The current pandemic has and will continue to mutate the social landscape of the world, but amid the lost lives and spoiled economies in its wake has come a new appreciation of what science and scientists contribute.

“You don’t have to go back many months,” says Hetan Shah, the chief executive of the British Academy, “for a period when politicians were relatively dismissive of experts – and then suddenly we’ve seen a shift now to where they’ve moved very close to scientists.

“And generally that’s a very good thing.”

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Shah details how science, and social science in particular, has come to be deployed, how it’s been a force for good throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it can help policymakers understand and shape a better tomorrow.

Arguably, even before coronavirus the British Academy, a national body of humanities and social science scholars, has served in similar roles. In addition to its well-known body of fellows, the academy funds new research and serves as a forum to discuss humanities’ and social science’s role and impact beyond academe. Shah took the reins of the academy in February, having headed the Royal Statistical Association for the eight years previous.

Given that his time at the academy roughly mirrors COVID’s arrival on the world stage, he’s had to hit the ground running. “It’s also been very interesting to see the government using the term, ‘We are following the science.’”

This has been a prime opportunity for social science to show its importance for the public, but also a chance for the public to consider what science is and isn’t.

“There isn’t a single monolithic thing called ‘The Science,’” Shah explains, adding, “I think governments have recognized that the pandemic is not just a medical phenomenon but a social and economic one.”

But even within the subcommunities of science there’s no single ‘Answer’ to any given challenge. “It does feel to me the public has seemed to cope quite well and understood the level of uncertainty of the science. It’s an argument for treating the public as grown-ups.

“We are making decisions at speed. That data are limited and being gathered as we speak. This is how science happens. There may well be settled science on these matters [someday] – but that might take really quite a lot of time.

“This is why none of us envy our decisionmakers. They’re having to make decisions on imperfect knowledge.”

Even without those capital-A answers, established social science has been deployed to good effect already, Shah says.

“Anthropologists who wouldn’t have been surprised at all by the panic buying of toilet paper. They have known for a long, long time, rooted in the work of people like Mary Douglas, the cultural and symbolic importance of things like cleanliness and security in times of crises. “

As other examples he offers the campaigns detailing how best to wash your hands, the crafting of the United Kingdom’s economic package along needs rather than party lines, and how to enforce social distancing. It was social science that shows that rather than shaming – in essence, promoting -- the few people who are breaking rules, compliance increases if you praise those who are keeping the rules. And social science also helps address wicked problems that predate COVID but which now have new facets, such as the unequal impact the disease has on ethnic minority communities.

There’s even a lesson in how science gets applied, he suggests. Like those anthropologists …  “[A]nthropology seems like it’s for other people -- ‘Other people have strange customs; we’re normal in the West and what we do is normal’ – but I think the key is to bring an anthropological lens to our own behavior. What are the practices that we have and how can we change them?”

Arenas like critical thinking and psychology are also brought to bear tellingly on the home front: “Our leaders share our biases,” he tells Edmonds, before detailing a number of logical traps policymakers and the populace currently share.

The podcast closes out with a look to the future, both through specific initiatives Shah is part of, and in general. “I think there will be all sorts of fascinating data about how the pandemic has affected us,” including, he made clear higher education and academic research itself. Shah, meanwhile, is acting chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute, which while looking at technical solutions to COVID also draws on social science insights, i.e. in digital contact tracing, it was revealed that those most vulnerable to COVID were also least likely to have a smart phone.

And the British Academy itself, he noted, has a group of scholars assembled who will provide a rapid response to government inquiries and needs, as well as looking at some of the other implications of the future “that the government doesn’t have the bandwidth for.”

Depending on your views, far-right populism can represent a welcome return to the past , or a worrying one. The former, argues sociolinguist Ruth Wodak in this Social Science Bites podcast, is one of the hallmarks of far-right populism – a yearning for an often mythical past where the “true people” were ascendant and comfortable.

She’s termed this blurred look backward retrotopia, “a nostalgia for a past where everything was much better,” whether it was ever real or not.

Wodak, who to be clear finds herself worrying and not welcoming, offers host David Edmonds a recipe for becoming a far-right populist. In her scholarship, she’s identified four ingredients, or dimensions, to the ideology that often underlie populist far-right parties.

