RETAILERS across the UK are charging hefty returns fees to customers who change their minds on orders.

In some cases, brands are simply passing on courier fees, but other high street names are enforcing a charge for every parcel sent back.

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For instance, PrettyLittleThing recently implemented a charge of £1.99 per item returned.

In February, River Island angered customers by introducing a £2 charge to return items ordered online.

The retailer also said it would ban some customer accounts if they made too many returns.

And H&M brought in a £1.99 fee in September last year.

It’s worth noting that most retailers in the UK still allow free returns in store, although not all will let you return goods bought online this way.

Richard Hyman, a retail expert and partner at Thought Provoking Consulting said: “Online retail has always found making money challenging. People may imagine without rents to pay the economics are better. But returns tend to erode margins. 

“The cost of dealing with huge amounts of product sent back are huge. Belatedly, retailers are realising they need to start charging and growing number are.” 

He added that some retailers are offering free returns for bigger order sizes but that risks encouraging still more returns from oversized orders, which could leave retailers struggling once more.

Hyman says he believes that charging for returns will very soon be the order of the day but points out that very few retailers are actually passing on the entire cost.

He explained: “Most charges fall way below what is a rapidly increasing cost to retailers.” 

Delivery charges should be clearly visible on the website, as they form the basic terms and conditions of the sale.

However, an recent investigation by The Sun found that costs and courier charges were sometimes buried in terms and conditions meaning customers might not know about them at point of purchase.

And despite the trend towards charging, there are still lots of high street names that offer free returns.

We’ve rounded up the ones we could find that are totally free, only charge for postage, or only impose a fee if parcels weigh over a certain amount.

Amazon UK

Amazon says that it offers free returns for most items that are sent back within 30 days as long as they are unused and undamaged.

It adds that most of its sellers do the same. Often, a free returns label is included with your package.

It says that it will issue a refund for a product shipped by Amazon, within a maximum of 14 days and confirm it with an automated e-mail.

Argos

Argos offers free returns for most of the things that it sells. 

If you’ve changed your mind and need to return an item, you have 30 days from the date of collection or from the date of delivery to return your item(s).

Your item(s) needs to be:

• Unused and with all original components
• In its original packaging (with the tags if applicable)
• In a resaleable condition with security seals intact (where applicable)
• With its proof of purchase
• With any free items that came with the product

However, if you’re returning a made to order furniture item, you have to pay a non-refundable £25 charge, unless the product is faulty.

Apple

Apple says you can return purchases within 14 days for free. The product must be in its original condition with all of its parts, accessories, and packaging.

Returned products may require inspection. If approved, a refund or exchange will be issued within 10 business days.

If you bought an Apple product from another retailer, you will need to follow that store’s returns policies and procedures.

Asda

Asda has a generous online returns policy, where most things can be returned within 30 days if you change your mind. You need to show proof of purchase.

On top of that, it has a 100-day satisfaction guarantee on George clothing and some George home products.

Fashion and homeware items that do not have the 100-day guarantee and must be returned within 30 days include pierced jewellery, hair accessories, mattresses, and furniture.

Swimwear can be returned for a refund under the Changed Your Mind policy, only when the hygiene seals are in place and have not been removed.  

Marks & Spencer

M&S’ standard returns policy is 35 days for both online and in-store purchases, except sale items, which must be returned within 14 days.

Clothing or homeware items can only be returned at main clothing and home stores and outlet items can also only be returned to outlet stores. 

M&S says all items need to be in their original condition, which means:

• Item(s) should be in an unworn and unused condition
• Multi-pack items must all be returned together
• 3 for 2 items can be returned individually but will be refunded based on the promotional price paid
• If the original purchase contained a free item, this item must also be returned
• Items with hygiene seals must be returned with the seals intact (swimwear, underwear, duvets, etc)
• Beauty products must be returned with their tamper seals intact

Returns that are incomplete, unsaleable or do not meet these conditions may be rejected, with all or part of the original price paid withheld.

ASOS

ASOS says that returns in the UK are free and trackable, as long as you don’t fall foul of its “fair use policy” and you return things within 28 days.

It says that for the small group of customers who consistently take actions that make providing them with free returns unsustainable, it deducts and retains £3.95 from their refund to help cover the cost of getting the goods back.

It says that it uses an objective formula based on shopping behaviour, taking into account whether someone has made particularly excessive returns well beyond the average, as well as the number and value of orders made.

Even if you fall into this group, you still get free returns if:

• You keep £40 or more of any order and are a non-Premier customer; or  
• You keep £15 or more of any order and are a Premier customer.   

ASOS adds that some things cannot be returned for health and hygiene reasons including:

• Face + Body products if opened, used or the protective seal is not intact.
• Underwear if the hygiene seal is not intact or any labels have been broken.
• Swimwear if the hygiene seal is not intact or any labels have been broken.
• Pierced jewellery if the seal has been tampered with or is broken.
• Face coverings if the seal has been tampered with or is broken.

John Lewis

John Lewis says that you can return or exchange an unwanted item for free up to 30 days after you receive it. 

The item you’re returning must:

• Be unused, with all its labels and tags intact.
• Not contain personal data or have been registered with the manufacturer (for phones, computers and other tech products).

Small items can be returned in store at John Lewis, Waitrose, or one of its return locations. For larger items you will need to arrange a return online, with a £29.95 collection fee.

Boots

Boots says you can return any unwanted items free of charge within 35 days for a refund or replacement.

It says it will not provide a refund if goods are not returned in a saleable condition or are damaged (unless they arrived damaged).

Electrical and photographic equipment will only be accepted if complete with all leads, accessories and software. Any software must have its original seal intact.

Unless faulty, medicines, food, personalised gifts or cosmetic products which have been opened cannot be refunded or exchanged.

If you want to return things by post, you will need to download and fill out a returns form, and create a returns label with Royal Mail.

You need to post it yourself as Boots says it cannot accept returns that have been collected by Royal Mail.

Sports Direct

Sports Direct says you can return goods for a refund within 28 days, but you’ll have to pay your own postage.

All items must have not been used, worn, or washed and must in their original packaging with all tags attached.

You can’t take goods bought online into a store for a refund.

Currys

If you purchased from Currys online, you can return your item within 30 days even if you have opened it for inspection. 

To obtain a full refund, it must be returned as new and in a resaleable condition.

This means:

• You must not use it
• It should be in the original packaging
• Return it complete with all accessories
• The item must not contain any personal data
• The item must not have been registered with the manufacturer

Once you have used a product, you can only return it if it is faulty or not as described

If you purchased in store, you can return your item within 30 days in its unopened and sealed packaging along with proof of purchase.

O2

02 says that if you want to return a device or accessory you can return it within 14 days for a refund. If you’d like to exchange it, just complete the return and place a new order.

For hygiene reasons, some accessories (like earphones) are exempt from the 14-day change of mind policy once they’ve been opened.

Very

Very has a 28-day approval guarantee, which means most items can be returned free of charge.

To do this you need to go to the ‘Returns’ tab in My Account online or the ‘My Orders’ tab in the app within the 28-day approval guarantee period.

Next, select the items you wish to return

Choose Yodel store or Post Office and click ‘Get Label’ and follow the steps on screen to generate your code.

Fill in the reason to return code in the box on the advice note for each item you are returning and place the form and all items inside the parcel

Drop your parcel at your selected Yodel store or Post Office and show your code. The returns address label will be printed for you.

Next says that, if possible, customers should return all items in the same parcel.

IKEA

IKEA says that almost all items can be returned within 365 days, even if they’ve been assembled.

