On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.
It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?
Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.
WASHINGTON — The shift toward digital government services is reshaping how Americans interact with public institutions, but a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) warns that this transformation risks leaving behind millions of vulnerable citizens. Titled “Closing the Digital Verification Divide,” the report, authored by Dr. Michael Mandel, Vice President and Chief Economist at PPI, highlights the urgent need for inclusive identity verification processes to ensure access to government services.
The report reveals that as federal, state, and local governments increasingly digitize their services, the existing digital verification divide is becoming a significant barrier for low-income and marginalized Americans. These individuals often lack the financial and identity documents, such as bank accounts or passports, that are commonly required for digital verification. The report stresses that without targeted interventions, these populations may be unable to access critical services like unemployment benefits, tax records, and social security.
“At every level of government, we’re grappling with how to make access both effective and inclusive for Americans,” said Dr. Michael Mandel. “The digitization of government is essential for making services more efficient, but it must be done in a way that doesn’t widen the divide between those who have easy access to verification and those who don’t. This report outlines actionable steps to ensure that digital government works for every American.”
The report identifies a significant “digital verification divide” that disproportionately affects low-income Americans, rural residents, and marginalized groups, all of whom often lack the documentation required to access digital government services. One key barrier is the reluctance to adopt biometric verification due to privacy and surveillance concerns. This has resulted in the underuse of effective tools that could help bridge the verification divide. The report advocates for the responsible use of biometric systems, integrated with alternative methods like video interviews, to ensure inclusivity.
To address these challenges, the report outlines several policy recommendations. It calls for the adoption of integrated verification systems that combine biometrics with alternative approaches, such as using trusted referees to conduct video interviews for those without traditional forms of identification. It also urges government agencies to follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines, which balance security and accessibility. Finally, the report emphasizes the need for greater support for trusted referees, who can help individuals navigate digital verification, particularly those in low-income or underserved communities.
The report concludes that implementing these recommendations is crucial for closing the digital verification divide and ensuring that all Americans can access the services they need. By making these changes, government agencies can not only improve efficiency but also ensure broader access to digital services in the modern era.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
###
Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
In the internet era, the digitization of government is essential for the efficient and fair provision of public services. From faster access to unemployment benefits and food stamps to easier taxpayer retrieval of IRS tax records, digitization has the potential to make federal and local government work better, especially for lower-income Americans who need its services the most. It is not an exaggeration to say that “making government work better” requires digitization.
But successful digitization of government was slowed until recently by several factors. First, the “digital access divide” meant that many low-income or rural Americans did not have good enough quality Internet to seamlessly make use of digital government services. As a result, digitization of government ran the risk of widening existing inequities. Moreover, government had to maintain non-digital legacy systems as well as the new digital means of access, driving up the expense of service delivery and undercutting potential cost savings.
True, the original digital access divide has been narrowing. Post-pandemic efforts to bring highspeed broadband internet to everyone, such as the BEAD program, are in the process of successfully reducing the obstacles to access.
However, government agencies face a more subtle but pervasive issue — what we call the “digital verification divide.” Verification is the process by which a user verifies that they are who they say they are. Verification includes identity proofing, in which an individual provides sufficient information (e.g., identity history, credentials, documents) to establish a trusted identity online. That’s a prerequisite for higher levels of authentication, which verifies the identity of a user, process, or device, in order to allow access to more protected resources in an information system.
The process of identity proofing and authentication is especially important when users are trying to tap into government systems that contain sensitive personal data, such as individual accounts at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), Federal Student Aid (.gov) or Veterans Administration (VA). If government agencies make verification too easy relative to the risk of the transaction, then the wrong people can get access to sensitive personal data. If agencies make verification too hard relative to the risk of the transaction, then it becomes more difficult for constituents to prove their identity, unnecessarily locking them out of services and data that they are entitled to.
A “digital verification divide” is created by two factors that make it harder for low-income and other Americans with sparse document trails to take advantage of digital government. One issue is that low-income and marginalized Americans are less likely to have bank accounts, mortgages, passports, or any of the accumulation of documentation that most people can use to establish their identity and help authenticate themselves for government systems.
