Why Family-Friendly Policies Don’t Boost Birth Rates by John Burn-Murdoch for The Financial Times. It turns out financial incentives aren’t enough to turn around the worlds declining birthrate. Who would have thought. There’s a load of reasons people aren’t having kids and money has little to do with it - think the fewer number of people in couples to begin with.
How To Streamline Your Wardrobe Using The Three-Word Method by Emily Chan for Vogue. Zoë Vaunois first introduced me to the three word method a few months ago. It helps you define your personal style, cut stuff out of your wardrobe and provide a lens through which you make future purchases, by simply selecting three words that encapsulate your style. Chan does a great job here of explaining it. For reference *aspirationally* mine are classic, versatile, bold.
More Young People Than Ever Will Get Colorectal Cancer This Year by Knvul Sheikh for The New York Times. The rates of colon cancer are rising rapidly among people in their 20s and 30s. 1 in 5 diagnoses in 2019 were in patients under 55, up from 1 in 10 in 1995. The scary part is they can’t pinpoint why.
The Economics of American Lotteries from The Economist. Sales of lottery tickets in the US are at a record high, with Americans spending over $100 billion on lotto tickets in 2023. Poorer households however, spend significantly more on lotteries than richer ones. In the poorest 1% of zip codes with lottery retailers, the average adult spends around $600 a year, or nearly 5% of their income, on tickets, compared to just $150, or 0.15%, for those in the richest 1% of zip codes.
Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt was introduced to me by my genius colleague Jesse Corlett and has fast become one of my favourite thinkers (expect to see a lot more of his work in this newsletter.) This is a longer piece, but worth a skim. The below graph shows the percentage of UK adolescents with “clinically relevant depressive symptoms” by hours per weekday of social media use.
The book I’m carrying
I’m currently reading Not The End Of The World by Hannah Ritchie. It’s an upbeat take on tackling climate change. Interesting fact: If we split the world’s food production equally between everyone we could each have 5,000 calories a day. More than twice what we need. To put it another way, we already produce enough food for a global population more than double the size it is today. Sadly, it’s due to inefficiencies in distribution and storage, that millions of people still suffer from hunger and malnutrition, not because we don’t make enough food for everyone.
Something living in my head rent free
The flatmates and I have just finished the new Gloriavale documentary, Escaping Utopia (a must watch). My unanswered question is, are regular members of the public still choosing to move there?
Stat of the week
Cryptic pregnancies aren’t actually that uncommon, 1 in 500 pregnancies are not recognised until at least halfway through and 1 in 2,500 are not known until labour starts. Yikes.
Happy reading,
Maddy x