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The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales was supposed to bring efficiency and investment to a vital sector that had been starved of public funding. But since 1989, the industry has failed to invest sufficiently in replacing antiquated pipes and sewage treatment systems.
Rivers and seas have become increasingly polluted with raw sewage. Meanwhile, dividend payments, funded by water companies loading up on corporate debt, have soared.
The largest of those companies, Thames Water, has debts of almost £14 billion – roughly 80% of the value of the assets of the business. Rising inflation and interest rates mean this debt is increasingly expensive to service, let alone reduce.
If Thames Water collapses, the UK government is likely to step in and manage the company through a special form of business administration to ensure 15 million customers continue to receive their water and sewerage services. But state involvement would probably be temporary, with the aim of an eventual return to the private sector.
Many would see this as a missed opportunity to do things differently. There are already groups calling for Thames Water to be renationalised and brought into public ownership to remove the company’s profit motive and the pressure of paying dividends to shareholders. Instead, the theory goes that, as a local natural monopoly, Thames Water ought to be run as a publicly owned utility fully focused on providing a public service.
But doing this would be far from straightforward. To begin with, it would involve the transfer of corporate debt onto the government’s own balance sheet, which could dramatically constrain spending on other public services, such as the NHS and education.
Another complication comes from the fact that an administration process usually involves attempts to raise funds from the sale of company assets to pay off debts. But in the case of a water company, those assets are part of an integrated and complex infrastructure. It would not be practical to break up those assets if any new company was to go on providing water and sewage services to the public.
Renationalising Thames Water would therefore require the government to buy the assets. But the cost of doing so could be enormous, and the current shareholders would need to be adequately compensated. These include investors like pension funds, which the government would find politically hard to ignore.
And even though governments can generally borrow more cheaply than private sector companies (or even deal with its own debts by printing money), these options are not attractive. They could be inflationary, and would risk a negative response from the financial markets. Renationalistation could end up being seen as an expensive acquisition that brings no new money to improve the water industry.
An alternative would be to sell the assets to a new private company or investor. But existing water companies are unlikely to be considered suitable buyers on competition grounds (and many already face similar problems as Thames Water). Demands for significant future investment to meet tighter environmental standards are also likely to deter other investors.
A more attractive option might be to create a new kind of water provider – a bit like an unusual one that already exists in Wales.
Welsh Water has a unique corporate structure, with no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of its customers. It is commercially run, with professional managers held to account by 62 independent trustees. While not perfect, its performance in recent years compares favourably with that of the other privatised water companies.
Welsh Water’s decisions are made not in the interest of profit-seeking shareholders but in the interests of broader society. Any profits made are either reinvested or returned to its 3 million customers in the form of cheaper services.
Creating such an organisation would not be easy. But there is a precedent in the case of Network Rail, a similar trustee-governed organisation, which was created when its commercial predecessor Railtrack went bust. Railtrack’s debts were subsumed into Network Rail, which were underwritten by the government (while initially staying off the public sector balance sheet). This change in ownership structure led to significant improvements on Railtrack’s atrocious safety record and reduced the cost of rail operations too.
A move towards the Welsh Water model would be in line with recent calls to turn all water firms into democratically run companies focused on public benefit. If renationalisation is considered to be too tricky politically and not viable economically, other solutions are available.
And while it is true that these public-interest companies are funded by debt, a government debt guarantee helps keep the costs of servicing this debt down (while costing the government very little). By not renationalising, the UK economy would avoid many considerable challenges – and a hefty water bill.
J. Robert Branston has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and several other health related charitable organisations. He is a non-active member of the Liberal Democrats.
Phil Tomlinson receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an Interact project on UK co-working spaces and manufacturing.
The UK is set to roll out a national lung cancer screening programme for people aged 55 to 74 with a history of smoking. The idea is to catch lung cancer at an early stage when it is more treatable.
Quoting NHS England data, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, said that if lung cancer is caught at an early stage, “patients are nearly 20 times more likely to get at least another five years to spend with their families”.
Five-year survival rates are often quoted as key measures of cancer treatment success. Barclay’s figure is no doubt correct, but is it the right statistic to use to justify the screening programme?
Time-limited survival rates (typically given as five-, ten- and 20-year) can improve because cancers caught earlier are easier to treat, but also because patients identified at an earlier stage of the disease would live longer, with or without treatment, than those identified later. The latter is known as “lead-time bias”, and can mean that statistics like five-year survival rates paint a misleading picture of how effective a screening programme really is.
My new book, How to Expect the Unexpected, tackles issues exactly like this one, in which subtleties of statistics can give a misleading impression, causing us to make incorrect inferences and hence bad decisions. We need to be aware of such nuance so we can identify it when it confronts us, and so we can begin to reason our way beyond it.
To illustrate the effect of lead-time bias more concretely, consider a scenario in which we are interested in “diagnosing” people with grey hair. Without a screening programme, greyness may not be spotted until enough grey hairs have sprouted to be visible without close inspection. With careful regular “screening”, greyness may be diagnosed within a few days of the first grey hairs appearing.
