Wanted: freelance researchers for The Spectator

Summer’s coming, and we’re looking for some specialist research help at The Spectator. We like to answer the questions other publications don’t, which means digging beyond the available social data and widening the parameters for debate. And we’d like some help, ideally from a specialist.

You could be a PhD student looking for a few hours’ extra work, a specialist who knows exactly how to mine the Millennium Cohort Study database or a genius school dropout who can do a Lisbeth Salander (pictured, above) for social data.

The pay is hourly, and will be commensurate with your experience (ie, how quickly you can get the stuff done). You can (of course) work from home. If you can answer three of the below questions (of have a clear idea how you would answer them, with enough time) then drop a line to editor@spectator.co.uk with RESEARCH in the subject heading.

1. Draw a stacked bar chart with salary paid on the X-axis and take-home pay on the Y-axis, showing the extent to which benefits and tax credits top up low pay. The bars should be composed of after-tax pay, then the various benefits.
2. Is it harder to escape low pay nowadays?
3. When William Galston was advising Bill Clinton, he identified three steps to avoiding poverty: finish school, get married and avoid teenage parenthood. If you kept all three rules, he said, you had a 8pc chance of falling into poverty. If you broke all three rules, it was 79pc. Can these figures be calculated for Britain?
4. Draw a graph of earnings for graduates and non-graduates since 1980.
5. Draw a graph to show the popularity of marriage amongst various income (or social) groups over the years.
6. Demos recently used census data to show out that 10.3% of ethnic minorities are in ‘Class 1’ jobs, more than 9.8% for whites. Draw a graph to show how both percentages have changed since the 1951 census.
7. Is it likely that the UK is the best in Europe for the high percentage of ethnic minorities in Class 1 jobs? How would you find out?
8. The Nobel prizewinner Joe Stiglitz recently declared on the radio that ‘everyone knows inequality in Britain is getting a lot worse’. Given that the Gini index has been stagnant for 25 years, and the ONS household wealth figures show no increase in the share of wealth held by the 1% or 10%, what was he referring to?
9. Has the fall in crime been concentrated in richer neighbourhoods?
10. Identify a few decent metrics to compare NHS performance in England, Scotland and Wales since devolution.
11. David Cameron has pledged that Britain will make overseas aid donations worth 0.7pc of economic output. What is the real figure, factoring in private philanthropic donations?
12. Two unemployed, single 21-year-old men, from Salford and Szczecin, see a minimum wage job advertised in central Manchester, 30 hours a week. How much better off would each one be by taking it?

These are just examples: there are several more such questions. And yes, they’re tough but I’m hoping someone out there will know of a short cut. It may mean mining the Millennium Cohort Study or finding a clever way of interrogating the Hospital Episode Statistics. Or using FoI requests to produce the results that the officials don’t want to release.

Even better, perhaps you know where some of the above work may have already been done. Or half done, and a researcher somewhere may be able to advise how the task may completed. Or it may well be that the data doesn’t exist, or the task would take several months.

In an ideal world, these questions would be addressed by the government with its massive resources and an interest in knowing more about the problems it’s spending so many billions trying to solve. Or by a British equivalent to well-funded, quasi-academic American think tanks chock-full of scholars (Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute, etc). Britain’s think tanks are tiny by comparison, so unanswered questions pile up.

Hence this appeal.

And one final appeal: please don’t respond to this blog unless you have experience of handling such tough issues.

UPDATE: My colleague Sebastian was teasing me for the first question, saying that he can easy draw a stacked bar chart and he’d get the data from the ONS. But he wouldn’t! The data doesn’t exist – and yes, it’s pretty appalling that no one has put together data that attempts to show what life is like for those on low wages. This means policymakers are in the dark, and don’t realise workers would lose most of a minimum wage increase via withdrawn benefits. Open Europe and PolicyInPractice have drawn up a few case studies, but there is no chart showing pay vs earnings. The IFS have some old models, but the benefits change all  the time. The ideal candidate might be able to say: ‘actually, the DWP has a new online calculator and you can build a pay-income graph by querying it’.  Which would be great. But it’s more likely that the benefits system is so complex that such figures don’t exist. And that millions of low-paid workers are caught in a trap too complex even for government to understand.