John Burn-Murdoch

I like being single.

So there's a Financial Times data reporter named John Burn-Murdoch, uh, who did an analysis of data and found that the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds in marriages or cohabiting partnerships, um, dropped really steeply from 1980 to 2022 by almost 10 percentage points for college graduates-

Hmm

... and more than 20 percentage points for people without a degree.

As media scholars have long argued, outrage and division can be extremely profitable.

A recent paper from MIT and Harvard professors that was written up by John Burn-Murdoch in the FT, The Business of the Culture War, found that US cable news networks systematically shifted coverage towards hot button cultural issues, crime, race, gender, and immigration.

Not because these topics are the most important news, but because they wind viewers up and reliably boost viewership.

Economic and healthcare stories, on the other hand, which may be much more important, made viewers tune out.

The US also had one of the widest gaps between its highest and lowest scoring students of any country tested.

So what does this mean for the American education system, and what might it mean for the international economy? Here to answer these questions, we are speaking with John Burn-Murdoch, columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times.

John, thank you for joining us on Prof G Markets.

I'd love to just start with your reactions to this global education report card.

So I, I think you can imagine a world where the education system is done AI-free as much as possible in terms of the actual learning experience.

But there is then a sort of fast track later on in the education process where people are brought up to speed on the AI tools that they're go- they're gonna encounter in the world of work.

John Burn-Murdoch is columnist and chief data reporter for The Financial Times.

John, this was fascinating.