People who obsessively check for grey hairs (“screen” for them) will, on average, find them earlier in their life. This means, on average, they will live longer “post-diagnosis” than people who find their greyness later in life. They will also tend to have higher five-year survival rates.
But treatments for grey hair do nothing to extend life expectancy, so it clearly isn’t early treatment that is extending the post-diagnosis life of the screened patients. Rather, it’s simply the fact their condition was diagnosed earlier.
To give another, more serious example, Huntington’s disease is a genetic condition that doesn’t manifest itself symptomatically until around the age of 45. People with Huntington’s might go on to live until they are 65, giving them a post-diagnosis life expectancy of about 20 years.
However, Huntington’s is diagnosable through a simple genetic test. If everyone was screened for genetic diseases at the age of 20, say, then those with Huntington’s might expect to live another 45 years. Despite their post-diagnosis life expectancy being longer, the early diagnosis has done nothing to alter their life expectancy.
Screening can also lead to the phenomenon of overdiagnosis.
Although more cancers are detected through screening, many of these cancers are so small or slow-growing that they would never be a threat to a patient’s health – causing no problems if left undetected. Still, the C-word induces such mortal fear in most people that many will, often on medical advice, undergo painful treatment or invasive surgery unnecessarily.
The detection of these non-threatening cancers also serves to improve post-diagnosis survival rates when, in fact, not finding them would have made no difference to the patients’ lives.
So, what statistics should we be using to measure the effectiveness of a screening programme? How can we demonstrate that screening programmes combined with treatment are genuinely effective at prolonging lives?
The answer is to look at mortality rates (the proportion of people who die from the disease) in a randomised controlled trial. For example, the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) found that in heavy smokers, screening with low-dose CT scans (and subsequent treatment) reduced deaths from lung cancer by 15% to 20%, compared with those not screened.
So, while screening for some diseases is effective, the reductions in deaths are typically small because the chances of a person dying from any particular disease are small. Even the roughly 15% reduction in the relative risk of dying from lung cancer seen in the heavy smoking patients in the NLST trial only accounts for a 0.3 percentage point reduction in the absolute risk (1.8% in the screened group, down from 2.1% in the control group).
For non-smokers, who are at lower risk of getting lung cancer, the drop in absolute risk may be even smaller, representing fewer lives saved. This explains why the UK lung cancer screening programme is targeting older people with a history of smoking – people who are at the highest risk of the disease – in order to achieve the greatest overall benefits. So, if you are or have ever been a smoker and are aged 55 to 74, please take advantage of the new screening programme – it could save your life.
But while there do seem to be some real advantages to lung cancer screening, describing the impact of screening using five-year survival rates, as the health secretary and his ministers have done, tends to exaggerate the benefits.
If we really want to understand the truth about what the future will hold for screened patients, then we need to be aware of potential sources of bias and remove them where we can.
Christian Yates is a member of Independent SAGE.
Women in the UK earn, on average, 14.9 pence less per pound than men, based on the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This means that while men are getting paid from January 1, women have effectively worked for free for the first 53 days of the year. That makes February 23 “women’s pay day”.
The ONS gender pay gap is calculated by dividing the median pay for women by the median for men. The resulting ratio tells us that women earn, on average, 85.1 pence to the male pound – or 14.9% less.
This covers employees doing all jobs. It’s not the same as men and women getting paid differently for doing the same job, which is illegal.
But calculating the gender pay gap in different ways can highlight the different causes of the gap and which groups of women are more or less affected.
The median is the middle amount when all wages are listed from smallest to highest. This is different from the mean, which you find by adding everyone’s wages together and dividing by the number of people.
The median is less distorted by top earners, who are mostly men. If a survey of 1,000 people included Elon Musk while everyone else earned minimum wage, this would probably give an “average” wage of hundreds of pounds an hour based on the mean. The median would be the minimum wage.
The ONS figure of 14.9% is based on hourly pay, so compares pay for a fixed one-hour amount of work. Comparing weekly or annual pay would give bigger gaps because they’re directly affected by the amount of work that people do. Women – on average – work fewer hours than men (29 v 35 weekly hours).
The ONS figure also excludes overtime and bonuses. But there is evidence of larger gender pay gaps for bonuses than for regular pay.
Included in the ONS figure are part-time employees. Removing them narrows the gender pay gap to 8.3%. But this still puts women’s pay day for full-time employees on January 30, meaning full-time employed women effectively work nearly one month of the year for free.
The ONS figure also excludes self-employed people. The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed found a whopping self-employed gender pay gap of 43%. Self-employed women tend to charge less for their services than self-employed men. For this group, women’s pay day won’t come until June 6.
Another pitfall of the overall gender pay gap is that it hides how the gap varies for lower versus higher earners.
