Positive thinking

Nicholas Beuret, University of Essex American congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently shook up environmental politics by releasing a broad outline of a Green New Deal – a plan to make the US a carbon-neutral economy in the next ten years, while reducing both poverty and inequality. Lauded by many as a radical and necessary step, president Trump responded in typical style: "I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called “Carbon Footprint” to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military - even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!" 15:21 - 9 feb 2019 - twitter The Green New Deal doesn’t directly call for people to consume less meat. But the argument that solving climate change means changing our diets is widespread, and Ocasio-Cortez herself has made the link . Yet Trump’s tweet was actual...

Matthew Riddle, University of Melbourne   How well are we preparing the typical primary school kid for life when they graduate in 2032? Current attitudes to education around cybersecurity and online safety skew towards caution at all costs. We often focus on schools’ duty of care rather than fostering skills and frameworks of digital ethics which empower students. There is a danger we are letting kids down with a fear-driven mentality instead of engaging their challenges head-on. Both parents and teachers can help kids in this capacity: let’s take a look at how (tips below). Fear can be a barrier We educational technologists often have cybersecurity discussions with students, parents and teachers with digital fluency levels ranging from expert to little-to-no knowledge. As parents and teachers we can understandably be fearful of the role of technology in kids’ lives, however this can sometimes be a barrier to student learning. Around six years ago, Wooranna...

Geraldine Healy, Queen Mary University of London and Mostak Ahamed, University of Sussex   Despite huge amounts of publicity and government efforts to tackle the gender pay gap, it remains a serious issue. It affects women in most industries : from artists and academics to journalists and doctors. We’ve researched some of the particular problems facing the UK’s finance industry when it comes to the gender pay gap. Across finance as a whole, women earn 27.2% less than men an hour, on average. When it comes to bonuses the gap is nearly 50%. Our research shows how this plays out at different levels of the finance industry. Progress on gender pay issues in this sector has been too slow, fragmented and uneven over the past ten years. The UK government introduced legislation requiring employers with more than 250 employees to report annually their gender pay gap publicly beginning April 2018. The principle is that greater transparency will reduce the gender pay gap, but...

Kate Pickett, University of York and Richard Wilkinson, University of York   To end austerity and make the economy work better for the whole country requires transforming the tax system. It is time for the UK to have a grown-up, national conversation about tax, to gain support for a radical tax regime that will allow it to end austerity, adequately fund public services and reduce inequality. And we need tax records to be publicly available. It’s time to end the British coyness about money. We have written extensively, in our books The Spirit Level and The Inner Level , about the damage caused by income inequality to population health and social cohesion, and the need to reduce inequality as part of a transition to a sustainable economy that maximises well-being rather than GDP. But the UK already has a policy framework and (theoretical) commitment to reducing income inequality, as this is in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The UK signed up to those g...

Hulya Dagdeviren, University of Hertfordshire and Sheilla Luz, University of Hertfordshire   Debt is a growing problem for people on low incomes and it has been made worse by the austerity policies that followed the 2007-08 financial crisis. The UK’s poorest households have the highest debt-to-income ratio in comparison to other income groups. This often means they struggle to repay their debt because it is so high in relation to their earnings. Many are forced to cut back their spending on basic necessities just to keep up with repayments – or they may borrow more, increasing their debt burden further. Our calculations, based on the latest Office for National Statistics data , show that the financial liabilities of the UK’s poorest households (excluding mortgages and student loans) were more than two and a half times their monthly income after tax and other deductions. What is more remarkable is that a significant proportion of this is accounted for by unarranged de...

Calvin Jones, Cardiff University   English towns with struggling economies will receive £ 1.6 billion of funding over six years. The UK government announced the creation of the “stronger towns fund” – the lion’s share of which will be distributed to towns in Northern England and the Midlands. Critics have focused on the fund’s assumed purpose as a “bribe” to gain Labour MPs’ votes for Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal to leave the EU, and on the inadequate size of the pot. Leaving the first criticism aside, the second certainly has some merit: £1.6 billion sounds a large sum for a single project (at least, for one outside London ). But it’s a tiny amount to complete a “transformative” programme of work in many places over a number of years – especially when those places have already lost much more than that during the past decade of austerity, and stand to lose further billions in EU support if and when the UK exits the union. The difficulties the fund will face hav...

Ella Tennant, Keele University   As we mark International Women’s Day after a year of renewed media attention to issues of gender inequality, it could be that there are more important threats facing women and the survival of our planet, than mere words. But after the #MeToo campaigns, exposure of the gender pay gap , and recent publication of yet more research that challenges the idea of a gendered brain , it is mindboggling to see how “ gendered blindness ” – described as “the one-size-fits-men approach” in design and tech culture – lives on. Meanwhile women’s equal contribution to society and culture is ignored. Visible women – those in the public eye or who call out unfair treatment – are subject to scrutiny and treated suspiciously in a way that men are not. Gender scholars have argued that English is a language made by men for men with the sole purpose of representing and perpetuating their point of view. The way we see the world is therefore shaped by patriarc...

Sergei Bachlakov / Shutterstock.com Edward Yates, University of Sheffield   Conditions for young people in the UK are bleak. Young people are more likely to be unemployed than all-age workers, and are more likely to be in low-paid jobs when employed . National minimum wage laws allow lawful discrimination against young people as they mean a young worker can be paid less than those over the age of 24 for doing the same job. Young people have worse pension opportunities than previous generations and suffer from a housing market characterised by high rents and purchase costs. They are also paying record levels of tuition fees for university, as well as spending more on accessing training and skills in a system of provision that is increasingly driven by profit. Media portrayals of young people compound the problem and are rife with discriminatory language. Young people are labelled lazy, idle “ snowflakes ” and are blamed fo...