The most apparent from the outside is a strong national chauvinism or even nativism. This nativism is very exclusive to a specific set of insiders, who focus on creating “an anti-pluralist country, a country which is allegedly homogeneous, which has one kind of people who all speak the same language, have the same culture, or look the same. [Having] this imaginary ‘true people’ is very important.” is very, very important. Far-right populists decide who belongs and who does not belong to the ‘true people.’”

And just as important is then having a group of outsiders to cast as scapegoats responsible for major problems – making for “an easy narrative for very complex issues.” It’s probably no surprise, then, that “conspiracy theories are part and parcel of the far-right agenda. They are very supportive in constructing who is to blame, etc., for all the complex problems.”

Another ingredient is an anti-elitism that targets elites or ‘the establishment’, i.e. managers, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, liberals or your political opponents; “all the people who allegedly don’t listen to ‘us’ and who have very different interests from ‘the true people’.”

Next comes a focus on law and order (“an agenda of protecting this true people”) enforced through a hierarchal party structure. This top-down structure frequently focuses on a charismatic leader who encapsulates the spirit of the ‘true people’ – and rejects the ‘other.’ “Along with the scapegoat,” Wodak explains, “comes ‘the topos of the savior’ … the leader who will save the true American or the true Austrian or the true British people from those all dangers, they will ‘solve’ the problems, protect the people, and they promise hope.”

The final standard ingredient is endorsing conservative values and perceived cultural touchstones, such as Christianity in Europe.

This recipe matters, of course, thanks to the rise of far-right populist politics across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Wodak herself is Austrian – she’s professor in linguistics at the University of Vienna and emeritus distinguished professor and chair in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University – has seen plenty of recent natural experiments in populism throughout continental Europe.

She cites several reasons for the popularity of far-right populism, including the end of the Cold War and the resultant increase in migration from Eastern Europe into the West. Those migrants, previously seen as refugees from communism who were welcomed and even feted, morphed into unwelcome and fear-inducing interlopers (and despite being white and from Christian cultures). Around the same time, she continues, neo-liberal policies changed labor policies in the West, creating inequalities that the right could build on – just as they did in the pro-business responses to the global financial crisis of 2008 (“saving the banks instead of the people”) and globalization.

In this podcast, Wodak also discusses how right-wing populism makes use of social media, how exploiting “otherness” helps roll over self-interest, what the role of a social scientist is in exploring fraught ideologies, and how someone might counteract malign politics.

Wodak has studied right-wing discourse for years, work that is covered in 2015 book The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, which will see a second edition later this year. At present, she is senior visiting fellow at Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaft des Menschen where with  Markus Rheindorf she is examining “repoliticization from below.”

ichard Layard remembers being a history student sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library on a misty morning, reading philosopher Jeremy Bentham (he of the famed “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”). As he recounts to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, he thought, “Oh yes, this is what it’s all about.”

And while much has changed for the current Baron Layard FBA in the years since that epiphany, his laser-like focus on seeing happiness as the key product of any successful society has remained. Much of his effort as a labor (and Labour) economist has gone into popularizing the idea of happiness as the real measure of national success; he’s written extensively about the concept, ranging from his 2005 book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, to his latest, just released this year, Can We Be Happier? (written with George Ward). Layard is also co-editor, with John F. Helliwell and Jeffrey Sachs, of the World Happiness Report.

The fundamental impulse of a government, he insists, should be the creation of well-being, and not just wealth.

Three basic principles underlie happiness economics, Layard explains:

• “The way we judge the situation or the state of a nation is by the happiness of the people, especially the happiness of the least-happy people.”
• “We should try and produce the best state in the world that we can in the way that we live our lives and the people we touch or could touch. So we should be trying to produce the largest amount of happiness in the world that we can, especially taking into account the people who are least happy.”
• “Governments should also be trying to produce the greatest happiness in people, especially preventing misery. That was the view of Thomas Jefferson; I think it was the right view.”

While not spoken about in government circles nearly as much as say gross domestic product, these ideas aren’t revolutionary – both Bentham and Jefferson were active at the close of the 18^th century, after all.