A review found that among the bottom 10% of UK earners, women were paid 90 pence on the male £1 in 2019, partly because of the wage floor created by the national minimum wage. For these women, pay day was February 6.
But among the top 10% of earners, women were paid 77 pence for every £1 paid to men, meaning their women’s pay day comes later, on March 25. American labour economist Claudia Goldin has described certain high-paid jobs, such as in banking, corporate management, law and consultancy, as “greedy jobs” because the demands are incompatible with unpaid care and domestic work, most of which is done by women.
The overall gender pay gap masks differences by company and occupation, too. While in a few occupations, such as childminders and medical secretaries, women earn more than men on average, men typically make up a very small share in these jobs. These jobs also pay less on average.
There are differences by parenthood and age as well. When women become mothers, their earnings stop rising so quickly or even fall. But when men become fathers, their earnings accelerate. Women often have to cut back on employment after having children, sometimes because of unaffordable childcare, which stops them from advancing their careers and earnings.
Plus, evidence has shown that employers judge mothers as less competent and committed workers but fathers as “ideal workers”. By the time their first child is 12, UK women’s hourly wages are one-third below men’s. For mothers, women’s pay day won’t come until May 2 2023.
The overall gender pay gap also ignores how gender intersects with other characteristics, like disability status, ethnicity and being a single parent. For example, white British women earn 18.7% less than white British men, while Bangladeshi women earn 23.1% less and Pakistani women 26.7% less than white British men.
Read more: Ethnicity pay gap: Why the UK needs mandatory reporting
Gender inequality is a complex concept, and the pay gap is only one measure. While the UK is an average performer internationally on its pay gap, it has a bigger gender gap in employment participation than many other advanced countries.
Focusing on pay also ignores non-wage benefits, like leave entitlements and enjoyment of one’s work. A 2021 study on labour and wellbeing found that including non-wage benefits in the definition of “pay” would widen the UK gender pay gap.
Despite its limitations, the gender pay gap is a straightforward summary measure for keeping track of gender equality. Still, calculating pay gaps for different groups and looking at other measures of gender inequality in the workplace, like employment rates and women’s access to workplace power, can help provide a fuller picture of what’s going on.
Helen Kowalewska receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Listening to people talk about views that clash with your own can be galling. Families all over the world avoid controversial topics. In the UK, for example, mention Brexit and watch everyone in the room tense up.
But if you only speak to people who think the same way you do, you live in an echo chamber. Being around people who think differently from you can increase your self-awareness and acceptance of others and is vital for learning. That’s why we carried out our recent study into whether focusing on your core values can help you engage more openly with others.
Conflict is part of life. Difficult conversations may feel uncomfortable but research shows there are things you can do to make talks with people who have directly opposing views more productive and less combative. For example, one study published in 2019 found that reminding people they have more in common than they think with members of groups they dislike can diminish people’s hostility towards those groups.
Researchers have argued receptiveness to opposing views and intellectual humility lie at the heart of healthy debates. Intellectual humility is owning or accepting your own shortcomings out of a genuine desire for knowledge and truth. It is about developing an increased awareness that you do not have all the answers and it is possible your views might be mistaken. An unassuming attitude makes people more open to appreciating others’ views. It doesn’t mean you have to suspend critical thinking though.
We tested whether there’s a way to enhance intellectual humility. We used an approach called values-affirmation, in which people reflect on one or two cherished personal values, such as freedom, equality or family security. Previous research found a brief period of reflection on personal values may increase people’s sense of integrity when they feel threatened. Contemplation also seems to make people more thoughtful and open-minded in response to text that challenges their views.
In our experiment, we invited participants in groups of two or three to the lab. After completing a range of psychological questionnaires assessing personality, intellectual humility, and self-esteem, half of the participants were asked to reflect on their most important value (for example freedom and equality) by writing about the significance their chosen value has in their lives and how it informs their behaviour. The second group, the control group, instead wrote about their attitudes to beverages such as tea and coffee. Afterwards, participants took part in a 15-minute group discussion about the pros and cons of raising student tuition fees to pay for university education.
Recordings of the debates were analysed by linguists from our team for conversational markers that indicate high or low intellectual humility. They coded participants’ contributions to discussions along with several other features including tendency to dominate the discussion, to engage with others’ opinions, or to convey their own convictions as certain, obvious and unchallengeable.
Participants who reflected about their most important value engaged in the discussion in a more humble way compared to participants in the control group. For example, they were more supportive of other speakers even when they were at odds; they tended to avoid dominating discussions; they were less likely to treat their own opinions as facts. Afterwards we asked participants to rate how they much they were feeling different emotions on a five-point scale (ranging from very slightly to extremely). The values-affirmation group reported feeling more empathic, giving, grateful, and humble compared to the control group.
Our research showed how a simple intervention can enhance intellectual humility in conversations. More than half (60.6% of participants) in the values-affirmation group showed more intellectual humility in debate than the average person in the control condition. This finding, as well as the enhanced feelings of tolerance people experienced, suggest reflecting on values can improve the quality of discussions on controversial issues.