The second issue in closing the digital verification divide is that the use of biometrics for identity verification has been mistakenly conflated with the use of biometrics for
surveillance and law enforcement, which poses a very different set of technological and implementation challenges. A typical identity verification system might use a face-matching algorithm that does a “1 to 1” comparison between an individual’s face and a particular government-issued ID. A law enforcement application, by contrast, might use a facial recognition algorithm that does a “1 to many” comparison between an individual’s face and a database of millions of potential matches.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) testing has shown a steady reduction in the errors from the sort of face-matching algorithms used for identity verification, with the top-scoring ones performing consistently across demographics. Nevertheless, the continuing debate over the use of biometrics in situations such as surveillance and law enforcement has made policymakers reluctant to mandate biometrics for identity verification.
Closing the digital verification divide should be an important goal of policy, both for equity and efficiency reasons. Enabling government to interact digitally with all citizens in a safe way is essential to move the government into the future. Unfortunately, that progress has been slowed by challenges facing “Login.gov,” the widely-used identity proofing and authentication system originally launched by the General Services Administration (GSA) in 2017. The GSA was faced with conflicting demands: On the one hand,
guidelines issued by NIST required a physical or biometric component to achieve a high level of assurance needed by federal agencies to ensure legitimate access to restricted information or accounts requiring identity verification. On the other hand, the GSA apparently felt pressure to stay away from biometrics.
The result: the GSA ended up significantly misrepresenting the capabilities of Login.gov to the agencies using (and paying for) the system, according to a report released in March 2023 by the GSA Inspector General. GSA officials claimed that Login.gov met NIST guidelines which required a physical or biometric component. But “Login.gov has never included a physical or biometric comparison for its customer agencies,” according to the report, titled “GSA Misled Customers on Login.gov’s Compliance with Digital Identity Standards.” Along the same lines, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration came out in September 2023 with a report raising concerns about Login.gov’s ability to stop the types of fraud experienced by the IRS and other government agencies — though its deployment across agencies continues to expand.
This policy brief will examine new evidence about how government agencies on the federal, state and local levels can digitize without creating or widening a digital verification divide. First, we note that the digitization of government needs to both boost efficiency and promote inclusion in order to meet its goals. Second, the success of
digitization of government requires fair treatment to all individuals who need to log on remotely to public-facing government systems. In practice, this may mean following NIST guidelines that suggest providing an alternative video chat with a “trusted referee” for anyone who chooses and is verifying remotely. Finally, we conclude that with the availability of “trusted referees” or a similar alternative channel, biometric facial verification using leading NIST-tested algorithms can provide a high level of security and strong performance, while closing the digital verification divide.
In particular, an integrated system that includes both biometric face matching and the ability to verify users via alternative channels, such as video chat or in-person, can produce better access to digital government for low-income and other Americans with sparse document trails while limiting fraud. By contrast, an approach that relies only on online records is likely to be both less secure and less inclusive
Summarizing, this policy brief identifies and names a major roadblock to digitization of government on every level, and explains how following the NIST guidelines helps overcome those obstacles. Indeed, misguided opposition to biometrics as part of a well-constructed digital verification process has been slowing down effective digitization, and widening the digital verification divide.
California has found a better path forward in the long-running battle between newspapers and the tech industry. Led by state Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the state brokered an agreement that benefits California residents and journalists, while avoiding the unintended consequences of legislation adopted in Australia, Europe, and Canada, and being considered elsewhere in the U.S.
The agreement, which does not require legislation, sets up a News Transformation Fund, totaling $125 million over five years, to be jointly funded by Google, the California state government, and perhaps other tech companies. The fund, which will support journalism in the state, would be overseen by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
In addition to these subsidies, the agreement provides a framework for a privately funded “National AI Accelerator” that would help develop AI tools for journalism and other industries. Google will maintain and expand its content licensing efforts for Google News Showcase, and continue the Google News Initiative.