“It always had some traction,” Layard says, “but I think it’s gaining more traction now, particularly because the new science of happiness is making it practical to aim at the happiness of people. And secondly, because people have become somewhat disillusioned with economic growth — even before the financial crash.” New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland – all with female prime ministers, he notes – all have budgets aimed at wellbeing.

In the podcast, Layard explains how a qualitative instrument – asking people how happy they are or are not – turns out be an excellent predictor of future lifespan, work productivity, and whether an incumbent government is re-elected. These happiness-generated predictions prove to be more accurate than predictions based on the economy. “Bill Clinton said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ I’m afraid he was the stupid one. … It is pretty clear in our mental fabric that how you feel is of ultimate importance, and these other things [such as wealth or health] are a means to that end.”

In 1990, Layard founded the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and was director of the center until 2003. His elevation to the House of Lords in 2000 was followed by some signal policy-oriented projects on happiness, mental health and even climate change. In addition to being a fellow of the British Academy, Layard was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2016.

With each new year comes a wave of good intentions as people aim to be better. They want to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer, drink less and smoke not at all. They want to change behavior, and as Susan Michie knows well, “behavior is related to absolutely everything in life.”

Michie is a clinical and health psychologist who leads the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London. She specializes in behavior related to health – for behavior or health practitioners, patients and population as a whole – and in looking at how behavior impacts the natural environment. And while you might think that the essentials of human behavior are pretty similar, one of the things Michie quickly tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast is that it can be unwise to jump to conclusions when studying behavior (or trying to change it).

She notes, for example, that lots of behavioral research is done in North America, where there’s relatively abundant funding for studies, “but the biggest need [for research] is often where there’s the least investment. There’s no point in developing an intervention based on research evidence conducted in parts of the world that are very far away from the type of context we want to implement the findings in – only to find out it’s not going to work.”

So yes, she says, do look at both the rigour of the research, but also base any potential application of the findings on deep understanding of local conditions and using local knowledge.

Michie and her team describe this using a model, COM B, to account for the ‘capability, ‘opportunity’ and ‘motivation’ necessary to change behavior.

Changing behaviors is important – “In order to solve any of these big social challenges we need people at different positions in society to change their behavior” -- so these considerations matter. But that begs the questions of what behaviors need changing – and who decides what those selected behaviors are..

“There’s a big issue about who decides what the key issues are,” Michie says. “But I think there are certain problems which are very self-evident – there are people dying unnecessarily as a result of smoking, obesity but also environmental conditions – poor housing, etc. There are areas where the social consensus is that things needs to change, and I’d say those are the ones we start with.”

In the interview, Michie also addresses the ethics of behavior change and how algorithms and machine learning will be “absolutely vital” to parse through all the relevant data . Her own Human Behaviour Change Project is a collaboration between behavioral scientists and computer scientists combing the global literature to see what works, with an initial focus on smoking cessation. A comprehensive tobacco control strategy, she details, involves those infamous “nudges” beloved of policy makers, but also the legislation, services and taxation, that need to work synergistically to effect real change.

Michie had a long career as a research fellow and clinician before joining the Psychology Department of University College London in 2002. She’s a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the European Health Psychology Society, the British Psychological Society and a Distinguished International Affiliate of the American Psychological Association. 

Henri Tajfel’s early life – often awful in the living, exciting in the retelling – gave the pioneering social psychologist the fodder for his life’s defining work: understanding the roots of prejudice.

Born one hundred years ago into a Jewish family in the dawn of an independent Poland created from the detritus of three disintegrated empires, he left Poland to study chemistry in France in the late 1930s. When the Germans dismembered Poland, Tajfel joins a Polish unit in the French army, and is ultimately captured by the Germans. He survived the war as a POW, even as the Nazis exterminated most of his family.

“From that moment on,” his biographer Rupert Brown explains to Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “one of his driving pre-occupations was to understand how could something like the Holocaust ever have happened.”

After the war, Tajfel worked in orphanages in France and Belgium and then in a displaced persons camp in Germany. At this time he met, and eventually married, a German Jewish woman who had emigrated to England before the war. This led him to move to Britain, where he studied and then taught psychology. His research at Oxford, and later and most notably at Bristol, focused on researching the cognitive roots of prejudice, discrimination and nationalism.