Many conversations about controversial issues happen online, however. Face-to-face dialogue is very different from online communication, particularly when the people involved don’t know each other or obscure their identity. In theory, an intervention that supports intellectual humility in face-to-face dialogue may help online dialogue, but we can’t be sure without more research. If one thing is clear from science it’s that we shouldn’t avoid discussions about controversial topics, but we do need to change the way we approach them.
Research leading to the paper was partially funded by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by Grant No. 58942 from John Templeton Foundation. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or the John Templeton Foundation.
Research leading to the paper was partially funded by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by from John Templeton Foundation (Grant No. 58942 ). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or the John Templeton Foundation. Alessandra Tanesini was also the recipient of a Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust
Childhood trauma may play a key role in many later psychiatric disorders. However, most of what we know about the impact of trauma exposure comes from research with adults.
Less is known about the impact of childhood trauma on teenagers. It is still unclear whether they show the same range of mental health problems as adults or have difficulties mainly in some specific areas – such as having mood problems like depression. Younger children have been investigated even less.
We carried out research looking at data from 4,231 children born in 2004 in the city of Pelotas, South Brazil. These children were tracked from birth to age 11 years to collect data about their exposure to traumatic events and rates of common mental health disorders.
We found that more than a third of the children were exposed to trauma by the time they were 11. This is more than double what was observed in a similar group of children aged 10-11 years from the UK.
Most studies on childhood trauma have been conducted in affluent countries such as the USA or the UK. However, almost 90% of the world’s children live in poorer countries, sometimes referred to as low- and middle-income countries.
In these parts of the world, violent events such as youth homicide are more common. We know little about the amount and types of trauma experienced in these social and cultural contexts and their mental health impacts on children.
Children exposed to trauma in our study showed higher rates of a broad range of mental health problems, including anxiety, mood disorders, ADHD or hyperactivity, and disruptive disorders – also known as “behaviour problems”. For instance, 6% of 11-year-olds who had experienced trauma had an anxiety disorder, compared to 3.3% of children who had not experienced trauma.
These associations between trauma and mental disorder were not explained by the children having mental health problems at an earlier age. They were also not explained by other factors, such as lower socioeconomic status, having a mother with mental health problems, or the child’s mother smoking or drinking alcohol during pregnancy.
There are different types of trauma. Many traumatic experiences involve events inflicted by another person, which is known as interpersonal trauma. This can mean being the victim of physical violence or assault, experiencing physical or sexual abuse within the family, sexual assault or being exposed to domestic violence.
However, children may also experience other types of non-interpersonal trauma, which includes severe accidents not perpetrated by a person (such as an accidental car crash), and indirect trauma – witnessing or learning about harm to a loved one.
Our study looked at the impact of interpersonal and non-interpersonal traumas and found that both were potentially harmful to children’s mental health. Children exposed to these types of trauma showed higher rates of anxiety, mood, ADHD or hyperactivity, and disruptive disorders. Nonetheless, interpersonal trauma might be particularly important in relation to children’s mental health problems. In our study, children who experienced interpersonal trauma were almost twice as likely to show some disorders, such as behaviour problems.
We should be aware that traumatic experiences in childhood are common and can lead to a broad range of mental health problems – not just post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the psychiatric disorder most often talked about when discussing trauma exposure.
More needs to be done to reduce the likelihood of children experiencing traumatic events. For example, educating parents not to use corporal punishment could reduce children’s exposure to violence and maltreatment.
The city of Pelotas launched an intervention programme in 2017 to reduce violence in the community. Its approaches include targeting schools to decrease the chance of children engaging in violence. Initiatives like this have the potential to reduce childhood trauma and its associated mental health problems, bringing about major societal benefits.
Andreas Bauer has nothing to disclose.
Graeme Fairchild has received funding from the MRC, the ESRC, the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission for research on children's mental health.
Sarah Halligan receives funding from the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, ESRC, MRC, Newton Fund, NIHR, MQ, and Research England for research into the consequences of children's trauma. She is affiliated with the Children and War Foundation, UK.
Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland plan to visit South Sudan in February 2023 to try and move the nation towards peace.
The three church leaders will meet church and civil groups. The visit follows a retreat held at the Vatican in 2019, when South Sudanese political leaders were urged to end a civil war that has cost more than 400,000 lives.
Churches are powerful authorities in South Sudan, where many people are Christian (estimates of 60%-80% are highly contested). When South Sudanese political leaders visited the Vatican in 2019, the pope surprised people by kissing the feet of President Salva Kiir and opposition leader (and former vice president) Riek Machar, as the pontiff urged them towards peace.
Religious leaders can provide an alternative diplomatic route when others have failed to reconcile. For example, churches in Columbia have been active in promoting peaceful relations.
I have spent a decade carrying out research on peace and conflict in South Sudan, and research suggests that the two big challenges these religious leaders face are understanding both why people are not ready to forgive and why local institutions face difficulties helping resolve the violence.
