John Burn-Murdoch

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

It has benefited from a steady influx of working-age people over the past 40 years, but now risks forfeiting that privilege

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

It’s not often these days that one thinks of Britain as having advantages over other developed countries, and less often still that those advantages stem from unity across a famously divided electorate, but for some time now support for the pursuit of net zero has been broader and deeper in the UK than any peer country. And it’s not just flimsy support for vague concepts, but for real policies, including those that would hit people in their wallets or otherwise impact their daily lives. The cur…

Britain’s Conservatives are one of the most successful political parties in the history of democracy worldwide, in power for 64 of the last 100 years, a record bested in the developed world only by Canada’s Liberals. The Tories have been victorious in 13 elections: you can accuse them of many things, but not knowing how to win is not one of them. This makes their current predicament intriguing. If there’s one party anywhere that will view an almost year-long 20-point deficit in the polls as rec…

The Fifa World Cup final between England and Spain on Sunday will crown the best team in women’s football; it will also showcase elite players from two domestic leagues that have become talent hubs for the game. Almost a quarter of all players in the tournament play in England’s WSL and Spain’s Liga F, both of which have received increased investment since the 2019 World Cup in France, attracting broadcasters, sponsors and fans, as well as increased support from the owners of powerful men’s clu…

If phase 1 of HS2, the high-speed rail project connecting Britain’s capital to its second-largest city, is ever finished, it will be the world’s most expensive such scheme, coming in at a cool £396mn for each mile of track. It didn’t have to be this way. When neighbouring France opened a new 188-mile stretch of its high-speed network in 2017, it cost £46mn per mile in today’s money, just over a tenth as much, and took 12 years to deliver from the start of planning to the first passenger-carryin…

You wouldn’t typically think of affirmative action advocates and anti-immigration nativists as being bedfellows. The former group skews young and is composed overwhelmingly of progressives, and the latter skews old and conservative. But according to a fascinating new study out of Harvard University, they have one significant thing in common: a predilection for zero-sum thinking, or the belief that for one group to gain, another must lose. The same way of thinking crops up on all manner of issue…

In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, American cultural theorist Neil Postman argues that “the medium is the metaphor” — that is, the dominant ways in which people consume information influence that society’s culture. He contrasts the era when people got their information from the printing press — a time when the big conversations of the day were detailed and logical — with the age of television, where complexity is avoided and nuance dispensable, rendering America’s national discourse “…

A new study finds older people are sensitive to the challenges faced by young adults

Imagine every death certificate issued in a particular country is lined up in front of you in 10 piles, from those who lived to the ripest of old ages on the left, to the most tragic young deaths on the right. In the pile furthest to the left are the most fortunate people in society: those who won the lottery when it came to genes, jobs and outcome. Today, in developed countries, the average certificate plucked from this pile will show an age at death in the late nineties. This is as true of de…

Young Conservatives have become an endangered species in the UK. On five separate occasions in the past two months, polls have shown that fewer than one in 10 of Britain’s under-30s plans to vote Tory at the next general election. A survey in late September put the figure at one solitary per cent. It would be easy to assume similar trends are playing out across the western world. The increased blurring of cultural lines across the Atlantic can make it feel like anything that is happening here m…

Since generative artificial intelligence burst on to the scene last November, the forecast for white-collar workers has been gloomy. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, estimates that the jobs most at risk from the new wave of AI are those with the highest wages, and that someone in an occupation that pays a six-figure salary is about three times as exposed as someone making $30,000. McKinsey warns of the models’ ability to automate the application of expertise. I understand the temptation to w…