“[H]e made,” said Brown, “this really significant discovery that one doesn’t need very much to invoke inter-group discrimination and prejudice. Simply being told that you’re in one group or another seems to be enough to trigger that discrimination.”

Using a technique known as ‘minimal group experiments’ – creating kinship based on as little as what sort of abstract painting you like or what colour you prefer – Tajfel determined that “if you imposed categories on anything you are viewing or are living, people start exaggerating the differences between the two groups. He wondered, ‘Could we observe the same thing in a real behavioural situation?’”

Such questions conflicted with many of the then-prevailing notions of how prejudice arises, which Tajfel saw as too generic and too idiosyncratic. Based on the individual, they didn’t account for the clear historical precedent, Germany in the 1930s, that Tajfel saw firsthand (nor current examples like Islamophobia). Can that come down a particular personality or a particular level of frustration, Brown recounts Tajfel thinking. “He just thought that didn’t wash.”

As others have built on his insights, Tajfel’s own work now sounds much like conventional wisdom, even if Tajfel himself didn’t push into applications and left out issues like emotion and gender in his theorising. “In itself, social identity theory is rather an impoverished explanation for things like genocide, things like inter-group slaughter,” Brown says. “Because what does it say – ‘We want our group to be a little better than the other group,’ ‘we‘re looking for positive distinctiveness’? In trying to understand hatred, intergroup violence, we have to go beyond positive distinctiveness. There must be something else that drives people’s anger and hostility.”

Of late, Tajfel’s behaviour has overshadowed his contributions. He died in 1982, and in the 1960s and 1970s he was a serial sexual harasser of young women in his lab and elsewhere (and a difficult and demanding professor overall, as Brown, one of his former PhD students, confirmed). That legacy was known but ignored for years, and the European Association of Social Psychology instituted an important award for lifetime achievement in Tajfel’s name the year he died. This autumn, however, the Association rethought that decision; “naming an award after a person suggests that this individual is a role model as a scientist and beyond,” the organization stated as it announced renaming the award.

Brown does not shy away from the conduct in this podcast or in his new book, Henri Tajfel: Explorer of Identity and Difference. Nor does he defend it, although he does question the renaming: “The prize wasn’t given to recognise moral probity; it was given for contributions to the discipline.” (Brown’s research and his book were supported by a major research fellowship by The Leverhulme Trust and the European Association of Social Psychology itself.)

Brown is an emeritus professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex and himself won a Tajfel medal in 2014. Among his achievements are writing several important texts on social identity and prejudice, including co-authoring Social Identity Processes in 2000 for the parent of Social Science Space, SAGE Publishing.

Living in a loosely regulated society, the very term “social norms” can be vaguely threatening, as if these norms are a threat to freedom always lurking on the periphery. But cultural psychologist Michele J. Gelfand says norms are not the enemy – they are one of our most important inventions.

“Culture,” she says, “is this set of values, norms, and assumptions about the world that we’re socialized into from the time we’re babies. We follow social norms and we need social norms to navigate. It’s really an incredible human invention that helps us predict each other’s behavior and coordinate on large-scales on a regular basis.”

That said, Gelfand definitely understands that social norms can seem threatening – or reassuring – based on your perch. That’s the basis of her substantial body of scholarship, and it’s a concept neatly encapsulated in her 2016 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.

In her work and her book, Gelfand explores the continuum between “tight cultures,” which strictly enforce and adhere to social norms (think Singapore), and “loose cultures,” which are much more permissive (such as the United States). But in all cultures norms, are, well, normal. We’re constantly following norms – Gelfand points out how people always face the door of an elevator as they ride up and down – and it’s only when we break them that we realize how important they are.

“Social norms are the glue,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “that keep people together.” How much glue do we need? Gelfand describes the “simple tradeoff” between tight and loose cultures: tight opts for more order and so reaps some of the hallmarks of that, like less crime and more uniformity and more self-control, while loose aims for openness, which can result in more creativity, tolerance for differences, and openness to change.