However, it says it is unable to offer refunds or exchange for custom made worktops, food or drinks.

If the item weighs less than 10kg and can fit in a parcel of 60x50x50cm or less, it can be returned for free using Yodel.

However, for larger items, unless you’re happy to take them to a store, you’ll need to arrange collection which will cost you £25.

Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s says you can return items within 30 days, in their original condition and with proof of purchase, to any of its stores.

The following products are not refundable unless faulty:

• Baby food and milk
• Chilled and frozen products
• Entertainment items where the seal is broken
• Photo books, acrylics and canvases bought from the photo shop
• Gift cards, e top-ups, lottery tickets, scratch cards and postage stamps

For hygiene reasons, Sainsbury’s doesn’t offer refunds on earrings.

Medicine bought from the shop floor can be returned for a refund or exchange, however it must be sealed, in its original packaging.

Screwfix

Screwfix offers free returns within 30 days of purchase under its moneyback guarantee scheme. There are several ways to return items to Screwfix, including: 

• In-store: Return items to a nearby Screwfix store 
• By post: Use the FREEPOST service to return items to a local Post Office 
• By carrier collection: Arrange a free collection by calling Screwfix on 03330 112 112 or emailing online@screwfix.com

Non-faulty items should be unused and in a saleable condition and with their original packaging. You must make sure you return all component parts and any promotional items or free gifts

House of Fraser

House of Fraser offers free returns within 28 days, but you have to pay for your own postage.

All items must have not been used, worn, or washed and must be in their original packaging with all tags attached.

Personalised items will not be accepted unless the text is incorrect, or the item is faulty

Underwear, swimwear and pierced jewellery cannot be returned for hygiene reasons

Items which deteriorate or expire rapidly, magazines, items that are sealed for hygiene reasons, computer games with the seal broken or any items that have been inseparably mixed after delivery, cannot be returned

Halfords

If you change your mind about your Halfords purchase within 30 days, you can return to any of its 400+ stores. 

If you bought your item online, you can send back to the distribution centre for a full refund, but you’ll need to pay for your own postage. For larger items, if you need Halfords to arrange a Courier, you will have to pay £40.

The item must be unused, clean and in its original packaging.

Littlewoods

You can return your Littlewoods orders completely free with Yodel. Just select the order you’d like to return in your account and follow the instructions.

Yodel can only accept parcels under 10kg in weight and with maximum dimensions of 90x60x60cm.

Heavier parcels need to be returned by the Post Office, and you will need to pay for delivery.

JD Sports

Items bought at JD Sports can be returned free of charge either in store or using the note that comes in your parcel.

If you need to arrange a courier, then a £2.50 charge applies.

Matalan

You can return items to Matalan stores free of charge, but you can also send them back using the online returns tool.

The parcel should contain the items you want to return, in their original condition, as well as your original delivery note with the returns section fully completed.

There’s no charge for returning the item, but you do have to pay postage unless the item was damaged or faulty. 

To qualify for the refunds policy, all items must be in a re-saleable condition i.e. undamaged, in their original and undamaged packaging, unworn and complete with all tags and labels attached.

Smyth’s Toys

Smyth’s Toys offers free returns both online and by post, within 28 days.

If you want to send things back, it will generate a returns label for you which you can bring to your nearest DHL Service Point. This allows returns for parcels up to 20kg.

For larger items, you need to contact customers services, and charges may apply.

All items must be unused, unopened, and in their original condition and packaging.

In-store returns must be accompanied by a valid Smyths Toys receipt whereas online returns must include your dispatch confirmation email including your order reference (UK) number.

Dunelm

Dunelm’s “Change of Mind” policy allows customers to return products (subject to exclusions) within 28 days of purchase

To get a refund, you must ensure the product is unused and in its original condition (including all packaging, and tags and hygiene and security seals intact) and have your Dunelm receipt or order confirmation.

Certain items are excluded including those that are made to measure, cut to length, perishable, sold as ex-display, or gift cards.

Superdrug

Superdrug allows free returns both online and in store within 28 days.

This excludes the following:

• Marketplace Orders
• perishable items (e.g. food and baby milk)
• medicines
• items personalised for you
• sealed products which are not suitable for return due to health or hygiene reasons if unsealed after delivery (unless these items were damaged or faulty when delivered to you or have been incorrectly delivered)

To return items by post you need to get a Royal Mail freepost return label, which you can find here. Make sure that you get a proof of postage receipt from the post office.

H&M

If you’re an H&M member, then postal returns are free. However, if you don’t sign up then you have to pay £1.99 per parcel.

Becoming a member costs nothing, so it’s worth doing if you think you’ll want to order something online.

Poundland

You can return most products that you buy through Poundland within 28 days from the date of purchase.

The exceptions to the refund and return policy include: 

• bespoke, “made to order”, created to your specification or clearly personalised;
• sealed for health protection or hygiene purposes, if have received these items and unsealed them;
• perishables, such as flowers or fresh food or drink products;
• sealed audio, video recordings or computer software, if you have received these items and unsealed them;
• pharmaceutical products, if the hygiene sealed packaging has been opened or tampered with;
• pierced jewellery items, if the hygiene sealed packaging has been opened or tampered with; and
• underwear or swimwear, if the hygiene label has been removed or tampered with.

You need to send returns back to Poundland Digital Unit 5, Dearne Mls, Darton, Barnsley, S75 5NH and you’ll have to pay for your own postage.

Poundland says you should include a note that includes information such as your order number, name, and the items you wish to return within the parcel.

Game

Game offers free returns both online and in store, but you’ll need to pay postage costs if you’re sending something back.

You can’t return things bought online in store for free, either.

You need to return items within 28 days, and you’ll need valid proof of purchase.

Products must also be returned in a resaleable condition.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

By Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and Lewis Krauskopf

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The reverberations from a blowout U.S. employment number could threaten an assortment of trades predicated on falling interest rates, if stronger-than-expected growth spurs investors to radically shift views on how much the Federal Reserve will need to cut borrowing costs in the months ahead.

Expectations of steep rate cuts spurred bets on everything from rising Treasury prices to a weaker dollar in recent months, while juicing corners of the stock market such as utilities. The Fed delivered a jumbo-sized 50 basis-point cut last month, temporarily vindicating that view.

But the trajectory of rates is less certain after Friday’s labor market report, which showed the U.S. economy creating over 100,000 more jobs than expected last month. That suggests there is less need for more large cuts this year and raises the prospects of a reversal in many of the trades that hinged on lower rates.

Futures tied to the fed funds rate on Friday showed traders had ruled out another 50 basis-point cut at the central bank’s November meeting. Market pricing on Thursday reflected a greater than 30% chance for such a cut, according to CME FedWatch.

Here is a look at some corners of the market that could be affected in a rates rethink.

DOLLAR REBOUND

Net bets on a weaker dollar stood at $12.91 billion in futures markets last week, the highest level in about a year, data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed, after the dollar notched its worst quarter in nearly two years.

But the dollar shot to a seven-week high against a basket of currencies on Friday and may have more gains ahead if bearish investors are forced to unwind their bets.

“Dollar bears had unquestionably gotten too far over their skis coming into this week, and are now suffering the consequences,” Karl Schamotta, chief market strategist at payments company Corpay in Toronto.

TREASURY REVERSAL

Bets on a stronger-than-expected economy could also accelerate a recent rebound in Treasury yields. Yields on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury, which move inversely to bond prices, hit a 15-month low of 3.6% in September, as investors rushed to price in rate cuts.

