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CHART 1 • Are students getting dumber?

This chart will resonate with any worried parent. It’s obvious. Of course children’s reading abilities have deteriorated. It’s all those devices and social media.

But there are a few things we need to be careful about here. What are PISA reading scores? How are they measured? Who takes these tests, and how representative are they?

What this test does is assess a 15-year-old’s ability to understand written information, interpret it, and then evaluate its meaning. This goes beyond just recognising words or reading a passage of text. They need to be able to explain what they read, follow an argument, and then judge whether the information they are reading is correct.

Source: The Economist

That makes these results concerning. Are our kids reading less, or are they reading differently? They might encounter plenty of words through messages and social media posts, but that does not necessarily give them the same practice in following a sustained argument or understanding complex prose.

So I would take this chart seriously. But evidence that reading performance has declined is not the same as evidence explaining why. As George Bush once asked, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

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CHART 1 • Anthropic now leads the AI industry

I don’t think we’ve ever seen a software industry this dynamic (if that’s the right word). Anthropic turned the cards on OpenAI in a matter of months this year. Watch to see!!

You would be mistaken in thinking that this is a duel between OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies have led the market in Frontier models, introducing ever-powerful features and new capabilities since the start of this year.

There are, however, few things to bear in mind.

1. During this period the market grew tremendously. Total business AI adoption went from 35% to over 50%.

2. What’s insane is that Anthropic managed to take a disproportionate slice of that growth in a very short period of time.

3. These companies are not necessarily always rivals, nor are their products substitutes. Roughly 79% of Anthropic’s customers also pay for OpenAI.

Source: Eeagli

Ramp, which actually built this data set, confirmed that the churn between the two is nearly identical at 4% a month. So this was never really a switching story.

Within companies, teams might use both, side-by-side. Another reason is that different teams inside a company might use different frontier models for different tasks, from different providers.

So when you watch this chart, just be careful how you interpret it. This was not a knife fight between two tech giants, but a remarkable land grab by Anthropic while the market was still expanding.

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CHART 1 • Oil seems entrenched above $100

The Iran war has raised energy prices everywhere. A huge amount of oil comes out of the Persian Gulf, and most of it goes to Asia. If the Strait of Hormuz gets shut, buyers in Asia, Europe and elsewhere will all bid for the same, more limited global oil supply.

The place where this really hurts is diesel. Now, I know I’ve mentioned this before, but this is one of the biggest cost-push factors for inflation coming out of this crisis.

Diesel fuels trucks, ships, farm machinery and construction equipment. It also heats homes and runs backup generators. So when diesel gets more expensive, the cost of moving food and goods goes up, and shop prices follow a few weeks later. In other words, the cost of living rises.

Source: Eeagli

As the chart shows, ceasefires haven’t worked. There is a real risk that oil prices eventually get entrenched above $100. Oil is now 60% higher than in early August. The concern is that it stays there, and that this feeds through into economies around the world, hitting GDP growth and inflation.

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CHART 1 • SpaceX drives America’s rocket surge

I always love Visual Capitalist data visualisations and this one is absolutely gorgeous. It shows annual space launches since the start of the space race. As you can see, the chart shows a huge rise in space launches by the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, vastly outpacing the United States.

Of course, things have since changed and the Soviet Union has now become Russia. Although Russia still sends quite a considerable number of satellites and spacecraft into orbit, those numbers have declined quite considerably since the end of the Cold War.

Source: Visual Capitalist

The really interesting rise, though, is China, which has rapidly increased its number of launches. The story in the US is also incredibly interesting. They are launching more satellites than ever, partly because of SpaceX and its Starlink programme, which has literally put tens of thousands of satellites in orbit to give the world high-quality, fast internet access even in the remotest of locations.

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CHART 1 • China’s $1.2 trillion export lead

Despite the trade tariffs slapped on China by the United States, China hasn’t stopped exporting goods to the rest of the world. In fact, trade has hit a record $7.2 trillion when you combine both exports and imports. Despite the United States’ best efforts, China appears to be gaining during this trade war.

China still maintains a huge amount of manufacturing capacity and is therefore able to comfortably meet strong demand from overseas. Right now that appears to be growing faster than the growth of China’s imports. You can see that clearly in this chart. The gap between the blue and red lines has kept widening since the pandemic.

Source: Econovisual

This has occurred despite all the economic headwinds China has faced in recent years, including an over-indebted real estate market and other frictions that have weighed on the Chinese economy.

What we see here is a China that can increase competitive pressure on other large economies and trading blocs, and gain despite tariffs being levied on it. It is doing so with alarming strength, and this has made those economies, especially the United States, nervous.