Gelfand also discusses factors that cause the evolution of these differences. One major contributor is the degree to which groups face ecological and human threats (think constant fury from Mother Nature or the threat of invasions). Groups that have a lot of threat need more rules to coordinate to survive—so they tighten, while groups that have less threat can afford to be more permissive. Other factors that promote the need for coordination also lead to tightness (like working in agriculture versus hunting and gathering).

Asked if her depiction is a little too neat, Gelfand tells Edmonds she “love[s] the exceptions ... no theory can be a one-to-one prediction.” Plus, her descriptions are “dynamic constructs – they are not static – they can change over time.” As an example, during times of external threat, looser cultures may tighten  up (although it takes much longer, she notes, for tight cultures to get demonstrably looser when pressure wanes).

While Gelfand avoids saying one direction is better or worse than the other (and it is a spectrum, not a binary), the extremes of both – tight to repression, loose to chaos – are a concern. She notes that people experiencing either extreme, whether in a company or a country or a household, become dysfunctional. She calls this “the Goldilock’s principle of Tight-Loose”—and argues that groups that are getting too tight need to insert some discretion (what she calls “flexible tightness”) while groups that are getting too loose need to inserts some structure  (what she calls “structured looseness”).

Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology and affiliate of the RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where she runs the interdisciplinary Culture Lab in the school’s the Social Decision and Organizational Sciences group. As she says on the lab’s ‘About’ page, “We work with computer scientists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and--increasingly--biologists to understand all things cultural.”

In addition to her best-selling book, Gelfand has seen outside validation, such as from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which elected her to membership in 2019; from the American Psychological Association, which named her the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist; and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, which gave her its Diener Award in 2016 and Outstanding Cultural Psychologist award in 2019; or the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which bestowed its Annaliese Research Award. 

When a mother with minor children is imprisoned, she is far from the only one facing consequences. Their children can end up cared for in multiple placements, they’re often unable to attend school and they’re stigmatised.

These effects on the children of the incarcerated, although predictable, have been poorly understood precisely because almost no one has done that. But Minson, who practiced both criminal and family law before entering academe, did. Following up on issues she’d seen in her work as a lawyer and after taking a master’s at the University of Surrey, she interviewed children, their caregivers and members of the Crown Court judiciary to see both how having a mom locked up affected children and how sentencing decisions that created those situations came about.

Furthermore, she shared her findings with the authorities. “I didn’t realize,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “that academics didn’t normally try to change things.”

And while that action might have been somewhat out of the ordinary , what happened next is even more unusual: the authorities listened. After telling the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights about her findings in March 2018, the committee held an enquiry centered on the rights of the children of the imprisoned, and on Tuesday, 1 October, new guidelines were released with the aim of strengthening female offenders' family and other relationships. Existing systemic problems, she believes, can be “more of a blind spot than a deliberate dismissal of these children.”

While the policy affect was likely the most gratifying reward, she also received this year’s Outstanding Early Career Impact Prize awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council in association with SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space).

In this podcast, Minson explains that the lack of research into the children of imprisoned women echoes scant data on the mothers themselves. No one knows exactly how many mothers are locked up in England and Wales because that information isn’t collected, but a “best” guess follows by multiplying the results of a 1997 study that found 61 percent of women in prison were mothers by the rough daily headcount of 3,800 women in prison. Of that estimated maternal population of 2,300, most are single mothers incarcerated up to 60  miles from home, leaving their children in the hands of a variety of carers, ranging from grandparents to friends to, as a last resort, a local authority.

“Most people don’t want their children to go into the care system,” Minson relates, “because it can be very, very difficult to get them back again. And often short sentences are given women ... so if they lose their children into care at that point, it can be years before they have them back even though they’ve only been in prison a few months.”

But those informal arrangements are also fraught, with children often living in multiple places during their mom’s confinement. And because these particular children are not recognized as ‘children in need,’ they get no priority in school places – so carry-on issues with not being in school, stigma because their mother is in prison, and resulting damage to education all plant seeds for future problems. And some not so-future ones ...

“Most of the children that I met just describe themselves as sad,” Minson says. “They have this huge grief, and therapists have written about this, whether it’s a disenfranchised grief where you’re almost unentitled to it, or an ambiguous loss because of the uncertainty – a person hasn’t died, but you don’t know when they’re coming back and you can’t talk about in the way you might if your parents separated or divorced.”

