Bernard's Top 10: How the young are priced out of Britain; Young UK workers' wages down 15% since 2007; ECAN's high nitrate levels; An Ebola effect?; The amazing magic leap machine; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz. 

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read is #1 on the way the young have been hit hardest by the Global Financial Crisis in Britain.

1. Social mobility and age - Britain has a Commission on Social Mobility which looks at why some people just can't seem to lift themselves out of poverty by their boot straps.

With all the talk about rising levels of inequality in UK, US and Europe, the next question to ask is whether this means people born into poverty can never get out.

The theory is that investments in education, health and social welfare could increase the level of social opportunity.

That's the theory our Government is using with its 'investment approach' to social welfare, and increasingly health, education and social housing.

Here's the Guardian's Daniel Boffey on what Britain's Social Mobility Commissioner (or Szar as they like to call them), Alan Milburn, is saying about. how different age groups have fared.

He is focusing a lot on the diferences in opportunities between age groups in the wake of the Global Finanical Crisis. The young are really struggling because of low wages, insecure work and rising tuition fees (and debts), while baby boomers aren't doing so badly...

Britain is on the verge of becoming permanently divided between tribes of haves and have-nots as the young increasingly miss out on the opportunities enjoyed by their parents’ generation, the government’s social mobility tsar claims.

The under-30s in particular are being priced out of owning their own homes, paid lower wages and left with diminishing job prospects, despite a strong economic recovery being enjoyed by some.

Those without the benefits of wealthy parents are condemned to languish on “the wrong side of the divide that is opening up in British society”, according to Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister who chairs the government’s Commission on Social Mobility.

2. The numbers are shocking - Milburn details the shocking fall in real wages for the young. Looking at it from a selfish point of view, this may be an opportunity for New Zealand to recruit a bunch of people. You'd have to hope our numbers are much better. The size of the real wage deflation seen in Britain may explain its apparently jobs-rich recovery, but its lack of productivity growth.

Here's Milburn again.

In a strikingly downbeat intervention, Milburn said: “It is depressing. The current generation of young people are educated better and for longer than any previous one. But young people are losing out on jobs, earnings and housing.

“This recession has been particularly hard on young people. The ratio of youth to adult unemployment rates was just over two to one in 1996, compared to just under three to one today. On any definition we are nowhere near the chancellor’s objective of “full employment” for young people. Young people are the losers in the recovery to date.”

The median pay of a 22- to 29-year-old, £9.73 an hour, was more than 10% lower today than it was in 2006, according to Milburn. The pay of 18- to 21-year-olds, £6.73, is 8.8% lower. Both are at the same wage level as they were in 1998.

The proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds in work fell from 65% at the start of 2007 to 56% at the end of 2012 and has only now recovered to 60.8%, despite some consistent economic growth in the last two years.

After taking into account reductions in hours of work, which have decreased in the recession, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has highlighted that for those aged between 22 and 30, median earnings are 15% lower than before the recession, driven by a combination of lower hourly pay and fewer hours of work. This decrease is roughly twice the size as earnings decreases for the 30-59 age group.

3. ECAN's nitrate levels - Environment Canterbury has decided to set a nitrate maximum of 8.5 mg/litre, which is just below the maximum safe level of 11.4 mg/l and well above the 6.9 mg/l level set just last year by the Government.

Gareth Morgan is not happy here.

As we are seeing in Selwyn, the simple fact is that increasing the intensity of agricultural production will have negative impacts on our waterways. For example, conversions to dairy means more cow pee, which means more nitrogen going into the soil, which will eventually end up in our waterways.

The idea that we have ‘headroom’ for conversions in some areas is based on the idea that we can drive water quality down to the Government’s bottom lines. It is simply not compatible with maintaining or improving water quality. The truth is that more dairy farms will not mean our fresh water gets better. They will only make it worse.

4. And neither is Canterbury's Chief Medical Officer of Health - Conan Young from Radio New Zealand reports here.

With 50,000 hectares of land in Selwyn already taken up by dairy farms and another 30,000 possible if a new irrigation scheme goes ahead, Canterbury Medical Officer of Health Alistair Humphrey said the limit should be almost half of this.