That move has reversed in recent days. Yields hit 3.985% on Friday, following the data, their highest level in about two months.

Zhiwei Ren, portfolio manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management, said the jobs report was a big surprise that went against “consensus and crowded trades” in the Treasury market that bet on bond prices rising as rates fell further.

Story continues

HEDGE DEMAND

Expectations of economic strength could also push investors to turn their focus from options hedges to chase further stock market gains, spurring more upside in the S&P 500, according to Charlie McElligott, managing director of cross-asset strategy at Nomura.

As investors chase upside “it could quite rationally act as the fuel for the melt-up to 6,000 and beyond,” he wrote. That would constitute a gain of about 4%.

In options markets, various measures of skew – a gauge of relative demand for downside protection versus upside speculation – have remained elevated after hitting their highest levels of the year in an August stock sell-off, even as the S&P 500 recovered.

The benchmark stock index rose 0.9% on Friday and finished at 5,751.07, near a fresh high.

“The rip higher post the massive Labor data ‘beats’ tells you people don’t have ‘right tail’ on,” McElligott said, referring to the possibility of an extremely large rise in stock prices.

A countervailing force in the short term, however, may be a too-sharp rise in yields that could dim the allure of stocks compared to bonds, said Jeffrey Schulze, head of economic and market strategy at ClearBridge Investments, in a note on Friday. The 10-year yield is still about 100 basis points below where it stood a year ago.

“However, this release should be positive over the intermediate-term for risk assets generally and US equities in particular as economic growth expectations should improve on the back of today’s release,” he added.

BYE TO BOND PROXIES?

Investors may also need to rethink trades in some stock sectors that came in to favor as yields fell.

Among those are the market’s bond proxies, high dividend-paying stocks in sectors that had grown popular with income-seeking investors as yields fell. One such area, the S&P 500 utilities sector, is up 28% year-to-date, compared with a 20.6% gain for the S&P 500.

“The economy may not be in as much trouble as people were worried about, and it may not need these large rate cuts that fueled the interest in the higher-yielding areas of the market,” said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth.

(Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and Lewis Krauskopf in New York; Additional reporting by Davide Barbuscia in New York; Editing by Ira Iosebashvili and Matthew Lewis)

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In her new podcast Mind Your Own, Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o tells stories from her life. Yes, I know how that sounds — another Hollywood star blathering on about their journey to success. But this is emphatically not one of those pods. Not only does Mind Your Own avoid the navel-gazing that frequently blights celebrity-hosted series, it is also tightly edited and produced and has a clear objective: to be a repository of tales by and for the African diaspora.

Each episode contains two or more self-contained stories that can be listened to in any order. Nyong’o opens the series with “The Sound of Home”, in which she movingly reflects on the evolution of her accent (she was born in Mexico to Kenyan parents). When she began acting, she worked with voice coaches to stamp out her Kenyan accent and sound American for auditions.

“I knew that Africa was the unknown element and I didn’t want it in the room,” she explains. But later she came to the realisation: “I had rid myself of myself.” And so Nyong’o called her agents and told them she wished to return to her original accent and “to send a message that being African is enough.” These days her accent has traces of Kenyan, British and American, an apt reflection of her life so far.

The next story comes from a Ghanaian man named Yaw Atta-Owusu whose music, recorded in the mid-1990s under the name Ata Kak, went ignored for decades. But then the collector and archivist Brian Shimkovitz came upon a cassette of Atta-Owusu while he was visiting Ghana’s Cape Coast, uploaded the music on to his blog, and set about tracking down its creator. By the time he found him years later, Atta-Owusu was a hero of underground music and his song “Obaa Sima” a cult hit.

In her introduction to Mind Your Own, Nyong’o notes that the title is typically an admonishment but also works as an invitation “to mind your own people and take care of them.” There are echoes here of The Moth, the US storytelling series that underlines the breadth and wonder in everyday human experience.

But that’s not to say these stories are ordinary. The second episode features a tale so wild, if it were a movie you’d think it too farfetched. It concerns a Kenyan career thief named John Kibera who, having observed how the rich were being buried in gold coffins, took to graverobbing. But when the police were called on him and his accomplices in the middle of a job, circumstances led Kibera to hide in the coffin he had stolen and pretend to be a corpse, only to jump out as police were loading it into a van. Fast-forward to the present and, after a spell in jail, Kibera is now — of all things — a motivational speaker warning youngsters that crime doesn’t pay.

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The Official Project Censored Show

The Stranglehold of Silence: Suppression of Free Speech in the Israel/Palestine Conflict

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In the first half of the show, Eleanor sits down with bestselling author and Emmy-nominated filmmaker James Bamford to discuss Israel’s nefarious attacks on our rights to free speech and assembly here in the US. Bamford shares details about the clearly illegal activity of foreign agents working to suppress movements and actions for Palestinian rights, and how our government turns a blind eye to all of this in the name of supporting Israel.

Next up, Mickey Huff sits down with seasoned journalist and science writer Peter Byrne to talk about the media censorship of one of his recent articles which covered protests against the genocide in Gaza. Byrne discusses the sad habit that many local media outlets have of caving to pressure on the Israel/Palestine issue, how ad dollars drive news, and more.

Support our work at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks, everyone, for joining us back at the Project Censored radio show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by James Bamford, who’s a best selling author, Emmy nominated filmmaker for PBS, and winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting for his writing in Rolling Stone.

His most recent book is Spy Fail: Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, published by Twelve Books. James, thanks so much for joining us.

James Bamford: Yeah, my pleasure.

Eleanor Goldfield: So I wanted to start back in 2015 in Vegas, which I hope never to go back to, in a network-esque setting where billionaires plot in evil boardrooms. The birth of an attack on the people of the United States, people who are exercising their rights of free speech and free assembly in the case of support for Palestine against the apartheid regime of Israel.

And you’ve recently written an article where you mention this Project Butterfly , a brainchild of Israeli psychological warfare firm Psy Group that, according to their own documentation, which you link to in the article, “a multi vector offensive effort to significantly limit and thwart those individuals and organizations seeking to delegitimize and demonize Israel.”

So wow, James, starting here, what can you tell us about this project and the remarkably creepy and invasive means that it’s used to try and thwart Palestinian support in the United States?

James Bamford: Well, it started, like you said, in Vegas. It was in a hotel owned by Sheldon Adelson, the Venetian Resort, a huge hotel in Las Vegas.

So an invitation was sent out to a number of very wealthy people, friends and colleagues and so forth of Adelson and his group, and they were asked to come to Las Vegas for a very secret meeting. They were told, or they were asked before, you know, before, during and after the meeting: no mention at all to the press, to be kept very confidential and so forth.

At the meeting, Adelson got up on the stage and read a letter from Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel basically saying we’re forming a task force to try to quiet or limit, or silence critics of Israel, particularly the critics who are calling for a boycott, the BDS organization.

And, the task force required a lot of money. So he was asking for contributions as well as help. So the group there, they were basically Gulfstream warriors, they all flew in on private jets, or at least most of them. And, that night, this group, small group, a couple hundred people in this room contributed I think it was 50 million dollars to the cause.

At around the same time, Netanyahu said they would put in 30 million from the government. And hopefully with contributions from others, pro-Israelis in the US and so forth, they would get up to 900 million, almost a billion dollars for this effort.

So soon after that, the first thing that happened was that this organization came to the United States, this Israeli organization called PSY-Group, which basically stands for Psychological Warfare Group.

And it’s a private organization in Israel that is made up largely of ex Mossad agents and psychological warfare agents and so forth, and it has connections to the Israeli intelligence. So they came to the United States, again, asking for more money. They wanted a three year project to target all these groups in the United States. They wanted, I think three million dollars, or whatever.