In this podcast, Minson discusses why she chose not to interview the imprisoned mothers for her research, the surprising lack of knowledge about child issues she saw in the judges she talked with, and how new court rulings are opening up non-custodial sentencing options for some mothers.

Minson is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, where she is continuing to study children’s rights, this time in the wake of both custodial and non-custodial sentences.

One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that you can’t tell from the actions themselves why they have to be done that way – and that fascinates anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. By his own admission, what intrigues the statutory chair in social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford is that ritual is “behavior that is ‘causally opaque’ – by which I mean it has no transparent rational causal structure. 

“[Rituals] are that way,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Space podcast, “simply because by cultural convention and general stipulation that is the done and proper way to carry out the behavior.”

Rituals can range from collective events like funerals, initiations, political installations and liturgies to private acts like bedtime prayers or self-crossing before a crucial meeting. One thing that unites all of these is that they are faithfully copied and passed down through the generations.

While the psychological causes of the ritual impulse are inherently interesting, Whitehouse’s work also examines the consequences of ritual, and how rites can produce different intensities of social glue depending on their frequency and emotionality.

For example, painful or frightening initiations tend to produce very strong  “social glue,” “fusing” individuals into a larger whole. This insight, partially derived from a visit to Libya in 2011 to study the groups engaged in the effort to overthrow Moammar Ghadafi, has implications, for example, in addressing extremism.

By contrast some groups use “high frequency but relatively dull and boring rituals in order to establish a set of identity markers that can be maintained without radical mutation”. Here the focus is more on ensuring conformity across a large population.

Whitehouse’s own journey into studying religiosity (“I’m not religious myself but deeply fascinated by what makes people religious”) and ritual also are covered in the podcast. As a young academic, Whitehouse started by doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea focused on economic anthropology. “The people I ended up living with for two years, deep in the rain forest, were very interested in telling me about their religious ideas and ritual practices. They were the ones who got me into the topic.”

It was less, he added, that they wanted to proselytize and more that “they got bored with my questions about production and consumption and exchange and all these boring economic things. I think people were starting to want to avoid me when they saw me coming with my notebooks.” 

Whitehouse has created a number of academic research groups and is co-founder of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts at Harris Manchester College in 2014 and is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion established last year.

In the most recent 12-month period for which is has data, the Trussell Trust – the largest foodbank trust in the United Kingdom – the trust passed out 1.6 million food parcels, with 500,000 of those going to children. More than 90 percent of the food donated came from the public, often though prompts seen supermarkets, and the remaining 10 percent came from corporations.

Social scientist Kayleigh Garthwaite wanted to know more about the people behind those figures. Spurred on by numbers cited by politicians in a debate over foodbanks, she wondered, “What was it like for people to go to the foodbank? Why did they go there? Was there any stigma or shame?

“I think the debate about why people use the foodbanks has become really politicized to the point where apparently individual faults and failings are the reason why people are using them,” tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. To find out, Garthwaite engaged in some immersive sociology and volunteered to work at a Trussell foodbank. She went to the foodbank in northern England’s city of Stockton, deploying ethnographic methods to learn from the workers and the food recipients.

While Stockton was close to where Garthwaite earned her bachelors, masters and doctorate – in sociology, social research methods and human geography respectively -- at Durham University, Stockton also has the highest health inequalities in England. Statistically, those living in the city core will on average live 17 fewer years than someone in an affluent area just a few miles away.

After 18 months at the foodbank, with 40,000 words in filed notes already, Garthwaite decided to write a book, and in 2016, Hunger Pains: Life inside foodbank Britain, came out. The book is unique, both an social scientific investigation of foodbank and a diary of Garthwaite’s journey, sprinkled at various times with her trenchant observations about those who judge the hungry and those who hunger.

And getting food isn’t automatic. Someone wanting a parcel of three days’ worth of emergency food – mainly processed, long-life foods, with fresh fruits and vegetables part of the package when available – must be referred by a so-called “referring care professional” like a teacher or social worker.

