Sell your possessions, buy your citizenship, and do young people hate fresh air?

Top of the Charts

This week’s blog comes to you from a Welsh mountainside. The path goes steeply up, which is more than you can say for the country’s economic growth (in case you missed it, 2018 didn’t start well). On the flip side, we also learnt this week that the government stopped borrowing for day to day spending for the first time since 2002 – so swings and roundabouts on the economic news front.

This week’s email brings similarly mixed news – train geeks will be happy, those that want the young and old hanging out together with be disappointed.

Living together, commuting together: everyone worries about the idea that differently-educated people are forming separate communities and not interacting. Now a new blog about the Netherlands shows that the highly educated make up 70% of some neighbourhoods in western cities but only 15% in some north-eastern rural zones. There is good news for one group though: transport planners. It turns out this makes deciding where to put new train stations easier – because the highly educated do all the commuting.

Radical smadicalRadical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society is a new book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl – it’s a great read accusing us all of being too attached to absolute, permanent ownership of our possessions. Gulp. They have some fun but bonkers ideas – here’s one: a ‘Harberger tax’ is a form of asset tax where people would self-report the value of all their possessions each year and then pay a tax on that value. To ensure no-one lies about the value of their possessions, the owner also has to be willing to sell their listed possessions at their stated price, if anyone offers to buy them. See this paper for a longer explanation of this stressful scheme.

Robots wars VI: Almost five years on from that paper, Oxford University’s Carl Frey and Michael Osborne review the many studies that have questioned their prediction that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation. It’s not their fault everyone over-interpreted, it they say – we never meant there would be an ‘employment apocalypse’. That’s reassuring.

Buying in: An intriguing and growing trend – now employed by 40 countries including the UK – is to sell citizenship to people who promise to invest big amounts. Its growth since the 1980s has spawned a whole $2bn industry, and is an important source of foreign currency to several countries with necessary investments ranging between $10,000 (in Thailand) and $10m+ (for the fastest track to UK citizenship). In 2014, passports became the biggest export in St Kitts and Nevis, accounting for 25% of GDP. Particularly attractive countries are EU countries with a quick process (Malta requires a minimum €650,000 investment) and Caribbean nations whose colonial histories give them wide visa-free access. If this is giving you ideas, see this explainer by the leading Swiss consultancy in the sector, and an article in 1843 magazine.

Chart of the week: young Britons are increasingly found in cities. It’s not just differently-educated people in the Netherlands who are living in separate places. Research for the soon-to-be-published final report of our Intergenerational Commission shows that different age groups in the UK are increasingly living apart too. This chart shows the proportion of family units, by age, living in a selected group of city regions (Tyne & Wear, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, West Yorks., South Yorkshire, Birmingham, London). Since the mid-1980s these cities have been getting younger, with 41 per cent of families headed by someone aged under 30 living in these city regions in 2017, compared to 25 per cent of families headed by 70 year olds.

Source: RF analysis of ONS, Labour Force Survey.

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