Despite the tax credit U-turn a radical upheaval in support for the working poor is still underway

The government’s decision to scrap tax credit cuts was a welcome move, and (eventually) highlighted the effectiveness of the British political system’s checks and balances. However, Daniel Clegg writes that the abandoned cuts were just one part of a more drawn-out and comprehensive dismantlement of the system of cash support for low-earning households. Tax credit U-turn notwithstanding, the democratic process would appear in this respect to have failed the working poor

A more liberal France, a more social Europe? Macron, two-level reformism and the COVID-19 crisis

Emmanuel Macron was elected President of France in 2017 on a programme that promised to confront the structural antagonism between the country’s social model and the liberalising thrust of European integration since Maastricht. His novel political offer combined supply-side reforms at home and the strengthening of the social dimension of the European Union, starting with the operation of European economic governance. And he saw simultaneous and explicitly linked action in both the domestic and European arenas—two-level reformism—as crucial in generating political support for this project. This paper assesses his government’s success in realising these objectives, and asks what if anything the COVID-19 crisis changed. Focusing on the crucial case of unemployment insurance, it shows how pre-pandemic reform efforts were complicated by deeply embedded policy legacies and were insufficient to significantly enhance France’s leverage at European level. COVID-19 generated some unanticipated momentum behind aspects of Macron’s plans for Eurozone reform, but at the same time further complicated both the implementation and the politics of his domestic reform agenda. Overall the French case underscores the challenges of radically reorienting mature welfare states, European economic governance and their interaction, even in the presence of major endogenous and exogenous shocks

Status and mating success amongst visual artists

Geoffrey Miller has hypothesized that producing artwork functions as a mating display. Here we investigate the relationship between mating success and artistic success in a sample of 236 visual artists. Initially, we derived a measure of artistic success that covered a broad range of artistic behaviors and beliefs. As predicted by Miller’s evolutionary theory, more successful male artists had more sexual partners than less successful artists but this did not hold for female artists. Also, male artists with greater artistic success had a mating strategy based on longer term relationships. Overall the results provide partial support for the sexual selection hypothesis for the function of visual ar