Religious leaders have previously called on people to forgive each other as part of a move towards peace. In my forthcoming book I highlight how, for many South Sudanese, forgiveness is seen as undesirable when the violence of the perpetrator is ongoing, and doesn’t provide accountability.
People also feel this ignores people’s obligations to those who were killed during war. Among the communities where I have researched, people want compensation in order to provide for the family of the dead, to keep their memory alive and to allow full reconciliation.
Christian churches have sensibly sought to work with existing peacemaking institutions and not only with political leaders. Local peacemaking is also subject to ongoing, high-level political interference including through the remaking of the meanings of peace rituals.
In areas where I conducted research, decades of governments’ legal reforms, shifting economies and the lack of compensation in peacemaking had undermined local institutions’ ability to end violence.
Decades of armed conflicts have had political, social and spiritual consequences. Local beliefs have long suggested that killers and their communities become subject to “spritual pollution” that can have deadly physical manifestations, such as sickness, and that can only be resolved through rituals and reconciliation.
Armed combatants have tried to remake rituals to protect themselves from this “pollution”, but the scale of killing, the use of guns and the patterns of violence all leave fears that situation is unresolved.
Religious authorities, including those largely invisible to the international community such as Nuer prophets and Dinka spear masters, have a powerful role in setting the moral limits of lethal violence, and deciding how war should be fought and resolved.
Wars for a separate South Sudan state started soon after Sudan’s independence from Britain in 1956. Peacemaking by Christian churches in what is now South Sudan also has a long history.
It has also often involved collaboration between different churches including Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. In 1972, the World Council of Churches hosted peace negotiations that ended the war between the Sudan government and the Anyanya rebels who were fighting for southern independence.
From 1983 until the 2005 peace agreement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) fought against the Sudan government. To gain international support and local recruits, from the 1990s the SPLA framed the conflict in religious terms.
These terms pitted the pro-Christian SPLA in what is now South Sudan against the Islamic Sudan government. However, much of the fighting in the 1990s and 2000s was between South Sudanese groups.
The SPLA v Sudan government wars ended with the 2005 peace agreement that made the SPLA the official army of the south and promised a referendum on southern independence. In 2006, the SPLA absorbed large numbers of anti-SPLA troops from elsewhere in the South in order to reduce divisions between groups. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
Armed conflict escalated again in South Sudan in December 2013 when the army divided along the historic pro- and anti-SPLA lines. This fighting included the targeting of civilians and led to regional rebellions and the rapid rise of armed opposition.
Within five years, these wars had resulted in 400,000 deaths. Millions were displaced, and hundreds of thousands experienced famine.
In 2018, a peace agreement was signed by the South Sudan government and the largest armed opposition group. However, fighting continued between the government and groups who did not sign the agreement.
In early 2022, armed conflict resulted in the government gaining territory from opposition parties who had signed the peace agreement. At the end of 2022, violence broke out between political factions in Upper Nile state, and offensives were carried out in Jonglei state by groups historically aligned to the opposition.
Read more: Kiir and Machar: insights into South Sudan's strongmen
In the late 1990s, international and local church leaders engaged with South Sudanese chiefs and other local religious leaders to try to end violent divisions. A meeting in the village of Wunlit was considered a success both because communities resumed peaceful relationships, but also because their political leaders were apparently forced to reconcile. This prompted churches to support dozens of similar processes over the subsequent decades.
From 2014, South Sudanese church leaders were official observers at the internationally brokered peace meetings. Church leaders have also publicly criticised the warring parties when they have not supported peace.
One part of my upcoming research describes how South Sudanese, over the last century, have often understood governments and warring parties as “god-like” because they claim to be able to arbitrarily show favour or destruction, without accountability. In such a context, religious authorities have a particularly important role in holding governments and warring parties to account.
To end these wars, church leaders need to take seriously the politics and potential violence of peace and forgiveness.
Naomi Ruth Pendle receives funding from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy.
To the delight of investors across the cryptosphere, the price of bitcoin (BTC) has rallied over 53% since its low of US$15,476 (£12,519) in November. Now trading around US$23,000, there’s much talk that the bottom has finally been reached for the leading cryptocurrency after a year of painful decline – in November 2021, the price peaked at almost US$70,000.
If so, it’s not only good news for bitcoin but the whole market in cryptocurrencies, since the others broadly move in line with the leader. So is crypto back in business?
The past is littered with various periods of market turmoil, from the global financial crisis of 2007-09 to the COVID-19 collapse in 2020. But neither of these is a particularly good comparison for our purposes because they both saw sharp drops and recoveries, as opposed to the slow unwinding of bitcoin. A better comparison would be the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-02, which you can see in the chart below (the Nasdaq is the index that tracks all tech stocks).