Taken together, these three components of the agreement will help California newspapers and other news operations, which have been struggling with economic and journalistic challenges. The economic challenge is to maintain funding for news operations in the face of long-term declines in the price of advertising. Adjusted for inflation, the price for newspaper advertising has dropped roughly 40% since 2007 — good news for advertisers and consumers, but bad news for newspapers and their employees. That’s where the subsidies from the News Transformation Fund will help.
The journalistic challenge is to maintain the relevance of news operations in the face of competition from online influencers, independent podcasters, and other new media born in the digital world. No one knows the best answer, but it’s likely going to require the use of AI to boost the reach of working journalists, and produce innovative streams of news and revenues.
The California agreement is an alternative to cumbersome and unsuccessful legislative attempts in the United States and elsewhere to force tech platforms to pay for their “use” of the news. The California approach avoids bureaucratic collective arbitration mechanisms, as in Australia and Europe, and complex exemption procedures, as in Canada.
Because the funding will be monitored by a board that includes representatives from independent, Black, Latino, and diverse media and labor, it’s more likely to be targeted to underserved populations.
The California agreement sets a model for other states and countries. It’s not perfect, but it brings all the parties to the table in a way that starts to tackle both the economic and journalistic challenges facing the news media.
FACT: Trump-era tariffs raised prices but did not ‘bring manufacturing back’.
THE NUMBERS: Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP –
Year
Percentage
2023
10.3%
2020
10.1%
2016
10.9%
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Here’s Vice Presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance, pitching higher tariffs in late July and saying no price for toasters would be too high. And there was the same Mr. Vance, a week earlier, denouncing high prices and their toll on middle-class family budgets: “Many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent.”
Visionary poets like Walt Whitman can get away with this sort of thing. (Song of Myself, verse 51: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”.) Politicians struggle. Challenged in a TV interview a few days later, Vance tries hard to have it both ways, with a claim about earlier Trump-era tariffs:
“[M]anufacturing came back and prices went down for American citizens. They went up for the Chinese but went down for our people.”
Is he right? In fact, manufacturing growth slowed down while prices went up. The two main Trump-era tariffs went onto steel and aluminum in March 2018 (“Section 232”), and most Chinese-made goods (“Section 301”) — though toasters were exempted — in three pulses from September 2018 to mid-2019. Overall, this raised average “trade-weighted” U.S. tariff rates from 1.4% to 3.0% as of 2019. Since then, the figure has dropped back to 2.4%, as some purchasing shifted from China to Vietnam and other countries. Here’s the price and output data afterward:
Prices: The U.S. International Trade Commission’s 2023 report on the Trump-era tariffs is the standard source here. It finds prices up for families buying consumer goods and also up for manufacturers, construction firms, and others buying metal. The representative quotes:
Steel and aluminum(pg. 124): “The increase in tariffs on steel and aluminum imports increased the relative price of imports and led consumers of steel and aluminum to increase sourcing from domestic suppliers. This increase in demand for domestic production of steel and aluminum resulted in increases in the price of domestically produced steel and aluminum and the quantity of domestic steel and aluminum production in these industries. However, the higher prices of steel and aluminum translated into higher costs of production inputs for downstream industries. This effect negatively impacted the downstream industries that purchase steel and aluminum because costs increase per unit of production.”
Chinese goods (pg. 145): “[T]he tariffs did not have a significant impact on the price received by Chinese exporters. On the other hand, the elasticity of the importer price with respect to the tariffs is close to one, indicating that importer prices rose about 1 to 1 in response to the tariff increase. This is consistent with the recent work of Amiti et al. (2019), Fajgelbaum et al. (2020), Carvallo et al. (2021), and Jiao et al. (2022), who also largely estimate full pass-through of recent tariff actions from exporters to importers.”
Academic literature, along with reviews by Federal Reserve staff economists, concurs. These generally converge on a finding that the tariffs raised overall U.S. prices in a range of 0.3% to 0.5%, with the highest estimate a bit above 1.0%.