"Nitrates take a very long time to increase, they take a very long time to decrease. So it's like turning an oil tanker around. You cannot wait until you get to the maximum accepted value before you act. You need to act earlier than that."

Dr Humphrey said the risks of letting nitrate levels get dangerously high are many including to new born babies who can suffer blue baby syndrome.

5. Ebola and air travel - I lived in Singapore through SARS and have seen more pandemic scare stories than you could shake a thermometer at.

Lots of people are getting worried about this Ebola thing. I'm less worried.

But this chart via WSJ showing air travel figures during SARS is a good reminder of the potentia for short term demage to tourism and travel.

6. This cartoon reminded me of modern New Zealand politics a bit.

6. This Pew study of political polarisation in America is fascinating - It turns out the bubbles are not as air tight we might think.

The project – part of a year-long effort to shed light on political polarization in America – looks at the ways people get information about government and politics in three different settings: the news media, social media and the way people talk about politics with friends and family. In all three areas, the study finds that those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views – and very distinct from each other.

These cleavages can be overstated. The study also suggests that in America today, it is virtually impossible to live in an ideological bubble. Most Americans rely on an array of outlets – with varying audience profiles – for political news. And many consistent conservatives and liberals hear dissenting political views in their everyday lives.

7. The next big new thing called Magic Leap - The world is an amazing place. There's a new type of computer coming that could replace brains, it seems. It's already worth US$542 million and it's still just vapour ware.

There's a company that, at best, you heard of a week ago, based on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale, Florida (!), that today announces it has raised a jaw-dropping $542 million in second-round financing from an unparalleled lineup of bigfoot investors to complete product development and commercialize what its CEO and founder Rony Abovitz calls "a hardware, software, firmware, and development platform" that, oh, you know, replicates the visual perception system of the human brain as a go-anywhere, mobile computing platform.

No one is willing today to explain exactly what the heck Magic Leap is making that'll replace all our rectangles, but it sounds like a blending of what we currently call augmented reality and virtual reality. In fact, Dr Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm's executive chairman and one of Magic Leap's new board advisors, along with Google executive Sundar Pichai, used precisely those two terms in an email to me explaining why he invested. "I'm not sure what the category will be called," Tull says when I ask him, "but it augments and brings you into a world in a completely realistic, immersive way without taxing your eyes or brain." Jacobs also called Magic Leap "immersive and engaging."

8. Just a cartoon for fun.

Germany is no model - Martin Wolf utterly destroys the idea that Germany should be emulated in this piece.

German productivity has been flat since 2007. So much for its amazing labour reforms, which really were just a lowering of real wages. I'm hoping Oliver Hartwich reads it. ;)

Examination of Germany’s sectoral financial balances – the differences between income and spending of the government, private sector and foreigners – strengthens this point. The response of the German private sector to the reforms of the early 2000s was to increase financial surpluses massively: that is, to spend far less than their incomes. Since the fiscal deficit also shrank, the capital outflow soared. This is striking and significant. In brief, the response of the private sector to the labour market reforms and fiscal tightening was to become increasingly frugal and so accumulate large quantities of (often poor-quality) foreign assets.

In terms of raising private domestic demand, reforms achieved little. On the contrary, Germany became heavily dependent on foreign demand. Similarly, fiscal tightening did not unleash stronger private spending. Expecting similar labour-market reforms to promote demand in France and Italy is likely to prove highly over-optimistic.

Germany is right that euro states need much long-term reform. But Germany is wrong to believe that this might, on its own, generate strong growth. The evidence from its experience with reforms is decisive on this point: it will not do so.

Nor does it make sense to rely on ever-greater external surpluses, instead. A policy that may work for Germany alone (a debatable proposition) cannot work for an economy more than three times as big as Germany’s.

9. Here's five unknowns about the Global Economy from the Washington Post. It's well worth a read.

10. John Oliver on Ayn Rand. Much hilarity.