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CHART 1 • Number of days’ work to buy an iPhone

I really love this chart, partly because I own this phone, but it also is a really interesting way to put things into context when it comes to the cost of living. For instance, where I live in Switzerland, the iPhone 17 Pro in local prices is equivalent to three average-wage workdays. By comparison, in India, this equates to 160 days.

Of course, there are a lot of factors at play here. For instance, exchange rates and tariffs placed on handsets can make them significantly more expensive. There is also the wide disparity in wages within countries.

Source: Visual Capitalisst

But I picked India because nowadays India produces iPhones. So it’s interesting that manufacturing the iPhone in India hasn’t really had a dramatic impact on the cost of the handset within the country.

Another country I would mention here is Brazil, which is known for its expensive imported goods. In fact, there was a well-known incident where a reporter flew from Sao Paulo to Miami, purchased the latest iPhone, and flew back to Brazil because it was cheaper than buying an iPhone in Brazil. So it’s not just about the disparity in wealth, but can also be due to the cost to do business in some countries.

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CHART 1 • Software hiring has reversed course

We’ve long heard concerns about white-collar jobs being lost to AI, and to an extent those concerns are justified. There are so many jobs that can now be automated, made more efficient, or even replaced by AI.

However, what’s not often mentioned is the new white-collar jobs that are likely to be created by AI. The most obvious example is software developers, who these days need good AI skills. A software engineer needs to know how to incorporate AI into their workflow to be more efficient, whether that requires refactoring code or managing the broader suite of technology that powers a piece of software.

Source: The Economist

Then there is the security industry, where AI jobs are needed to uncover security weaknesses and patch up defences. Engineering also requires AI jobs across the spectrum to rapidly accelerate development in multiple applications.

I think the message here with this chart from the Economist is that the future is not all bleak. What we are seeing is a restructuring of the economy, and consequently also the jobs market.

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CHART 1 • Hormuz traffic looks more like an escape than a reopening

There was a brief burst of departures through the Strait of Hormuz due to the June US-Iran memorandum. Outbound crossings briefly approached 60 vessels a day, while inbound traffic in the right-hand panel peaked at 20.

However, make no mistake, traffic is still vastly below what occurred before the war (look at both charts). The agreement provided an opportunity for ships to leave, rather than evidence that the Strait was back to business as usual. It was more like a prison breakout from a conflict that is still ongoing.

Source: Financial Times

Now that hostilities have flared up again, traffic has also fallen again. Shipowners, crews, insurers and traders cannot schedule reliable journeys through the Strait and so must wait once again for the next lull in fighting. The reality is that lots of vessels are still trapped in the Strait and those pre-war levels we see in these charts seem unlikely to recover any time soon.

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CHART 1 • Britain must plan beyond 40°C

Britain’s homes, hospitals, schools and railways must cope with temperatures outside the conditions for which many were designed. The underlying level of the country’s hottest day has risen by roughly 5°C since 1970, even though individual summers remain highly variable.

Greenhouse gases retain additional heat, raising the starting temperature when high pressure, continental air and dry ground combine. Those conditions helped produce the 40.3°C record in 2022. Under 2°C of global warming, a comparably unusual heatwave could approach 43°C. The red point represents that scenario, not a forecast for a particular day in 2050. Summer 2026 supplied a different warning: it was provisionally Britain’s hottest by seasonal measures despite a daily peak below the record.

Source: Financial Times

I would pay more attention to the rising grey line than to any isolated spike. Set beneath the jagged annual readings, it separates a structural shift from the noise of British weather and explains why a cooler peak offers planners little reassurance. Britain must prepare for both a still hotter day and prolonged heat that strains people and infrastructure without breaking the national record.

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CHART 1 • Switzerland grew beyond job creation

For Swiss voters, arguments over migration, housing and infrastructure turn on a basic question: did growth make existing residents better off, or mostly make the economy bigger? The strongest evidence against a simple population story is that Swiss productivity growth since 2000 is roughly twice the EU27 rate, even though Austria edges Switzerland on employment.

Switzerland also leads all five comparators on gross value added, while France and Italy occupy the weak end of the three rankings. Persistent net migration supplied expanding businesses with workers and scarce skills. Investment, technology and high-value industries also increased output per worker. Those forces can reinforce each other: a larger skilled workforce expands production, while greater productivity makes each job more valuable.

Source: Financial Times

I would treat the employment panel as the restraint that makes the comparison persuasive. It shows that Switzerland’s extraordinary aggregate performance was not simply the product of uniquely rapid job creation. But the bars do not reveal prices, currency effects or gains per resident, and real median wages rose by a much smaller 17%. Switzerland’s success is substantial; judging its benefit to residents requires looking beyond the longest bar.

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CHART 1 • China overtakes America across ten democracies

America’s goodwill once helped allied governments make the case for working with Washington. Across these ten democracies, that advantage has now disappeared, making public support harder to secure when the US seeks backing on trade, defence or foreign policy.