Output: With respect to manufacturing trends afterward, the ITC’s report concludes that (as of 2021) the steel and aluminum tariffs had raised the two metals’ output by about $2.2 billion, and shrunk the output of auto parts, machinery, tools, and other metal-using manufacturers (including household appliances such as toasters) by about $3.5 billion. On net, therefore, an overall slight shrinking of U.S. manufacturing. (They didn’t do a similar estimate of the China tariffs’ impact on consumers and firms buying inputs.)
More broadly, the post-tariff trend has been somewhat slower growth in manufacturing output and employment, though not an overall contraction. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates U.S. GDP stats, reports that in 2017, manufacturing made up $2.1 trillion of a $19.6 trillion American economy — that is, industries making planes, cars, semiconductor chips, frozen meat, refined petroleum, medicines, plastics, etc. accounted for 10.9% of overall output just before the tariffs. By 2019, their $2.2 trillion output was 10.5% of a $2.2 trillion economy; after a sharp drop to 10.0% in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, it rebounded to 10.3% in 2023 ($2.29 trillion of a $22.38 trillion economy). So manufacturing continued to grow, but makes up a somewhat smaller part of the U.S. economy than before the Trump-era tariffs.
Alternatively, in terms of “real,” inflation-adjusted growth, U.S. manufacturing grew by $33.5 billion on average per year during the Obama presidency, measuring from the financial crisis low of 2009 to 2017. Since 2018 it has grown by $30.2 billion per year, again slightly more slowly after the tariffs than before.
Employment: The employment story is similar – a slowdown in net manufacturing job creation, and a somewhat smaller share of total employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in July of 2017, manufacturers employed 12.5 million of 146.8 working Americans, or 8.5% of all jobs. As of July 2024, the figure is 13.0 million of 158.7 million jobs, or 8.2%. Alternatively, again looking back to the Obama era, from the financial crisis low in mid-2009 to mid-2017, manufacturers added a net of 795,000 jobs. This was an average net gain of 99,500 jobs per year. Since mid-2017, they’ve added another 480,000, for 68,600 jobs per year. Or, in terms of wages, BLS’ stats find manufacturing workers earning about 27 cents more per hour than the national average in 2017 (a 1.0% advantage), and 29 cents per hour less (a 1.0% disadvantage) by 2021.
So: A lot goes into these big numbers – economic shocks and booms, career choices of young workers, innovation and adaptation of new technologies, etc. But the overall data from BEA and BLS make ITC’s conclusion that the 2018/19 tariffs raised prices and slightly shrank U.S. manufacturing look pretty strong. Vance’s backward-looking claims of ‘lower prices’ and ‘coming back’ don’t hold up. You can, however, be pretty confident about his promise that with an added tariff of 10% or 20%, toasters – along with other home appliances, groceries, gas, TV sets, refrigerators, cars, medicine, toothpaste, and consumer goods generally – will cost more.
Vance’s toaster-price rhetoric appears to have contaminated the kitchen-appliance Internet with a moldy spread of opportunistic ‘made-in-USA toaster’ false positives. Discarding these, our search finds that no small home pop-up toasters appear to be made in the United States at the moment. U.S. factories do, however, produce kitchen and other home appliances – according to BLS, about 61,500 people work in appliance production – and several firms (e.g. Tennessee-based Holman Star) make big conveyor-type toasters for restaurants and hotels. They sell for $1,000 and up. Alternatively, the UK’s Dualit makes its “Classic” line by hand in Sussex, starting at £170 (=$222).
BLS on home-appliance industry employment and pay.
And tariffs appear to be making it harder, not easier, to make these things here. From the political right, National Review’s Dominic Pino reports on toasters and American kitchen appliance-makers’ unhappy experience with Trump-era metals tariffs.
One of the triumphs of the Information Revolution is the ability to connect countries, consumers, and businesses around the world. Africa, in particular, is moving into a new stage of connectedness. The 2Africa underwater fiber cable, the world’s largest subsea cable system, is scheduled to be completed in 2024, connecting 30 or so North African and Sub-Saharan African countries with Europe and Asia, and doubling data capacity.
At the same time, data consumption and smartphone penetration have soared. For example, in Nigeria, data consumption rose by 38% in 2023, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the new data capacity will be Africa’s “App Economy.” The rapidly growing number of smartphone users will be able to more easily use mobile applications to download information and entertainment both domestically and globally.
