Lord grant me the confidence and blithe optimism of the ice cream van circling my neighbourhood, over and over (Swedish ice cream vans have just the one jingle)

Wowsers look at what happened to posts on Twitter/X about London crime after monetisation of posts was introduced… economist.com/britain/2026...

Big Stockholm day: the sun sets at 16.00 today, for the first time since late October 🎉

Major @nuffieldfoundation.org funded research on the trajectory of high-achieving pupils at age 11 (from poorer & better-off families) through school into HE (or not). The class gap in entry to the Russel Group is very large, mostly (not exclusively) explained by attainment & seems to have narrowed

Sweden messing (deliciously) with the irreversible binomials

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

Amazing sob story: "ChatGPT deleted all the work I hadn't done" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The great graduate job drought - www.ft.com/content/c894... brilliant piece, somewhat terrifying for this father of three

Participating at the #RC28 online conference on educational inequalities? Come to my talk on the spatial embeddedness of #VET dropout decisions 🚫 and consequences 💸 in Germany at 11 am (Room 1) today!

Spotted a Dryrobe coat on the tunnelbana this morning: it's spreading...

Music for the times youtu.be/vyXccqTlhoI?...

Thrilled that our findings, showing how social norms and institutions interact in Italy to shape tax reporting, are now out at: academic.oup.com/esr/advance-... @gianlucapasin.bsky.social @squazzoni.bsky.social

What do people in England think about their local area? In this short report I take a look at surveys we conducted with @yougov.co.uk in 2022, 2024 and 2025 to gain some insights... Some key findings...

New paper! Do people in more unequal municipalities perceive their position in the national income distribution more accurately? Our findings suggest: yes. 🙏 to @apeichl.bsky.social and team for local ineq. data & to @excinequality.bsky.social for funding! linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii...

Is there a term for the shift from retail to food and drink in wealthy places? Has been easier to buy a coffee and a pastry than a durable good on Richmond high street for some time bsky.app/profile/youn...

Cool map. bluebookmke.substack.com/p/where-amer...

SU @stockholm-uni.bsky.social in full on winter wonderland mode

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io

How polarized was occupational change in Germany's and UK's largest cities? Happy to share a new paper with Daniel Oesch and @katymorris.bsky.social out in Journal for Labour Market Research. Read the paper #OpenAccess here doi.org/10.1186/s126... and 🧵👇:

Seven Sisters sunburn with @ellenhalliday.bsky.social and @julianlimberg.bsky.social. Some surprisingly splashy moments 🥲

New in @bjpols.bsky.social! Dave Hope, @lhaffert.bsky.social and I show that low taxes on the rich have a hidden cost: They undermine public support for broad-based taxation. 🖋️ cup.org/45lgPwN

🙄🌫️

New paper in the American Journal of Sociology (with Michael Grätz), and a very good way to close an important chapter! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Luciakonsert yesterday; Nine Lessons and Carols today Both stunningly lovely, but only the Anglicans have nailed congregational participation. Communal carolling for the wonder

Most excellent moose 😍

quite fun that everyone was stunned by figures showing a massive decline in trips to america, then everyone realised it was a statistical artefact of a different date for easter, and then… there was a massive decline in trips to america www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Sigtuna time! I'm presenting work with @kostermann.bsky.social and @patzinaalex.bsky.social on the causal effect of apprenticeship dropout on earnings in Germany Preprint is on @socarxiv.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/so...

One of the reasons that emergence of ‘cold spots’ of subject provision matters: 52% of 18 year olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds (the most deprived quintile in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation) plan to live at home when they go the university www.thetimes.com/article/22cc...

Nobel Week lights

🎉🎉🎉

He traffics in memes and mince pies. Tack så mycket for the contraband @pengzell.bsky.social 💫

Worth reading just for: "just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth".

Someone alert the Italian ambassador 🇸🇪

Centre LIVES @unil.bsky.social is running the Good Life Data Challenge: Using existing Swiss Household Panel data, can you predict the feeling of having lived a happy, meaningful, and interesting (psychologically rich) life in 🇨🇭? These new items will be included in the next wave of SHP

Just published my first article! 🎉 We study inequalities in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Sweden by immigrant background. Immigrant-background children enroll less often - but the pattern is different from the usual story about disadvantage and access. 1/3

It's rising despair among young workers that's changing the age profile of poor mental health in the United States. Check out our new paper here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @sriucl.bsky.social @undp.org @dannyblanchy.bsky.social

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Some educational decisions are structurally embedded: "These patterns suggest many students view community college and employment as substitute options, enrolling in college when [local] job opportunities are scarce and entering the workforce when labor markets are strong"

The only surprise is that less than 80% of voting Swiss rejected a 50% inheritance tax on the estates of the super rich (CHF 50 million+) www.rts.ch/info/suisse/...

Many enjoyably strong and correct opinions on British Christmas food, including on roast potatoes as a birthright and Christmas pudding as a symbolic vehicle on.ft.com/4rxHAb4

Your universe is a photocopy of a photocopy of a… on.ft.com/4ahkNKa

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps: /1

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse. 👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

The British mind cannot comprehend… the Swedish commitment to perfect register data

Attention is on NEETs today, but the problem is much worse. NEETs include stay-at-home parents & jobseekers. Strip those out to focus on people not working, not seeking work, not in education & not parenting: this group of economically & socially dislocated young adults has *doubled* in a decade.

🌡️🌫️ ➡️ ❄️☀️ ➡️ 😃😎 Sometimes causality is very easy to establish @stockholm-uni.bsky.social

From the always interesting AI Shift newsletter by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com and @sarahoconnorft.ft.com: AI is maximising job applications and word counts, in vicious circle of doom kind of ways

Mind-boggling that we've ended up here

*Women receive substantially lower "potential" ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings *Differences in potential ratings account for half of the gender promotion gap *Women’s lower potential ratings do not reflect future performance: women subsequently outperform male colleagues

Just published in @bjpols.bsky.social: @sergipardos.bsky.social and I show that inter-regional moves in pursuit of employment security reduce individual worries about immigration—a mobility pattern that, in the aggregate, reinforces spatial polarization in anti-immigration sentiment. cup.org/3XiB6yD