Nasdaq 100 index 1995-2005
Look at the bitcoin chart since it peaked in November 2021 and the price action looks fairly similar:
Bitcoin bear market price chart 2021-23
Both charts show that bear markets go through various periods where prices rise but don’t reach the same level as the previous peak – known as “lower highs”. If bitcoin is following a similar trajectory to the early 2000s Nasdaq, it would make sense that the current price will be another lower high and that it will be followed by another lower low.
This is partly because like the 2000s Nasdaq, bitcoin seems to be following a pattern known as an Elliott Wave. Named after the renowned American stock market analyst Ralph Nelson Elliott, this essentially argues that during a bear phase, investors shift between different emotional states of disappointment and hope, before they finally despair and decide the market will never turn in their favour. This is a final wave of heavy selling known as capitulation.
You can see this idea on the chart below, where bitcoin is the green and red line and Z is the potential capitulation point at around US$13,000 (click on the chart to make it bigger). The black line is the path that the Nasdaq took in the early 2000s. The blue pointing finger above that line is potentially the equivalent place to where the bitcoin price is now.
Bitcoin now vs Nasdaq in the early 2000s
The one other thing to note on the chart is the wavy line that’s moving horizontally along the bottom. This is the stochRSI or stochastic relative strength index, which is an indication of when the asset looks overbought (when the line is peaking) or oversold (when it’s bottoming).
A sign of a coming shift is when the stochRSI moves in the opposite direction to where the price is heading: so now the stochRSI is coming down but the price has held up around US$23,000. This too suggests a fall could be imminent.
Within markets, there is often a game that investors from institutions such as banks and hedge funds play with amateur (retail) investors. The aim is to transfer retail investors’ wealth to these institutions.
This is particularly easy in an unregulated market like bitcoin, because it is easier for institutions to manipulate prices. They can also talk up (or talk down) prices to stir up retail investors’ emotions, and get them to buy at the top and sell at the bottom. This “traps” the irrational investors who buy at higher prices, transferring wealth by giving the institutions an opportunity to convert their holdings into cash.
It therefore makes sense to compare how the retail and institutional investors have been behaving lately. The following charts compare those crypto wallet addresses that hold 1 BTC or more (mostly retail investors) with those holding upwards of 1,000 BTC (institutional investors). In all three charts, the black line is the bitcoin price and the orange line is the number of wallets in that category.
Retail investor behaviour
Institutional investor behaviour pt 1
Institutional investor behaviour pt 2
This shows that since the FTX scandal back in November, which led to the world’s second-largest crypto exchange collapse, retail investors have been buying bitcoin aggressively, resulting in the highest number of addresses holding at least one BTC ever. On the other hand, the biggest institutional investors have been offloading. This suggests that the institutional investors agree with our analysis.
There are those who argue that bitcoin is a bubble and that ultimately cryptocurrencies are worthless. That’s a separate debate for another day. If we assume there is a future for blockchains, which are the online ledgers that enable cryptocurrencies, the key question is when bitcoin will reach the accumulation phase that typically ends a bear phase in any market.
Known as Wyckoff accumulation, this is where the price of the asset repeatedly tests two areas: the upper bound where traders previously sold heavily enough for the price to stop rising (known as resistance), and the lower bound where traders bought heavily enough that the price stopped going down (known as support).
At the point where institutional investors decide the lower bound has proved to be sufficiently resilient – in other words, they think the price is cheap at that level – they will start buying the asset again. That moment is only likely to come after there has been a capitulation.
Of course, history does not repeat itself exactly. It may be this is the first time that retail investors have outsmarted the large institutions, and that the only way is now up.
More likely, however, there is more pain on the way. With a recession on the cards, unprecedented job layoffs and weak retail data coming out of the US, it doesn’t point to the kind of optimism that tends to move markets higher. It would therefore make sense to brace yourself for another plunge in the price of bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market.
James Kinsella works part-time as an investment analyst for Tyndall Asset Management.
Richard Fairchild does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Autistic people and people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often experience anxiety and depression. When these conditions occur together, though – as they often do – it can be hard to unpick which one is contributing the most to poor mental health. Our latest study aimed to find out.
We discovered that people with more ADHD personality traits were more likely to experience common mental health problems like depression and anxiety than people with more autistic traits. This is the first study, as far as we are aware, which shows that people with ADHD are more likely to have poor mental health than autistic people.
To conduct our study, we asked over 500 adults in the UK to complete questionnaires measuring autistic and ADHD traits. We also asked them to complete standard questionnaires for depression and anxiety.
This is known as a “trait approach” to autism and ADHD. It involves looking at people’s individual characteristics rather than their diagnoses. This allows us to indirectly understand how much different conditions overlap.
We then used statistical tests to measure the strength of the relationship between autistic traits and mental health problems and compared this to the link between ADHD traits and poor mental health.
Our results showed both ADHD and autistic personality traits could predict the severity of a person’s anxiety and symptoms of depression. But what was new was that people were more likely to experience these symptoms if they had many ADHD traits compared with those who had a lot of autistic traits. We found that the link between ADHD and poor mental health was around three times stronger than the link between poor mental health and autism.