More important, for Africa, the evolving App Economy is a potent source of future well-paying jobs. The App Economy includes those workers engaged with developing, updating, maintaining, and securing mobile apps, as well as the workers supporting the app developers. As the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has shown in previous research, the App Economy is booming in many countries at various stages of economic development.
Now it’s Africa’s turn. Nigeria already has 45,000 App Economy jobs, according to PPI’s new estimate (presented in this paper). Egypt, South Africa, and Morocco have 51,000, 15,000, and 9,000 App Economy jobs, respectively. Much more growth is possible with the right policies.
None of these jobs existed 15 years ago, when Apple first opened the App Store on July 10, 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis. Android Market (which later became Google Play) was announced by Google shortly after. These app stores created a new route through which software developers in any country could write programs for smartphones. These mobile applications — called “apps” — could then be distributed to the rapidly growing number of smartphone users around the world.
The jobs generated by the app stores became an important part of the global economic expansion. Originally, apps were associated with games and social networks, but over the years, apps became critical to every area of the economy: Retail, travel, education, banking, health care, agriculture, and government.
More than that, app development and app stores became a key route by which young people can develop tech skills, either by building their own apps or helping develop apps for global markets. App development is a stepping-stone, if you will, to other aspects of the global digital economy.
In this pioneering paper, we estimate the number of App Economy jobs for two North Africa countries and two sub-Saharan countries where we have sufficient data to make reasonable estimates. We calculate the size of the iOS and Android ecosystems for these countries and compare them to peers adjusting for size. Finally, we also give some examples of App Economy jobs for these four countries, and touch on some policy implications for growth.
Andrii Ryzhov, an assistant chaplain in the Ukrainian army, peers into the back of his battered Volkswagen van on a leafy side street in Kramatorsk, just 15 miles from the front line. These are the tools of his trade: dog-eared cardboard boxes containing packaged food, canned goods, and pocket prayer books, nestled among rolls of camouflage netting and combat gear, including bullet-proof vests.
Ryzhov had telephoned one of his commanders that morning and discovered that the officer was in the hospital—so now he is visiting, unbidden. The chaplain packs a box to take into the clinic across the street: two packages of cookies, a handful of hard candy, dried fruit, and nuts, as well as a copy of the New Testament. “We do whatever we can to support the men, believers, and nonbelievers,” Ryzhov’s fellow chaplain, Serhii Tsoma, explains to me. “And it’s often very simple—cook food, fix cars, tell jokes, whatever makes them feel better.”
I first met Ryzhov in early 2022, not long after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. His hometown, Irpin, a bedroom community outside of Kyiv, had fought off the first wave of Russian invaders, a show of resistance that stunned Moscow at a time when the Ukrainian capital was expected to fall in days. Most able-bodied residents left Irpin during the monthlong battle. But Ryzhov remained, driving into the shelling day after day to evacuate the elderly and provide humanitarian assistance for those who refused to go.
Companies hurt by the tariffs could sue Trump if he uses IEEPA, but they’re unlikely to find a judge that would issue an injunction to stop the order from going into force and the lawsuit itself could take years to resolve, said Everett Eissenstat, a former Trump White House official who now is a partner at Squire Patton Boggs.
Still, Trump’s action under the law may be easier to challenge legally if he uses the growing U.S. trade deficit as justification for urgent tariff action. The United States has run a trade deficit every year since 1975, making it hard to claim the current trade deficit is an emergency, said Ed Gresser, a former USTR official now at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank.
The U.S. economy has quadrupled in size over the past five decades to more than $22 trillion and employment has doubled to 158 million jobs even though the trade deficit has increased, Gresser added. And while the dollar value of the trade deficit has hit record highs in the range of $1 trillion annually, the trade gap actually has declined as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product from the peak level of 5.7 percent in the mid-2000s to 2.9 percent in 2023.
“Things will get worse before they get better.” That was the gloomy warning given by Keir Starmer this week, in his first major speech since becoming prime minister.