And so their plan, which actually leaked out after the first year, said that they were attacking individuals and groups and trying to slander them and hide any connection to Israel.

They conducted an espionage operation. They went to this one particular professor’s office in Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, and put notices on his… car windshield, and all his neighborhood calling him a terrorist because he was advocating for the boycott of Israel. And in the report from the Psy group, it says we hid all connections to Israel and so forth.

And so this is going on and it’s going on for a year and nobody from the FBI is doing anything either before, during, or after this whole operation. So that was one. And then there were other operations that they launched. They launched a massive intelligence operation, a troll farm, they did lots of things like that.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. And I mean, it’s so clear, and you mentioned this in the piece too, that this is just very clearly acting as foreign agents. And yet no one, to my knowledge, has actually been charged with that. And you even quote someone who either did work or works for the FBI about how frustrating it was because even people in the government were well aware that this was happening, but nobody did anything about it.

I mean, is there any hope or is there anybody going after charges for this kind of activity?

James Bamford: No.

I write books for a living. I’ve written five books, a lot of them have become bestsellers and so forth. My last one came out in January and I spent a great deal of it on this whole issue of Israel spying in the United States and nobody doing anything about it. The FBI ignoring it.

And I’ve spoken to FBI agents and they’re very frustrated about it. You know, that’s what they do for a living. That’s why they joined the FBI is to arrest people that break the law. And these people obviously, there’s a law against being a foreign agent. And if you act as a foreign agent, if you act as a person in the United States taking directions, especially secret directions from a foreign government, I mean, what does that make you? It makes you a foreign agent.

There’s never been any arrests. They’re going after, I guess the mayor of New York and some of his colleagues for having some kind of agency relationship with the Turkish government, but nobody goes after Israel for much more blatant and much more, evidentiary attacks on American citizens.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve covered it on this show, the FBI going after the Uhuru movement for supposedly being Russian foreign agents. And it’s like, what? That’s absolutely absurd.

James Bamford: That’s totally bizarre. Yeah, bizarre and absurd. You spend so much time on such a minor group when this is going on.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right. Exactly. And, and I have to say also that this is like, when I read your article, I was like, God, this is so infuriating also, because this is that classic, it’s a classic antisemitic trope. Right. And I’ve even heard people saying this at far right rallies, like, Oh, the Jews are all sitting in their ivory towers plotting to take over the world.

And I’m like, Oh my God, but this is actually one of those moments where there are these Zionists in a boardroom plotting. And I should also point out that Zionism does not equal Judaism. I’ve talked about this on this show ad nauseum, but for listeners just joining in, fun fact: they’re actually more Christian Zionists in the United States than there are Jews worldwide.

So important to make that distinction. And I also therefore wanted to get your take on this because it seems like the goal of Project Butterfly or any of these offensives is not, has nothing to do with Judaism or protecting a supposed sacred or holy space for Jews. It’s about protecting the apartheid state of Israel, and in that process align with vehement anti Semites, many of whom spoke at the pro genocide march in D.C. on November 14th.

But it’s about regional control and hegemony. Is that, I mean, would you say that that’s an accurate perception of that?

James Bamford: Yeah, I just talk about it my own words.

I spent my career following intelligence. That’s what I do. You know, I don’t write about religion. I don’t write about those kind of things. But, I’ve been to Israel. I covered, ustores there when I was with ABC News. I was the investigative producer for 10 years. I was shot at by the settlers with an Uzi machine gun. I’ve been covering Israel, in terms of writing about it for years.

So I focus on the intelligence and basically what they’ve been getting away with in the United States. I mean, earlier I wrote a piece for the cover story for The Nation on how Israel sent an actual agent, covert agent to the United States to get involved with the Trump campaign, for basically a quid pro quo.

They were going to give the Trump campaign some intelligence to help the Trump campaign. And what they wanted from the Trump campaign was recognition of Jerusalem as a capital of Israel, which is what they got. And This came from FBI documents. They were released under the Free Information Act.

The FBI had actually gotten the telephone records and so forth, and conversations, email messages between these, between the agent and the Trump campaign. And yet nobody was arrested for that.

You know, we spent a year going after Russia on Russiagate, where turns out nobody was colluding from the Trump campaign, but you had the Israelis coming over and colluding with the Trump campaign, yet there was never a congressional investigation. And the FBI, obviously there was an investigation. They got all these documents through search warrants, but there was never any prosecution.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, and I mean, you could also argue that just the entire organization of AIPAC should be brought down as foreign agents. I mean, it’s absolutely absurd.

James Bamford: Well, people have been, for years have been arguing that they should be investigated as an agent of a foreign government, and nobody bothers to investigate.

I mean, the problem is it’s so delicate for politicians to actually do anything with regard to Israel. So, it’s left to journalists and outside people, and protesters and so forth.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, which is, again, that point of conflating Israel with Judaism, which just drives me batty.

James Bamford: And 20 percent of Israel is Muslim.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right. Well, and just the fact that Israel is not welcoming to all Jews. I mean, it forcibly sterilized Ethiopian Jews, so it doesn’t even…

But I also wanted to get your take because of what’s happening now, and even before October 7th, Project Butterfly creators and supporters seemed to feel like their work was a great success, but it seems now that more and more people are taking a stand against Israeli apartheid and demanding ceasefire and demanding human rights for Palestinians.

What do you feel based on what you see happening right now is the next step that Israel And the U.S. will take with regards to this?

James Bamford: With regard to the domestic spying or with regard to the war?

Eleanor Goldfield: With domestic spying. Do you feel like they feel that they’re losing ground here or?

James Bamford: I don’t think they’re going to take any action.

They haven’t taken any action before, going back 20 years or whatever long as I’ve been writing about it. So I, I just don’t see them taking any action.

You know, what they do is they’ll go after the low hanging fruit. U wrote about this producer in Hollywood who was acting as an Israeli nuclear spy, who helped Israel acquire almost a thousand Krytons, those are blasting caps, basically the triggers for nuclear weapons. His agent, the guy that was working for him, was arrested and was facing 105 years in prison and so forth. He escaped the United States, and he was an American, but Arnon Milchan, the guy that was the producer working on behalf of Israel, nothing happened to him. I mean, he’s still producing huge movies and so forth. I mean, he even came out with a recent movie, a very popular movie.

So nothing ever happens to the people from Israel that actually engage in this. Although some people in the United States actually get arrested occasionally.

Eleanor Goldfield: Well, on the other side of that, do you see Israel and the officials in the United States ramping up things like Project Butterfly because so many people are demanding a ceasefire and standing up against Israeli apartheid?

James Bamford: I see some people going after them. I know a lot of people are wanting to go after some of this criminal activity and agent activity, but I just don’t see that it ever gets done. I mean, it may go up to the director of the FBI. I interviewed former head of the counterintelligence division and I said, you know, why isn’t anybody going after Israelis? And he basically said, we are, but nothing ever happens.

So, that’s the answer: you have agents who actually do go after these people and look at them and write reports about them. But, when it gets up to the Justice Department as to whether to prosecute or not, which is a political issue, it’s up to the Attorney General and so forth, the decision is always, no, we’re not going to do it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Sorry, I should have rephrased that differently. But do you see, on the other side of things, do you see, evidence or suggestions that another Project Butterfly might happen? Like, that there might be another effort, a stronger effort to go after people who stand with Palestine?