The scale of the reversal is striking. In 2021, the median share with a favourable view of the US was close to 60%, compared with roughly 20% for China. By 2026, China had recovered to 35% while the US had fallen to 29%. The paths matter more than the final ranking: this was not a wholesale embrace of Beijing, but a modest Chinese recovery alongside the loss of about 30 points of American goodwill. Pew says deteriorating views of the US accounted for the larger part of the reversal in its broader survey.

Favourability is not allegiance, and neither country commands a high rating. But sentiment shapes the political room in which allied leaders make decisions. Governments considering US requests on defence, trade or China policy now have less inherited goodwill to draw on. Washington increasingly has to win support rather than assume it.

Source: Pew Research Center

Public opinion towards the US and China has changed enough to alter the political backdrop for allied governments. The rest of today’s edition is deliberately varied, because a strong visual does not need a false common theme to earn its place.

Paid subscribers get access to the other four charts: immigration arrests, repeat car buying, anger in Congress and declining US drinking. Together, they show four very different changes that are easier to see and harder to dismiss

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CHART 1 • Anthropic grew without Fable 5

Anthropic’s most capable model was not the one businesses spent most on. For technology and compliance teams, Fable 5’s small share shows why choosing maximum capability can bring higher bills and stricter data rules without becoming the sensible default. Measured Anthropic spending rose roughly 35% from early June to late July, yet Fable finished at only about 11% of the total.

I think the revealing comparison is with Anthropic’s own cheaper models. Opus 4.8 remained the largest named category, while Sonnet 4.6 and other models retained substantial shares. Opus 5 also attracted spending within days of its late-July launch. Anthropic priced it at half Fable’s token rates. Fable, meanwhile, disappeared from the series during a suspension from 12 June to 1 July and initially came with stricter data-retention terms.

Source: Financial Times

Price, availability and privacy requirements all plausibly contributed to that mix, although Ramp’s spending data cannot tell us how much each factor mattered. They cover more than 70,000 US businesses, not global revenue, workloads or model quality. Seeing Fable’s narrow, interrupted layer inside a growing stack changes the diagnosis: Anthropic was gaining business, but customers appeared to be matching different jobs to different models rather than paying for its flagship every time.

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CHART 1 • Americans face Social Security crisis

Social Security’s retirement fund has been in annual deficit since around 2010, and its projected balance never recovers through 2100. Millions of Americans depend on those payments, so unless Congress changes the programme, workers will pay more or retirees will receive less.

This is largely a pay-as-you-go system: payroll taxes from today’s workers finance today’s benefits. Lower birth rates mean fewer future workers supporting each beneficiary, while longer retirements and scheduled benefits push spending above taxable payroll. Past surpluses built reserves that temporarily covered the difference, but they did not remove it.

Those reserves are expected to run out late in 2032. Current payroll taxes would then cover about 78% of scheduled benefits, leaving an abrupt cut of roughly one-fifth if politicians do nothing.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

I think the uninterrupted negative line is more revealing than that deadline. By the 2080s, the annual gap exceeds 7% of taxable payroll and remains close to that level at the end of the century.

A projection running to 2100 cannot be precise. Birth rates, wages and life expectancy will all change. But uncertainty does not produce a painless escape. Every year of delay leaves less time to phase in higher contributions or lower benefits, increasing the chance that one generation absorbs a sudden adjustment.

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CHART 1 • Young adults feel more isolated than ever

Pandemic restrictions ended in 2022, but the share of young Americans spending an entire waking day alone kept rising for another year. It has since settled near one in ten, almost three times its pre-Covid level.

For most of the 15 years before the pandemic, the line stayed between 2% and 4%. I would pay less attention to the sudden rise during lockdown, which needs little explanation, than to the high plateau afterwards. Work, education and leisure have not reliably restored the ordinary contact they once created for people aged 23 to 29.

Source: Financial Times

The American Time Use Survey records who was physically present during one person’s diary day. It does not measure loneliness, friendships or digital contact, and the three-year average smooths annual variation. Nobody should diagnose a generation from one day. Yet a measure this blunt should have fallen once normal life returned. Its refusal to do so suggests that isolation has become part of normal life for a sizeable minority.

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CHART 1 • When central banks stop buying, who picks up the bonds?

Central banks spent years making life easier for governments by buying their bonds. Now those holdings are shrinking, and somebody else must supply the money. I think that “somebody” is the entire story. If private investors are less willing than central banks were, governments will have to offer them higher interest payments.

The four countries in this chart from the Financial Times do not have the same replacement buyer. France still relies heavily on investors abroad. Japan relies overwhelmingly on domestic institutions and its central bank. Britain has lost much of the dependable demand once provided by pension funds and insurers, while America’s bond market has expanded faster than foreign ownership.