Labour have previously blamed the Tories for the ‘economic black hole’ they say they’ve found in the public finances since taking office. But what did Starmer mean when he referred to a ‘societal black hole’ left by his predecessors? And if there are cracks in British society, how does the government fix them?
Amol and Nick are joined by Starmer’s former director of policy and expert on the working class Claire Ainsley – now a director at the center-left thinktank, the Progressive Policy Institute.
Ideas about men’s work and women’s work and whether an individual has or does not have a college degree contribute to occupational segregation for young workers in the labor market. But this segregation has decreased since 2000, especially as women without college degrees increased their employment in some occupations.
This information is from several Pew Research Center reports on men and women civilian workers between 25 and 34 years old with and without a college degree. It draws on Pew’s analysis of Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data including a special 2023 report surveying about 57,000 households.
As we celebrate Labor Day 2024, here are 4 important trends from this Pew research that show where opportunity is lacking and where new occupational opportunities may exist for men and women who have or do not have college degrees.
FACT: World infant mortality rate cut by half since 2000; in the U.S., by only 22%.
THE NUMBERS: Infant mortality rates, 2000-2022* –
Country
2000
2022
Decline
Sierra Leone (highest rate 2022)
138.3
76.0
-45%
Estonia (lowest rate 2022)
8.7
1.5
-83%
Least-developed countries
108.6
42.3
-61%
World
53.0
27.9
-47%
High-income countries
6.9
4.1
-41%
United States
7.1
5.6
-22%
Deaths in the first year of life, per thousand live births. World Bank for world and regions; CDC’s most recent release for the U.S. rate in 2022. Note that the CDC has recalculated the U.S.’ 2000 figure to 6.9 per 1000.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
“Natalism,” the view that governments should encourage people to have children, can come in modest and supportive forms: child tax credits, cash subsidies for child care, and so on. Few are extremely successful. More exotic approaches — e.g. Vice Presidential candidate Vance’s haranguing of childless couples as in some way letting down the country — aren’t at all likely to do better. An alternative suggestion: improve the protection of children once they’re born. Here a remarkable 21st-century international success — a sharp drop in infant mortality almost everywhere, fastest on average in poorer countries but also clear in Europe, Australia, and Japan — highlights an area where Americans should do better. The background and the contrast:
20th-century success: In the very long view, American infant mortality has declined drastically — by 99.4% — since 1915, when the Labor Department’s newly formed Children’s Bureau first estimated a national infant mortality rate. Their statisticians found 99.9 deaths in the first year of life per every 1,000 births that year, for a 10% infant mortality rate. Earlier rates were likely even higher — Michigan’s health department, for example, reported 15.7% state infant mortality in 1900 — and the Bureau believed 30% of all deaths in the U.S. were of children five years or younger. To put these figures in perspective, the death rate for soldiers in the Union Army was 13.4%; and according to World Bank tables, the highest national infant mortality rates today are Sierra Leone’s 76 per 1,000 and the Central African Republic’s 74. Or, to move from data to family life, early childhood death was common, and neither power and wealth, nor education, nor medical education seem to have been defenses: three of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children died young, as did four of Karl and Jenny Marx’s seven, three of Louis and Marie Pasteur’s five, and two of Charles and Emma Darwin’s ten.
The causes were fairly simple: (a) bad sanitation, especially contaminated milk and water; (b) no vaccines, anti-inflammatory medicines, or antibiotics; and (c) poor or non-existent primary health care. Over the next decades, with public health and sanitation laws, new medicines, vaccination campaigns, Medicaid insurance for the poor, and other policy innovations, the figures collected by the Children’s Bureau and its successors at the Centers for Disease Control steadily improved: 60 deaths per thousand births by 1930, 40 by 1940, 26 by 1960, 10 by 1980, and 7.1 (since recalculated to 6.9) as CDC published its “Achievements in Public Health ” retrospective in 2000.