These results were replicated in computerised simulations with a 100% “reproducibility rate”. In other words, ADHD traits are almost certainly more linked to poor mental health than autistic traits in the UK population.
Our study highlights a clear link between ADHD and common mental health problems in adults. The next step is to examine the factors that might be driving this relationship. Scientists know that the genes linked to ADHD are also linked with certain mental health conditions, such as depression. People with ADHD are also more likely to experience stressful life events, which can lead to mental health difficulties.
It will now be important to look at how environmental and social cognitive factors (such as how well people understand others) may influence mental health in this group. This research is crucial for identifying people who are most at risk of poor mental health. Knowing what signs to look out for could let doctors intervene early, before people become severely anxious or depressed.
But to better understand the links between ADHD and mental health, and which support approaches may be most effective for this group, more funding needs to be invested in research. Funding for ADHD research is lacking in comparison to other conditions, such as autism. Yet, considering that almost 30% of autistic people also have ADHD, it’s clear that greater funding into this research area could have far-reaching benefits for many people.
If you are autistic or have ADHD and are struggling with your mental health, there are many charities and non-profit organisations that may be able to help you.
Luca Hargitai receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Lucy Anne Livingston has received funding from the UKRI Medical Research Council and The Waterloo Foundation.
Punit Shah receives or has received funding from the UKRI Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, the same year Donald Trump took power in the US. They could not have been more different: in age and sex, in politics, and in style. Where Trump’s brash, shoot-from-the-hip tweets sparked outrage, Ardern’s human and empathetic approach sought to strike a conciliatory tone. Nowhere was this more evident than with her response to the Christchurch terrorist attacks when she said, “they are us”, embracing the immigrant and refugee communities targeted.
Ardern showed the power of a different kind of leadership, but what will her legacy be? When we talk about leadership in my gender politics classes at the University of Bath one name above all others comes up in discussions: Jacinda Ardern. Ask my students which inspirational political leaders they see in the world today, and Ardern always tops the polls. Ask if they can remember any of New Zealand’s former prime ministers before her and there’s silence.
Ardern embodied a new kind of politics, one that has been nicknamed a “politics of kindness”. At the press conference announcing New Zealand’s first lockdown in the face of COVID, she said: “Be strong, and be kind.” During her time in office, these words would become synonymous with her politics and style. She even mentioned the word kindness in her resignation speech.
Such has been Ardern’s political power over the past six years, that the news that she will resign with almost immediate effect was met with widespread surprise as much within New Zealand as it was internationally. I was in New Zealand in 2017 and witnessed first-hand the rise of her leadership - nicknamed “Jacindamania” - and saw how it resonated so strongly with the public.
As a world leader who faced one crisis after another, and balancing the demands of working life for young families, she expressed how she “no longer had enough in the tank” to keep going. Of course, there are some who will claim she stood down before she was pushed, and it is true that Labour in New Zealand is struggling in the polls, although she was still the most popular candidate for prime minister. Compare and contrast Ardern’s departure with Trump being wrestled out of the White House. How many (male) politicians would call time on their own leadership in the way Ardern has done?
Her decision to step down is as groundbreaking as the way in which she shaped the job and her leadership style. In times when populist leaders with a hyper-masculine leadership styles took control from Brazil to Hungary, she brought compassion, kindness and empathy to politics.
Her leadership style, and more generally her leadership, inspired many, and in particular women. While gender equality is growing in politics, there are still not many women leading a country, and being the youngest woman prime minister ever, she was an exception in what is generally still seen as a “man’s world”.
In the academic literature on gender and political representation, a distinction is made between descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. The first concentrates on the number of women in positions of power. The second is concerned with the effect women’s representation has on policy outcomes, that is: do we get different kinds of policy decisions because women are making them? And the third suggests that women politicians are role models for women in society, inspiring them to engage in political activity and discussion and serving to increase political trust.
Being New Zealand’s youngest female prime minister and only the second in the world to become a mother while in office, Ardern inspired many women and showed how young women can take up leadership roles and do it in their own way. As she said when announcing her resignation: “I hope I leave New Zealand with a belief that you can be kind but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused, and that you can be your own kind of leader, one who knows when it’s time to go.”
With this message, she highlighted how there is no particular style of doing politics, but how everyone can do it in their own way, including in a connecting and empathetic way with a strong human touch – a style not commonly associated with politics. Hearing of Ardern’s resignation, US vice president Kamala Harris said she had “inspired millions around the world” and had offered a new way of doing politics.
Equally important has been how she has called out gender inequalities. A well-known, and widely shared on social media, example was when she met with the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin – also a woman and relatively young – last year and was asked by a journalist whether they were just meeting because they were both young (women)? Ardern quickly queried whether former US president Barack Obama and John Key (the previous New Zealand prime minister) would have been asked the same question when they met; clearly stating that they were not only meeting because of their gender but were there to talk about substance and politics.