James Bamford: Yeah, there’s a, as a matter of fact, I have a new article coming out in The Nation that looks at other, similar operations that Israel’s performed, particularly directed at students, student protesters and so forth.

So now, I mean, there’s numerous activities. I wrote, about 25 percent of my book, is focused on Israeli spying in the United States. So it goes well beyond Operation Butterfly. I mean, Operation Butterfly isn’t something I just dreamed up. The New Yorker magazine wrote about it over a year ago, so it’s out there.

I mean, they actually published the, or gave a link to the report that PSY group came out with. So it’s not as though the FBI doesn’t know about it. All they have to do is read a magazine. And, that’s the frustrating part about it. You know, you read these things and I write about these things and, and yet, it’s just like talking to a wall.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yes, well, we know a lot about that at Project Censored. It feels like screaming in an anechoic chamber sometimes.

And I wanted to get your take on this because you work so much with intelligence and, because the title of your piece that recently came out in the nation is, “Israel slept” regarding October 7th. As in they didn’t prepare actively for what was happening. Now you also note that of course Gaza is the most surveilled place on the planet. And some of that surveillance is also in use in the United States.

But, I wanted to share this that WikiLeaks back in mid October, about a week after October 7th, shared a screenshot of a release from 2007 where then Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin says, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

Wikileaks has also released secret documents passed between American diplomats back in the 80s showing that Israel was interested in enabling Hamas activity, intending to weaken the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

And so I’m curious, what is your opinion with regards to what happened on October 7th? There’s a lot of suggestions that it wasn’t a total surprise, but that Israel wanted it to happen so that they could do what they’re doing now.

James Bamford: Yeah, that’s… having written for a long time, one thing I don’t do is speculate on things like that. I usually get data, look it up, see if it’s accurate, and then write about it.

So I, I just don’t speculate on what may happen or what might’ve happened or whatever.

Eleanor Goldfield: But have you seen any evidence to suggest that that might’ve been the case?

James Bamford: I haven’t. I mean, you know, this is one topic I look into. I’ve written three books on the National Security Agency, so I’m not the world’s expert on what’s going on in Israel.

I just focus on Intelligence and that hasn’t come up. I’ve seen speculation, but again, unless I can actually find some hard information, I can’t really write about it.

I mean, what the Israelis were doing was what they usually do, what they call mowing the grass. They were going in there regularly, and, with weapons and drones and so forth, and every time there was a minor outbreak, they’d send in the heavy weapons or drones and take out whatever problem it was. So they were fairly confident about that, ever since the last major outbreak.

And I think they were very confident that nothing was taking place in Gaza. And that’s why they were spending so much time trying to build up public relations in the United States by going after the pro Palestinian groups. And, so they basically took their eye off the ball, and they had a lot of technology looking at Gaza. They thought that that was sufficient.

The problem was, you know, the militants were actually building tunnels and they were communicating in the tunnels through wires, not electronically, so you couldn’t intercept it. And unless you actually tap that wire, you couldn’t hear it.

So they were working very hard to find ways to defeat the Israeli technology, which obviously they did on October 7th, to catch the Israelis completely by surprise.

But again, as I’ve talked about in the article during all that time Israel was spending a lot of time not watching Gaza, and they were watching the United States or watching at least American students and American protesters protesting their actions against the Palestinians.

Eleanor Goldfield: And I’m curious as well, do you see with your, contacts inside the system, so to speak, do you see people wavering?

I know that there’s been, there have been calls like the Los Angeles times is now calling for a ceasefire. Some people have, at the UN for instance, have resigned over this.

Do you see folks that are backing away from the official US stance on this subject?

James Bamford: Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, there’s been a huge, sea change, at least as far as I can see. I’ve been following this issue for a very long time. And, most of it’s been basically, a sub-rosa. In other words, it’s never talked about much.

And now you’ve got protests 300,000 people strong. You would never see that before. You have a number of people who haven’t spoken out on the issue coming out, speaking out on it now.

I think it’ll be more because it’s just horrible what’s going on in Israel. How can anybody defend what they’re doing? I mean, you know, enormous attacks on hospitals, cutting off water, cutting off fuel. I mean, people are dying of starvation and thirst and everything else. It’s just incredible. How can anybody turn their eyes away from that? Or how can anybody support the Israelis and what they’re doing?

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, I mean, I ask myself the same question every day. And yet every day I wake up and the United States is still doing it. And I know that you said you don’t speculate, but I’m curious if you have any ideas or thoughts on, I mean, there was a time when Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and the United States would never have suggested that South Africa was an apartheid state.

Do you think that you’ll see it like in 10 years, 20 years, do you think we could get to the point where the U.S. is like, Actually, this is just too far. This is just too horrific and too genocidal.

James Bamford: Well, it’ll have to start at the top down. And, you have Joe Biden who’s proudly proclaimed that he’s a Zionist.

And, I write in my book about how he bragged at a meeting in Chicago, I think it was, about how he’s had more donations, caused more donations to go to AIPAC or whatever than anybody else and so forth. So, he’s certainly not gonna change of his own free will.

It’d only be from the Congress up, and I don’t see any movement in Congress. Which means the public has to push the Congress or the White House into it. If there’s a change of government and Trump comes in or whatever, he’s the guy that put the embassy in Jerusalem and dealt with this Israeli spy during the campaign.

So, no, I mean, unless Jill Stein gets in there or somebody like that I don’t see any rapid change. It’s people like me or writers or other journalists and people out there who have an ability to change people’s thoughts to some degree.

I think it’s moving more in that direction. And I think the public is moving more in that direction. And, you know, as the groundswell goes from the ground up, I think you might get more in Congress, but it’s just a horrible place, that and the White House in terms of accepting reality that Israel is an apartheid state. I mean, there’s no question. You have the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel’s own human rights organization has declared it an apartheid state.

So why isn’t, why doesn’t the New York Times or Washington Post always say apartheid Israel like they did with apartheid South Africa?

But if you remember, there was a long time when both the United States and much of the media didn’t acknowledge the apartheid, aspect of South Africa.

We were one of the last, I think one of the last countries to do that. So, you got all that baggage there, all that history to overcome before you get the government declaring Israel an apartheid state.

I mean, the United Nations is doing a bit more on that. And they’re, they’ve got these long investigations that never seem to come to an end in the ICC and so forth. You know, if they came out and declared war crimes and apartheid and all that, I think it would go a long way, but they’re very slow in taking action like that.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, the UN is a mixed bag at best.

Well, James, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us.

I really appreciate it, and giving us that important context on this issue.

James Bamford: Well, great. Thanks, Eleanor. I appreciate being on your show.

If you enjoyed the show, please consider becoming a supporting member at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored.

This is an audio transcript of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes podcast episode: ‘Why even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class?’

Soumaya Keynes
You’ve heard about racial inequality. You have heard about the glass ceiling. Today we are going to be talking about something that in the US hasn’t had as much attention — the class ceiling. A recent working paper argues that we really need to think about it because independently of race or gender, people’s family circumstances seem to be holding them back. And that’s the case even after they have done enough work to get a doctor in front of their name. This week, we are going to talk about the finding that even a PhD isn’t enough to erase the effects of class.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. I’m joined today by Anna Stansbury of MIT Sloan School of Management and one of that study’s authors. Anna, hello.

Anna Stansbury
Hi. Thank you for having me.

Soumaya Keynes
Thanks so much for being here. OK, so first question, you are a Brit and you live in America. So on a scale of one to 10, how much of a problem do you think that Brits perceive class-based inequalities?

Anna Stansbury
Seven.

Soumaya Keynes
Seven? OK, OK. So pretty present. What about the US?