But more recently: Placed against this 20th-century achievement, the U.S.’ 21st-century record looks mediocre at best. CDC’s most recent calculation of the national infant mortality rate (for 2022, out in late July) is 5.6 deaths per 1,000 births. This is 22% below the rate of 2000 and actually up from 5.4 deaths in 2021 – the largest jump in 20 years.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has cut infant mortality by nearly half. It’s tempting to put the relatively poor U.S. performance in a good light by noting that the high worldwide rate reflects remarkable successes in lower-income countries, and/or assuming that public health policy might have a diminishing rate of return, with infant mortality reduction slowing naturally as rates fall and at some point stopping.
The first of these points is true. Most of the low- and middle-income world has cut infant and childhood deaths deeply and fast since 2000. Uzbekistan, for example, has cut infant mortality by 77% since 2000, Cambodia by 76%, Armenia and Morocco by 66%, Bangladesh by 62%, Ethiopia 61%, Egypt 59%, El Salvador 57%, Indonesia 56%, Honduras 55%, Timor-Leste 53%, and Ghana 51%. But the second isn’t. The U.S.’ rate was near the ‘developed’-world average in 2000, is now clearly higher, and has fallen more slowly than most. As an example, Japan’s 3.2 per 1000 rate was the world’s lowest in 2000, and has fallen at exactly the world average rate to 1.7 per 1000. A representative table of large and advanced economies:
Country
2022 Infant Mortality Rate
Drop since 2000
China
4.8
-84%
Australia
3.2
-63%
Korea
2.5
-63%
Ireland
2.7
-60%
India
25.5
-62%
Italy
2.2
-53%
World
27.9
-47%
Japan
1.7
-48%
Spain
2.5
-43%
United Kingdom
3.6
-39%
Germany
3.0
-32%
United States
5.6
-22%
France
3.3
-19%
Canada
4.3
-19%
What explains this? And what might be done?
One explanation comes from internal disparities: differing experiences by geography, by race, and ethnicity, and differing rates of change over time. Some comparisons:
* State and region: By state, Massachusetts has the lowest U.S. infant mortality rate at 3.2 per 100 births; Mississippi’s 9.1 per thousand is the highest. By region, rates in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast are well below the national averages and within a standard rich-country range. Rates in the deep South and Vance’s Ohio-Indiana-West Virginia region are typically above 7 per thousand.
* Race and ethnicity: Infant mortality rates range from 3.7 per thousand in Asian American families through 4.4 in non-Hispanic white families, 4.8 in Hispanic families, 7.5 in Native American, and 10.6 in African American families.
* Change over time: By race and ethnicity, declines over time are not vastly different. Regionally, however, some parts of the country have cut infant mortality noticeably faster than others. The best state record since 2000 is the District of Columbia’s 60% reduction, followed by drops of 45% in New Jersey and North Dakota, 39% in Rhode Island, 36% in Massachusetts, and 35% in New Hampshire. Recent studies suggest a couple of commonalities in the latter group. One is non-participation in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which improved access to prenatal and maternal care for lower-income moms. Another is the imposition of abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, often vaguely written and applicable to many different situations, which may be both keeping patients from seeking care and deterring providers from working in the relevant areas.
Perhaps related to both of these themes is an ominous trend in rural health care: maternity care seems to be getting steadily harder to find, and both expectant mothers and infants therefore face rising risk. Health consultancy Chartis summarizes:
“More than 400 maternity programs closed nationwide between 2006 and 2020. In rural communities, the disappearance of OB services has been particularly impactful. Between 2011 and 2021, 267 rural hospitals closed OB services, representing 25% of all rural OB units in the United States.”
To put these figures in context, there are 2,168 maternity hospitals in the United States. So at least in remote areas, health care options are fewer and further away than they were a generation ago. And bringing this from policy and data to family life, the CDC reports 20,577 infant deaths in 2022. Had the U.S. achieved Japan’s world-standard 1.7 per thousand infant mortality rate, 14,300 of them would have lived. The EU’s 3.1 per thousand rate — which is certainly possible, since it’s not far away from the New England average — would have kept 9,200 alive.
So: For those wanting more American children, Vance’s “browbeating” approach is pretty certainly useless, and more prosaic things — child tax credits and child care support, better access to prenatal and perinatal care, primary health in general, “keeping clinics open in places where they’re closing” — are good ideas. We can, really, do a lot better.
