London takes full marks as the top city

The challenge and the triumph, are highlighted in a new report

HOW do you rebalance the UK economy away from London and the Southeast, when London seems to be becoming ever more successful? Or do you just celebrate London’s success and try and figure out how to pack more people in, and spread the wealth they generate a bit more widely?

The challenge, and the triumph, are highlighted in a new report by Deloitte published this week.

It is called Global Cities, Global Talent – London’s Rising Soft Power, and the central message is that whereas New York and London were running neck and neck two years ago, London is now pulling ahead.

The particular hard number that justifies this claim is 1.71 million. That is the number of high-skill jobs in the London economy. That compares with 1.16 million in New York, and is an increase of 235 000 over two years. By contrast, the number of such jobs in New York has declined a little. Paris comes next, with 0.63 million high-skill jobs, followed by Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney in that order.

‘Soft power’

Deloitte also looks at the connections between executives, their nationalities, and the number of countries in which they work. The message here is that London is the most global of the cities, with not only the most diverse group of people working there, but also ”exporting” executives to a wider number of other locations.

This is the “soft power” aspect of the study. The idea here is that if someone comes to London to attend business school, works here for a few years and then moves to some other country, the business connec- tions that he or she made in London extend the city’s influence worldwide. London also benefits from having the world’s number-three business school, the London Business School, and the eighth-ranked university, Imperial College.

Paris notably has the top business school instead, but no university in the top 50. New York has Columbia University and Columbia Business School, ranked 15th and sixth, respectively.

This research will doubtless be challenged, particularly by New York, not a city that likes being pipped to any post. But it confirms what most of us intuitively feel, that while London has probably lost a bit of ground to New York in finance (our job numbers are down there), we have gained in other areas, particularly the creative industries.

Further, it is beyond doubt that London and New York are so far ahead of the pack as to be uncatch- able for a couple of decades at least. For those of us who recall the two shabby, demoralised cities of a generation ago, London steadily losing population and New York within an ace of going bust, it is an extraordinary achievement.

Better to have a success story that creates challenges than a disaster zone with no money to fix it. But the London story does raise a string of issues, some of which are real concerns. There is, for a start, the internal imbalance within the UK. The concept of the Northern Powerhouse is a politically seductive one, but aside from improving infrastructure I’m not sure that the government can do much about this. Successful businesses and universities will drive the north, not political initiatives. In any case, however well the rest of the UK does, London dominance will persist. It is playing a global game, not a national one. – The Independent

NOT getting enough sleep at night may make you eat too much the next afternoon. That’s the conclusion of a study that finds skimping on rest can trigger a response similar to the effect of smoking marijuana, namely the munchies.

Evidence has been accumulating in recent years that people who don’t get enough sleep are at higher risk gaining weight. And while this may not be a surprise to everyone, scientists are beginning to uncover the mechanisms that make it an unhappy reality.

“We know that marijuana causes individuals to overeat,” said Erin Hanlon, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Sleep, Metabolism and Health Center.

“Our findings suggest that sleep restrictions may be acting in

the same manner.” Hanlon and her collaborators put 14 healthy adults through two separate four-day sessions. In one session, they were allowed to sleep eight and a half hours a night. In another, they only had four and a half hours per night. The participants didn’t leave the lab for the duration of each four-day session.

In both sessions, researchers strictly controlled what the subjects ate for the first three days. On the fourth day, after fasting all morning, they were led to a buffet of food far in “excess of what they could eat,” Hanlon said.

The spread included pizza, chicken, steak, burgers, as well as healthier options. Participants were also given unlimited snacks for the rest of the afternoon.

Regardless of how much they had slept, people ate a lot at each buffet – taking in most of the calories needed for the day. The difference appeared during the postlunch grazing: while people ate snacks whether they were rested or not, they were less able to resist extra helpings when they had only 4.5 hours of sleep. Their gorging coincided with an increase in a chemical known as 2-AG, which acts on the endocannabinoid system – the same one that THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, af-