Jackson. Photographer Jane MacNeil www.youtube.com/watch?v=4svJ...

Sixty six Labour MPs have tabled an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, calling for the Government to "get to grips with the broken First Past the Post voting system" Tabled by Alex Sobel MP, the amendment would push the Government to set up a National Commission on Electoral Reform

Kudos to whoever made this.

This is my chart, and yes it was made to illustrate the opposite point made in that article. www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/is-w...

Brilliant!