Anna Stansbury
Four.

Soumaya Keynes
Ooh. OK. So the US is not doing so great on class consciousness. I mean, what do you think the main kind of qualitative difference is in how people talk about class between those two countries?

Anna Stansbury
Well, so when I first moved to the US, which was 11 years ago and talk to fellow grad students at the time, they would say in the UK, the problem is class, in the US, the problem is race. And that’s a pithy way of explaining kind of the big salient factor that people think about when they think about social and socio-economic inequality in each country. And there are good reasons why race is a lot more salient in the US. But class is also a factor independent of race, and I think people are aware of that in the extent to which it determines whether you go to school in a good place, but not really later in the life course.

Soumaya Keynes
Right. OK. OK, well, look, let’s step back for a second, though. What exactly do you mean by class?

Anna Stansbury
So class is one of those words that is hard to define very specifically. Typically, when sociologists talk about class and they’re the academic discipline that thinks about it the most, they’re talking about the set of qualities and resources you had that determined your opportunities. So I’m talking specifically here about class background. So what was the class that you were raised in? And that’s some combination of the income and wealth that your family had as a kid because that determines your resources and your opportunities. That’s also the education that your parents had and the kinds of occupations that they worked in, because that determines some of the slightly less tangible aspects of tacit knowledge about how elite careers work and how education works and aspects of cultural capital. So whether you have access to the kinds of cultural knowledge that give you social status in certain groups, all of those factors together in some combination are what we talk about when we talk about class.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so class as distinct from income, essentially?

Anna Stansbury
Class as much more than just income, yeah.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. All right. Well, what made you want to look into this question of whether class holds people back? I mean, I know you were struck moving from the UK to the US, but what made that into a research question?

Anna Stansbury
So part of it was this, I think being from the UK makes you think a lot more about how these factors matter even later in life. Obviously in the UK class background can be a lot more salient in things like accent than it is in the US. But I think I believed that it probably mattered in similar ways in the US as well. And then what really got me into the research question was I was doing some kind of activism, advocacy-type work on gender and race in economics, diversity. Economics is bad on gender and race, as you’ve noted in prior work. And I wondered if this was also true about class and found some data that enabled me to investigate that and that sort of set me off on this route of trying to figure out whether class matches for people even once they’ve done their education, even once they’ve got a PhD, even once they’ve got into an elite career.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, because I mean, one thing your paper obviously does focus on is people who are pretty much in the elites, right? You’re looking at people with PhDs. And I suppose one question is why should we care about them? Right? We know that they’re doing pretty well.

Anna Stansbury
There’s a couple of different reasons we should care, and this is true of any kind of diversity. One is equity. We should care if people have opportunities to fulfil their talents for reasons of equity and justice. But the other is a very kind of banal economic reason, which is efficiency. If you assume that talent for something is equally distributed, then we should care if people that are talented aren’t getting to fulfil that talent because it’s worse for overall productivity and overall outcomes.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. And that’s essentially the high-level question that you’re asking in your working paper, which is if you compare people, do people from different backgrounds perform differently later on in their academic careers, having got that PhD? So can you just tell us a bit more about the methodology? How do you start going about answering this question?

Anna Stansbury
Yes. So we have data from the National Science Foundation in the US which surveys a representative sample of people that got their PhD in the US. So we have basically a very large representative sample of everyone that got a US PhD since about 1993. The sample goes back to them. And so what we do is we ask the question conditional on getting your PhD in the same field from the same institution, does your class background affect what kind of job you end up in later in your life?

Soumaya Keynes
OK. So that’s interesting because you might think that your background would affect the kind of subjects that you would study and which institution you go to. But you’re kind of trying to essentially wipe all of that and say, no, we’re comparing people who are basically very, very similar, right? They’ve got their PhD from the same place in the same subject and what happens next?

Anna Stansbury
Exactly. So you can think about it as a very high bar to pass because we’re saying it’s quite plausible to believe that your class background might affect whether you manage to get into a PhD program at a really elite university because of all the prior factors in your life. But it might be much less simple to believe that your class background is gonna continue to affect you after that. And I think this is what has surprised people about these findings is that we find that it does continue to matter even if you get your PhD at the same program.

Soumaya Keynes
So just starting off, how exactly do you measure class?

Anna Stansbury
So we use parental education background. As I said before, this is only one of the aspects that feeds into class background. Unfortunately, we can’t measure the rest in our data. And this is actually why class background is rarely studied. It’s very rare for surveys to ask this kind of question, particularly in the US. So we have parental education and we cut it into four groups, people who are first-gen college graduates. So they had no parent that got a four-year college degree, people who had a parent with a college degree but no graduate degree, people who have a parent with a graduate degree that’s not a PhD. So that would be MD, doctors, JDs, lawyers, MBAs, masters in education. And then finally, people that have a parent with a PhD, and we look at those four groups separately.

Soumaya Keynes
Just out of interest. If you got to be God for a day and could gather whatever data you wanted, what would your dream measure of class include?

Anna Stansbury
Great question. I think I would ask four things, and this tends to follow what I think a lot of sociologists would ask when they ask about class. It would be parental education, ideally not just the level, but also where they got that degree. It would be family income or wealth when they were a child. Again, ideally, both of those things because you might have low income but high family wealth. It would also be your parent’s most common occupation when you were a kid. And then finally, there’s a question people often ask that is trying to capture some combination of all of these which asks you to think about social status as a ladder and then place where you think your family was on that ladder. So that’s a sort of self-perceived measure of where you stood as a child in the overall socioeconomic distribution.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. I mean, that sounds attainable.

Anna Stansbury
Absolutely. It’s definitely attainable. It’s just rarely asked.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, in this survey, we have data on parental education, so that’s what you use. OK, let’s move on to what outcomes you look at, right? Because you’re looking at whether family background matters for success, what counts as success here?

Anna Stansbury
So what we look at mostly is success in academic careers. And we define this in a couple of ways. First, we look at do people end up in a tenured academic job? And then we look at where they end up, what kind of institution? So we use a couple of different measures for how prestigious their institution is. One is how research intensive it is, which reflects how much research funding you get and other kinds of opportunities an academic would want to have. And the other is the rank of the institution.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so you’re actually looking at placement after they get their PhD? Can you look at anything else like pay, for example?

Anna Stansbury
Yes. So we actually do also look at pay. In academia specifically, the sort of currency of success is less clearly only pay than it is in many other professions, which is why we mostly look at the kinds of institutions and whether people have tenure. But we also look at pay, and then we also look separately at the PhDs who go off into private sector careers instead of academia, which is a very large share of PhD recipients. And for those people, we look at pay as the primary measure, and then we also look at whether they end up later in their career in managerial positions.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. So you’ve got a fairly wide range of things that you look at. So what do you find?

Anna Stansbury
The top-level finding is a big class gap in career progression, even for two people from the same PhD program. So we can break that down into looking at the folks that went into academia and the folks that went into industry, private sector. In academia, we find that there is a big gap in the prestige or rank of the institutions that people end up employed at as professors. So a first-generation college grad is about 13 per cent less likely to end up as a tenured professor at a research-intensive university than someone from the same PhD program who is from a more advantaged background. And specifically, this more advantaged background that I’m referring to here is someone with a parent that had a non-PhD-graduate degree. So a parent that was like an MD, a JD, an MBA. We cut out those PhD parents because we think they might have academia-specific advantages that aren’t really about class background.

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so you see this class ceiling, are you able to look at any trends over time? I mean, I would really hope that perhaps this had become better as there was more thinking about inclusion, diversity.