“When you get into the foodbank you realize there is that bureaucracy of access in the red voucher in the first place, so people can’t just turn up and say, ‘Please give me food.’” Some have criticized the moral outsourcing involved in this vetting: “This voucher system already has that deserving or undeservedness built into it.” There was a benefit to Garthwaite as an academic; “Me, as a researcher, I didn’t want to be in that position of deciding whether somebody should or should not be receiving food.”

Rather than finding that most people spent their disposable cash on cigarettes and alcohol and then decided to hit up the local foodbank, Garthwaite says there are structural reasons that lead people to sue foodbanks. Even if people are buying cigarettes, she added, “that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to food.” She cites ‘Paul,’ who visited her foodbank at least nine times – and who spent his ready money on alcohol, drugs and food for his dog, But his “complex problems,” including being an ex-felon and having mental health issues, defied simple strictures on being deserving or not.

“People really did use the foodbank as a last resort; it wasn’t something they enjoyed doing.”

Garthwaite is currently a Birmingham University Fellow in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology. Off campus, she is a trustee of Independent Food Aid Network, a member of the Oxfam UK Poverty Policy Advisory Group and of the Trussell Trust ‘State of Hunger’ Advisory Board.

“I cannot count the number of people who’ve told me on Twitter, ‘Of course immigrants increase British unemployment! Of course immigrants drive down wages. It’s just the law of supply and demand.’ And it’s an almost infallible rule that people who say that do not understand basic economics and do not understand supply and demand, because immigration adds to both supply and demand.”

So recounts Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at the School of Politics & Economics of King's College, London and the former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Portes is explaining to interviewer David Edmonds how the “lump of labor fallacy” -- that there’s only a certain number of jobs to go around when in fact the number of jobs in an economy is not fixed – often plays out in the popular debate on immigration. “The key here,” Portes adds, “is that immigration leads to demand as well as supply.”

The economist has a long and storied career in British economics, having been chief economist at the Department for Work and Pensions before his stint in Cabinet and then director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research from February 2011 until October 2015. His latest achievement is the release of What Do We Know, and What Should We Do About Immigration, one of three books in the debut release of SAGE Publishing’s new ‘What Do We Know’ series of social science explainers. (SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space.)

One of the things that he definitely knows is that for anyone who sees immigration as an unalloyed evil (or boon, for that matter) is certainly mistaken. He likens immigration to trade, which is generally reckoned to be a good thing. “Trade and immigration are in some way very closely analogous and that the results that you get about the overall benefits – with the possible issue of distributional consequences – are very similar.” Those ‘distributional consequences,’ of course, often get the outsize headlines.

“The UK has always been a country of immigration in some ways, going right back to the Norman conquests, if you like” Portes observes. Pre-European Union, surges in immigration often came from  refugees like the Huguenots or from commonwealth countries. “Step change,” he adds, did not accompany immediate entry in the EU, but did in the 1990s. “It coincided with Tony Blair’s government and some of the policy changes that Blair introduced, but it wasn’t driven by that, but by globalization.” The number of arrivals tripled from about 50,000 a year net migration to 150,000 a year. Another jump came in 2004, when workers in the new Eastern European member states in the EU – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia – flocked to an open UK labor market.

He offers quick correlation to test the direst worries about the continuing influx. He looks at two decades of heavy immigration into the UK, in particular in the last five years, and then at the unemployment figure, at 4 percent the lowest since the current way of measuring joblessness were instituted. “It doesn’t prove anything, because of course there are lots of other things going on. But it does sort of tell you that if immigration really had a big negative effect on the employment of natives, that’s not really consistent with the aggregate data.”

Portes admits that there’s more to immigration that employment and wages; those just where the good data reside. “It’s much harder when you’re looking at more complicated issues – business startups, productivity, innovation. There is some evidence that immigration has had positive impacts ... but its more suggestive and more qualitative.”

So ever the academic, he does caveat. But being the former bureaucrat, he also interpolates. Portes offers Edmonds the example of British higher education. “Instinct tells me that [immigration has] been good. Would we have the world-leading universities that we have in London if we had to solely rely on Brits to fill the jobs? I think it’s almost inconceivable that we would.”