Source: Financial Times

You might hear this discussed as the end of quantitative easing, which makes it sound like central-bank housekeeping. It is really a refinancing problem for governments and, eventually, taxpayers. The comparisons are not perfectly harmonised, but they make one thing clear: each country must persuade a different group to absorb its debt, and those buyers get to name their price.

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CHART 1 • Anthropic overtook OpenAI in five months

OpenAI doubled its reported sales pace in five months and still ended up behind Anthropic. By July, Anthropic was reporting $65bn against OpenAI’s $40bn. I think the reversal is more interesting than the size of either number because it suggests that the best-known consumer brand is not automatically winning the business market.

Anthropic says much of its acceleration is coming from companies and software developers, particularly Claude Code. If you are choosing an AI supplier, that matters: the company capturing business workflows can become difficult to replace, even if another chatbot remains more famous.

Source: AI Supremacy AI Supremacy

I would still be careful with the apparent lead. These are annualised figures supplied by two private companies, not audited revenue calculated under one standard. They demonstrate extraordinary momentum, but not superior technology or profit. Investors discussing a possible Anthropic flotation are being asked to price that momentum before the underlying accounts are fully comparable.

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CHART 1 • The heat has reached the earnings call

For years, European companies treated extreme weather as something for the sustainability report, rather than the quarterly earnings call. Now heat, drought and wildfire are appearing in the conversations where executives explain sales, costs and profits to investors.

One in 10 European companies worth more than $1bn mentioned those terms this quarter. Look back across the previous decade and I think the long, low baseline is what makes the final bar so striking. Most readings sit below 2%, and even the previous peak in 2018 failed to reach 5%. Rather than completing a steady climb, the latest bar jumps clear of everything before it.

Source: Financial Times

Of course, a mention is not the same as a loss. Some companies sold more fans, air conditioners or sun cream, while others lost working hours, freight capacity or power. Climate change is no longer discussed only as a risk for 2050. It is now appearing in explanations of what happened to European businesses last quarter.

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CHART 1 • The economy grew, but incomes didn’t

Americans have been told the economy grew, and that they should now feel richer. It’s the same story across the OECD. But let’s put this into context: GDP per person rose just 0.3% in the first quarter of 2026. Real disposable income per person – the money households actually have once taxes are paid, benefits received and inflation stripped out – rose just 0.2%. No wonder nobody felt a thing.

The average is hiding a lot, however. Hungary’s households gained 6.0% and Chile’s 4.8%, both driven mostly by higher pay. However, the broader trend in this chart is still hard to unsee.

Source: OECD

Britain’s output per person grew while income per person fell 0.8%, which the OECD puts down to taxes, reduced net benefits and inflation. The same split appears for Greece, Austria and Belgium. So this really is a chart of contrast.

So, what’s the take away here? GDP tells you how much a country produced. It says almost nothing about what landed in households’ pockets. For that you need wages, prices, taxes and benefits. That’s why nobody for now feels richer.

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CHART 1 • Young Americans’ social lives didn’t recover after Covid

This chart isn’t about loneliness, but rather something simpler than that. In some ways, it’s more striking. Young adults in America can spend an entire waking day without physically being with another person.

Before the pandemic, that was unusual. Only around 3.5% of Americans aged between 23 and 29 reported a completely contact-free day.

Then Covid arrived and that number jumped. That part is unsurprising, because workplaces were closed, social events disappeared, and people stayed at home.

However, what is surprising is what happened afterwards. By 2023, around 10% of young adults were still spending whole days without in-person contact. In 2025, this figure remained at around 9.6%, almost three times the pre-pandemic level.

Source: Financial Times

Remote work appears to explain part of this. Research suggests that Americans who can work remotely spend roughly an extra waking hour alone on working days and socialise less afterwards. But remote work explains only part of the broader shift.

This is what makes this chart so interesting. Society may have reopened, but young adults did not completely return to their old social routines.

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CHART 1 • Why IPO winners distort the typical return

What’s surprising about IPOs is that the companies everyone remembers are not the companies most investors experienced. Large US companies often arrive on the stock market surrounded by a lot of excitement, ambitious forecasts and enormous valuations. However, once the hype fades and investors have several years of results to judge, many fail to beat the wider market.

Jay Ritter’s long-running research makes this point really clear. Across IPOs from 2001 to 2024, newly listed companies underperformed the market by an average of 14.7 percentage points over their first three years. In the five-year group, most failed to match the market’s roughly 70% return. This is what makes this chart by The Economist, based on his research, so interesting.

Source: The Economist

The reason investors keep buying IPOs is that the winners can be spectacular. Shopify, Palantir and Tesla produced gains of roughly 1,500% to 5,000%, creating the impression that getting into a great company early on can make you wealthy. This is the trap. Those extraordinary winners sit above a much larger group of ordinary or disappointing listings.

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