Anna Stansbury
Yeah. So I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but we actually don’t see any improvement over time. We have a relatively long time period. We have data from 1993 to 2021, and we don’t see any obvious improvement in this class ceiling or this class gap in where people end up conditional on that PhD program.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, that’s not very happy, is it? I suppose it could be something to do with preferences, though, right? I mean, you know, the obvious conclusions draw from that is there’s some sort of discrimination, implicit bias against people who don’t grow up with the same kinds of resources as others. But what if it’s that, some types of people from a particular family background just have different priorities in their career? Maybe they want to go to an institution that may not be the highest-ranked institution but may have more of a social mission. Is that possible?

Anna Stansbury
Yeah. So we do a lot of work to try and understand if this is driven by preferences and we can’t find any strong evidence that it is. So one strong reason you might think, preferences or constraints play a role, is differential financial backgrounds. Academia in the US is relatively lucrative, but it’s not as negative as going into the private sector.

So you might think that people from less advantaged backgrounds are choosing to leave academic jobs or leave academia altogether and go get better-paid private sector jobs. We don’t see that that’s happening on average. You might think it’s what you raised, which is this idea of preference for social mission and being willing to trade off rank and prestige of institution for serving a less advantaged population. Sure, that happens to some extent, but we aren’t able to find evidence of that when we look at is there a difference in terms of the income of the student body that the school serves.

We also thought about whether geographic constraints might play a role. If someone from a less advantaged background, there might be more constraints in terms of living far away from family. For example, if they’re a breadwinner or a carer for a family member. But again, we conditioned on distance from home as proxied by where they went to school. And again, we don’t find that that explains the gap. So we tried quite hard to see if preferences can explain it, but on average, it doesn’t seem to.

Soumaya Keynes
But that’s interesting that people from different socioeconomic backgrounds are just as likely to sort of stay in academia, right? It’s not that, because in say, gender, it looks like women are disproportionately dropping out of academia. And that is one thing that contributes to gaps in their outcomes. But more generally, how does this class gap operate differently to the gaps in gender or race?

Anna Stansbury
Yeah, this is a really interesting one, and I think we’re just scratching the surface here. I think it’s a super fruitful topic for research. So one thing to emphasise before I answer that question specifically is that when I’m talking about the class gaps that we estimate, we’re estimating them conditional on race and gender. So what that means is that our effects aren’t driven by, for example, in the US context, African-American PhD students are also more likely to be first-gen college grads. When we’re comparing outcomes of first-gen college grads, the people from more advantaged backgrounds, we’re effectively comparing them within racial groups. So within African Americans, within Asian Americans, within white Americans, and so on.

So having said that, our results aren’t driven by race, but we can compare them to the gaps by race and gender. And as you said, with gender, the big phenomenon is what you call the leaky pipeline. Women are falling out of the academic pipeline at every stage. They’re less likely to go on to get a tenure-track job, they’re less likely to get tenure. But actually, if you look at the women that stay in academia, there’s not that much of a gender gap in what kinds of institutions they end up employed at. They’re at similarly ranked, similarly prestigious places.

The class gap looks the opposite. There’s no leaky pipeline. There’s no sense in which first-gen college grads are less likely to stay in academia. But when they do, they end up employed at these less prestigious places.

Race gaps. It’s shameful to say, but unfortunate, but still relatively few African American and Hispanic professors in our sample. So we estimate these with a lot of noise because it’s hard to get a precise estimate if you have a smaller sample. But the race gaps look more similar to the class gap, where you see these big gaps in the institution, rank and prestige.

Soumaya Keynes
But less so in the staying in academia?

Anna Stansbury
Yes, exactly.

Soumaya Keynes
Just a quick question. Can you do anything to compare between subjects? Are some subjects worse than others? I’m thinking about economics, that is the name of the show. 

Anna Stansbury
So we do try and compare across subjects and we just don’t really find much going on there. Our data’s Stem and social sciences. So we compare the physical sciences, the biological sciences and the social sciences. The patterns look pretty similar across all three groups. We don’t have a super large sample of economists in this data, so we can’t say for sure that economics is not worse. But we don’t see any strong evidence that economics is worse.

This is different, by the way, to some of my prior work, which is just looking at the composition of people by class in fields. And in that sense, economics is worse. So the way you can think about it is when you look at PhD students, economics really stands out as having the lowest share of first-generation college grads of any PhD field in the US. So it’s doing really bad in terms of class diversity. But once you’re taking people who’ve already got their PhDs and looking at how they progress, economics then doesn’t look any worse than the other fields in terms of having disparate rates of success.

Soumaya Keynes
So just on that, do you have a theory as to why economics is so bad in attracting a diverse group of students?

Anna Stansbury
Yeah, I think there are probably three things going on and I don’t know what role proportionately to this place. One of them I think is that economics is a subject where it’s not exactly obvious what it is or what it involves. And so you see that even at the college level, first-gen college students are less likely to major in economics in the US or to take an economics degree in the UK. Probably in large part because it’s not clear what economics is, what it does, what it’s useful for, and studies that sort of just provide information and nudges do find big enrolment increases from all kinds of minority under-represented groups, not just first-gen college grads, also women, also racial minorities. When there’s more awareness of what economics is and what it does.

The second is that economics has a big drop off from people that major in econ to people that then go on to graduate school to get a PhD, particularly for first-gen college grads. And I think that is probably because economics has really good outside options. So if you get an economics degree, you can get a very well-paid job after college. And that might be disproportionately attractive to people who have come from backgrounds that have less financial security. So I think that in some way, economics is a victim of its own success, specifically on that metric.

The third one, which I think is almost surely playing a role that have not been able to measure, is, I think, the way economics is taught and some of the language and inherent assumptions in sort of econ 101 and a lot of the economics profession can feel quite hostile to people from less advantaged backgrounds. And some of the language we use can feel quite off-putting, some of the assumptions, especially in their core econ 101 style teaching. So just to give one example, referring to workers as unskilled, referring to people that choose not to go to college as low ability in these models. Those kinds of terms feel offensive and inaccurate, I think. And when people have lived experience or family members who would fall into those terms in the econ vernacular, I think that could feel like this is not a subject for me. This is not a subject that describes the world accurately.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, a lot for economists to think about there. Just building on this idea of outside options, though, and returning to your paper about outcomes for PhD holders. I know that you said that there wasn’t really much difference in who decided to stay in academia or not. But how does academia compare to other professions? Do you see what happens to people if they do choose to go into government or the private sector? Is the class gap still there?

Anna Stansbury
So we look at the three other big destinations for PhD recipients. That’s the private sector, government and jobs in education that are not tenure-track academic jobs. So this could be teaching jobs at universities, at community colleges, or the kinds of education jobs. In industry in the private sector, we also find a class gap. Now, our measures here are slightly different because obviously, we don’t see whether someone is a tenured professor because that doesn’t exist in industry. We look at someone’s salary and how that progresses over their career and we look at whether they end up in positions with managerial responsibility. And we find a class gap in both that widens over the course of their career. So when PhD recipients, you know, first get their job in the private sector, there isn’t negative class gap in outcomes, but as they stay in these private sector jobs over their career, you see the salary gap widening and you see that people from first-gen college grad backgrounds are less likely to end up as managers. So that suggests to us pretty strongly that there’s a similar class gap, class ceiling dynamic in the private sector.

Soumaya Keynes
And what about the public sector?

Anna Stansbury
So the story is more optimistic in the public sector. In government and in non-tenure track education, we don’t find a class gap in salary or in managerial responsibilities. So it doesn’t look like, at least on those metrics, there’s a class ceiling.