Overall, with her refreshing and dignified leadership, her brand of politics, combined with a call for greater gender equity in general and in politics in particular, Ardern has served as an inspiration for many women. And even in the style of her resignation, Ardern is again changing the course and setting standards for kind and authentic political leadership; a strong legacy that will be remembered for decades.
Hilde Coffe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Britishvolt, the would-be electric vehicle (EV) battery maker that recently went into administration, always faced an uphill struggle. The start-up had no track record developing technology and never confirmed how it would raise the £3.8 billion needed to start mass producing batteries, which reduces the average cost per battery.
The proposed facility near Blyth, a coastal town in north-east England, was slated to contribute around a quarter of what the UK automotive industry needs, or enough for 330,000 battery packs a year. But with no major auto firms as customers, its business model always looked vulnerable.
This was despite keen promotion from Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and a pledge of £100 million in public funding if certain conditions on the factory’s construction were met. They weren’t, and the government kept the cash.
There remains hope that new ownership could rescue the business and that batteries for EVs could still be assembled at the site. For now, though, Britishvolt’s woes raise wider questions about the future of the UK automotive industry as it transitions to making EVs, and whether the government is doing enough to support it.
For the UK to become a leader in EV manufacturing, it needs large factories (called gigafactories) making EV batteries and quickly, as demand for EVs is taking off ahead of a 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars, and the requirement for all new cars to be fully zero emission by 2035. This is particularly urgent given the nature of the trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) between the UK and the EU.
The TCA requires that batteries in EVs have to be assembled in the UK or the EU by the end of 2026 for vehicles traded between the two to avoid tariffs. The UK is lagging well behind EU countries in attracting investment in battery-making, and Britshvolt’s collapse throws this into sharp relief.
Without a major effort to build a domestic supply chain that includes battery manufacturing, UK car assembly lines will increasingly be left producing obsolete internal combustion engine cars and dependent upon imported battery components from the EU to meet rules of origin requirements. That isn’t going to make much business sense.
In recent years, a lot of investment in battery gigafactories has skirted the UK, partly because of uncertainty caused by Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk said as much in late 2019 when justifying his firm’s decision to build its first major European gigafactory in Germany.
Along with Arrival’s decision to shift electric van production to the US and Mini pulling the plug on EV production in Oxford, for now at least, government hopes for the UK auto industry as an EV powerhouse seem stuck in neutral, if not reverse. The one piece of good news so far is that battery maker Envision has committed to a new gigfactory in Sunderland that will come onstream in 2025 – the only confirmed investment in the UK.
In a good year, the UK makes between 1.3 and 1.5 million cars. As the industry seeks to supply UK and EU markets in which petrol or diesel vehicle sales are being phased out from 2030, maintaining a similar level of production will require a lot of batteries.
The UK has been slow to get government support lined up for such investment. So far, only £800 million has been earmarked for the mass production of EV batteries. Demand for EV batteries in the UK could reach as high as 130 gigawatt-hours (GWh) a year by 2040, equivalent to the output of eight gigafactories with a capacity of 15GWh each. Meeting this demand would require an investment of between £5 billion and £18 billion by 2040 according to one estimate.
Meanwhile, there are at least 35 gigafactories up and running or under construction in the EU, including those by NorthVolt (in Sweden), Saft/Stellantis (in France and Germany), Samsung SDI (in Hungary), LG Chem (in Poland), and Tesla (in Germany).
The European Commission and seven member states have allocated around €6 billion (£5 billion) to help build up to 20 gigafactories and aim at having one-third of the world’s EV batteries being made in the EU by 2030. This is expected to serve an estimated €250 billion-a-year market by that time. EU member states are simply doing more to attract investment in battery production than the UK, with heavy financial support and special economic zones to woo manufacturers.
If the UK auto industry is to compete, it will need to produce its own batteries at scale. Domestic battery production will reduce supply chain costs and ease logistical difficulties. It should also help UK-based carmakers and battery manufacturers work more closely in areas such as battery cell technology and technician training – critical to the industry’s competitiveness.
For this to be possible, the government must think more creatively about how to target financial support for car and battery makers. And, in turn, the auto industry needs a more active industrial strategy and closer partnerships with government, especially with regards to reorientating skills and the supply chain towards EVs.
This isn’t about picking winners – demand for EVs produced in the UK and internationally is forecast to be there. And increasing UK sales of EVs indicate a growing domestic market for batteries. McKinsey consultants forecast that by 2040, battery demand for European EVs will reach 1,200GWh per year, or the output of 80 gigafactories with an average capacity of 15GWh.
The UK risks missing out on new investment in a growing industry. If the UK wants to maintain its large automotive assembly capacity as it transitions to making EVs, then it will need homemade batteries and on a large scale. Only a revamped industrial strategy can help make this happen.
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David Bailey receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) UK in a Changing Europe programme under grant number ES/X005844/1.
Phil Tomlinson receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an Interact project on UK co-working spaces and manufacturing.
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