Not an economist but surely the surprise is that classically everybody has a preferred savings rate and it’s trivial to switch. The default setting shouldn’t matter, since there’s no information in it.

They are talking about niche subjects where the relevant A levels aren’t even widely offered. The year groups are probably like two students.

Labour also has a huge risk from its "PAYE professional" base just not voting. But when you are as bad as Starmer and Reeves, where your voters are going is essentially everywhere.

As an empirical matter, it’s not that easy. There have been six PMs in the past decade and none did this.

Put it all together, and it’s not so surprising she’s really unpopular. Labour’s base doesn’t like her, neither do the swing voters the majority is based on, and obviously the political right won’t. Who’s left?

At second order, Reeves also talked about cutting welfare, but didn’t (paying the political cost for no policy gain). The identity stuff comes in as a higher order term, that it’s tough for a Jewish woman in Labour. She’d have to actually be good to not lose the base. And she’s not been.

He manages to express how bad it is without mentioning that it was written by Frank Black when Taylor was a toddler.

If only there were a country with a strong cultural connection to Canada that is also the world leading whisky producer, it would be possible to substitute a whole range of much better options.

They said they would stop the boats and instead reduced the number of international PGTs and people on work visas.

An under predicted POLAR5 was more likely to have been gated by asking rates. Opportunities to trade up in August are limited, so the incentive to reapply as PQ next cycle is relatively high. This is what we see in the data.

Green: pleasant surprise on results day! POLAR1 and POLAR5 students start in different positions, though. Contextual offers means that a POLAR1 would be able to apply more widely in the first place, and targets make AOs willing to do business, if you want to trade up.

Dark red: massive negative shock on results day. You probably missed your firm badly and insurance too. Clearing is there, but leaving the cycle without matriculating to reassess the whole plan is also an option.

Gray / light red: either no information or mildly negative information on results day. You very likely made either your firm or insurance offer, which now looks pretty attractive. Either way you take it. This is exactly how UCAS is supposed to match efficiently, and it shows in the figure.

Here's the main figure in the article. Let's go through the thought process in August for each color.

Watch this thread for more rigidity related conference news.

August: in a new one for me, I'm co-organising an invited track "Advances in Rigidity Theory, Multi-Agent Formations, and Distributed Localization" at the IFAC World Congress (a big control theory conference). I'm always excited to work with a new community!

May: ICMS has a workshop on "Rigid structures in algebraic combinatorics and algebraic statistics". Come check out this cool Scottish conference!

February: Timo de Wolff's group is organising a workshop on "Positivity, Convexity and Computation in Rigidity Theory". I'm really excited about this workshop, where I'll talk about the energy-based approach to higher order rigidity and prestress stability.

January: there's a Banff Chennai workshop on "Rigidity, Flexibility and Complexity of Geometric Constraint Systems". I've never been to India, and my postdoc Aliso la Porta will be presenting some new stuff, so generally exited about this one.