Soumaya Keynes
Do you have any thoughts on what might be going on there?

Anna Stansbury
So this is just speculation because we don’t have enough data really on what jobs people are doing in these other sectors to know exactly what’s happening. My guess is that particularly in government, there are more standardised pay scales and kind of promotion requirements that make it less easy for disparities to creep in. We also see smaller gender gaps in pay in government than we see in the private sector, although that’s not the focus of our paper. I think it’s an interesting comparator, but I don’t know for sure.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, I think it’s time to throw to a break. But look, this is a controversial topic. And when we get back, I want to ask about the response to your research. So what it has been and what you wish it had been and what you think should be done next?

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Soumaya Keynes
We are back from the break. So what has been the most common critique you’ve heard, most common pushback against your paper?

Anna Stansbury
So one of the common pushbacks has been, how does this even happen among two people who’ve got their PhD from the same program? Hasn’t the effective class all kind of been washed out by having got this elite degree at this elite place? And I think depending on your experiences, that is either very obvious that those effects may not be washed out or not very obvious at all. And for me, I think maybe coming from the UK made this more salient, but I come from a relatively advantaged background. My parents both were qualified as lawyers and I was able to see throughout my education and then coming to the US how various factors that I received from my upbringing made it easier for me to basically exist and take up space in these elite places. And so part of the process of doing the paper has been talking to a lot of people who come from different backgrounds, who are in academia to try and ask them what their experiences are about, whether the progression has been affected by that class background. And we’re actually about to run a survey on this as well.

Soumaya Keynes
That’s super interesting. What kinds of things have you been hearing?

Anna Stansbury
So one of the big factors is this sense of ease. Ease is a word that is, you know, often used by sociologists when they’re talking about what does an elite education give you? And I think it’s a really good word for this circumstance, because to have a career, a successful career in academia, but also in lots of other industries, you need basically to seek out mentors who are elite people in their own field and get advice and sponsorship from them. You need to be able to network effectively in specific kinds of spaces that you may not be used to being in. This relationship building, this seeking out of advice and mentorship, I think can be much easier for people that have been raised in environments where they’ve been doing this kind of thing from an early age in gauging in more elite spaces from an early age. That’s something we’ve heard a lot.

Soumaya Keynes
Can I ask about the idea that this look at academia is relevant for the broader economy? Because I suppose in one sense you have this incredible data, you’re able to look at outcomes quite precisely. And so, you know, that looks like, Oh, this is a really good test! But in another sense, actually, within academia, there’s huge amounts of subjectivity on what is good research. So many places for implicit bias to creep in. So isn’t it possible that really academia is some kind of upper bound for the effects of class on your outcomes? It could be an area that’s really, really vulnerable to those kinds of biases.

Anna Stansbury
Yeah. So this is one of the other things that we’ve heard from talking to people and thinking about how it works in academia is these judgments that enable you to get the prestigious grant, get your paper published in a great journal, get tenure at a top institution. These judgments are based, obviously, they’re trying to be based on your research, but they’re inherently subjective because someone’s trying to see not just if you produce decent research, but if you are brilliant. If you have that touch of, you know, spark that makes you the academic genius that people want to have and promote and see. Those kinds of judgments are hugely subject to bias. And I think there’s a lot of extent to which the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you act, those kinds of things that can be affected by your social class background can be used by people subconsciously or consciously as markers of genius or brilliance rather than what they are, which is just markers of, you know, where you went to school and how you were brought up. So I think in academia, this is probably one of the other mechanisms by which we’re seeing this glass ceiling, this class gap emerge.

You said, is academia an upper bound? Now, I don’t know because I think academia does have this space for these value judgments, these subjective judgments to be made. But we do have very, very detailed, transparent, quite objective measures of research, quantity and quality as well. You can see, you know, you can read people’s papers, you can see what journals they’ve been published in, how many citations they have and all this kind of stuff. Compare that to something like professional services or law, where you’re working in teams, you might have less objective measures of one individual specific outputs. And these are settings where being able to do all this kind of social networking, form relationships with elite people is probably even more important than it is in academia, because you’ve got to impress elite clients if you’re a lawyer or a consultant or something like that, as well as the partners at your firm. So my sense is I would guess that academia is, if anything, maybe a lower bound on these effects relative to some other professions. Ideally, we would be able to have this data and so we wouldn’t have to guess.

Soumaya Keynes
Amen. Economists call for more data. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.

Anna Stansbury
Sorry to be a stereotype.

Soumaya Keynes
It’s OK. We’re all there. OK, but now I want to ask about the, so what? I mean, what do you think should be done as a result of these findings?

Anna Stansbury
So it’s quite a boring answer. But I think some of the most obvious concrete policy changes are incorporate social class background in the diversity initiatives that we already had for race and gender. It’s not rocket science to do things like track your applicant pool, your pool of employees or PhD students and how well they do to have mentorship initiatives that also incorporate someone coming from a less-advantaged family background, as well as incorporating someone who’s a minority gender or minority racial group. There are a lot of things that we know work relatively well. Don’t do everything. They’re not silver bullets, but work relatively well to advance sort of people from less advantaged groups in careers like academia that are just not really being done for class backgrounds. So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Soumaya Keynes
Do you see any movement in this space? Are there any people doing this kind of thing?

Anna Stansbury
Yeah, there’s some going on. So in academia specifically, some of the professional associations now have, you know, groups and committees set up for first-gen college grads, people from low-income backgrounds in the same way that they have committees for women or minority racial groups. I’m doing some work to look at other private sector firms. I knew very, very few private companies currently collect data on report on or target class background in their DEI report. So all the big companies have DEI reports where they’re tracking gender and race. Very, very few track class. But over the last few years, the number that tracks class has gone from basically zero to, you know, few, but not zero. And so I think there are companies that are now trying to incorporate this into their hiring, into their diversity practices. So there’s change, but we’re still on the early end of it, I think.

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. One of the things I was actually quite impressed by when I moved to the FT, was that I was asked about this kind of information, so . . . 

Anna Stansbury
Well, I should say in the UK, companies have been more proactive about this. In the UK there’s been more action over the last 10 years or so for companies to track this and monitor this and do more about it in diversity.

Soumaya Keynes
Just thinking about one final comparison. Do you have a hunch of whether this class gap would be higher in the US or in the UK?

Anna Stansbury
My initial guess would be higher in the UK because class is more directly visible. So all the mechanisms we’ve been talking about. About, you know, is someone perceived to have the polish or the brilliance required to do this job will get the opportunity. That stuff is all magnified, I think. And there’s a great book by two sociologists, Dan Morrison and Sam Friedman called The Class Ceiling, which looks at the UK and UK occupations, which I highly recommend to read for any listener. But the one caveat I would say is that in the US, inequality on basically all dimensions is higher, income inequality, even within professions, the inequality of really status of being, you know, a manager at a really, really super big, super successful company versus a medium-sized company or being tenure track at a top institution versus a middling institution. All of those gaps are magnified. And so having a small advantage in the US might actually translate to a bigger disparity later on relative to the UK.

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Something to think about Americans. Take it away. Ponder. And that is where we will finish this week. Anna, thank you so much for joining me.

Anna Stansbury
Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you.

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Soumaya Keynes
That is all for this week. You have been listening to The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. If you enjoyed the show, I would love it if you could rate and review us wherever you listen.

This episode was produced by Edith Rousselot with original music from Breen Turner. It is edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio, I’m Soumaya Keynes, thanks for listening.