… and a study looking at Medicaid expansion, post-Dobbs abortion restrictions, and changes in infant mortality rates.
World perspective –
The World Bank has rates for 1990, 2000, and 2014 through 2022 across all countries and for regions and income groups.
… and a sample of its data:
Country
2000
2022
Decline
China
29.9
4.8
-84%
Estonia
8.7
1.5
-82%
Uzbekistan
51.4
11.9
-77%
Mongolia
48.4
11.5
-76%
Turkey
30.9
8.5
-73%
Cambodia
79.0
22.3
-72%
Armenia
27.0
9.2
-66%
Australia
5.1
3.2
-63%
Bangladesh
63.0
24.1
-62%
Least-developed countries
108.6
42.3
-61%
Ethiopia
87.4
33.9
-61%
El Salvador
24.6
10.5
-57%
Indonesia
40.9
18.1
-56%
Honduras
30.5
13.8
-55%
Ireland
6.0
2.7
-55%
Italy
4.7
2.2
-53%
Timor-Leste
87.3
41.5
-53%
Mexico
23.6
11.5
-51%
Japan
3.3
1.7
-48%
European Union
5.9
3.1
-47%
World
53.0
27.9
-47%
Jordan
22.6
12.2
-46%
Sierra Leone
138.6
76.0
-45%
High-income countries
6.9
4.1
-41%
United States
7.1
5.6
-24%
Canada
5.3
4.3
-19%
Jamaica
17.5
16.1
-8%
Success stories –
In 2000, the capital’s infant mortality rate, at 13.5 deaths per 1,000 births, was nearly twice the national average. As of 2022, it was 5.5, down by 60% and equal to the national average. Mayor Bowser’s health division, with links to perinatal and infant health services and reporting.
UNICEF looks at newborn health care in Uzbekistan.
This summer’s Republican and Democratic nominating conventions were anything but conventional. Absent from both were the personal rivalries and factional infighting that usually flare up when these coalition parties gather to anoint their standard bearer.
What explains these rare displays of party cohesion? That would be Donald Trump’s genius for polarizing Americans.
July’s Republican convention in Milwaukee looked like a gaudier and more raucous version of a Chinese Communist Party plenum. Speaker after speaker acclaimed Trump as their party’s great helmsman as he looked on approvingly from his imperial box.
Trump’s third nomination essentially was a mass conversion ceremony in which Republicans swore fealty to his brand of apocalyptic populism. Peruse their platform, and you’ll see that Republicans no longer stand for free markets, small government, individual autonomy, fiscal rectitude, judicial restraint and muscular U.S. leadership for a freer world.
It’s that time of year again–reliably bumming out students and parents alike… it ’s back to school! But back to school is also a time to reflect on the state of education in this country… and it’s not all that great.
America is one of the richest countries in the world. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our education statistics. We’re 16th in science globally. In Math, we scored below the average and well below the scores of the top five countries, all of which were in Asia. And in 2018, we ranked an astonishing 125th in literacy among all countries according to the World Atlas.
As we tumble down the international tables, public schools around the country are getting rid of gifted and talented programs. They’re getting rid of standardized testing. All while trying to regain ground from COVID-related learning loss…
So how did we get here? Why have public schools deprioritized literacy and numeracy? What role have teachers’ unions played in advocating for public education in this country and also in holding kids back by protecting bad teachers? How is socioeconomic segregation hurting academic performance? And what kinds of books should really be taught in public schools?
Today, we’re diving deep into these questions and more with three experts who bring diverse perspectives to this debate:
Richard Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project and Director of Housing at the Progressive Policy Institute. His many books and essays have focused on addressing economic disparities in education. Maud Maron is co-founder of PLACE NYC, which advocates for improving the academic rigor and standards of K-12 public school curricula. She’s also the mother of four kids in New York City public schools. Erika Sanzi is a former educator and school dean in Rhode Island. She is Director of Outreach at Parents Defending Education, which aims to fight ideological indoctrination in the classroom.
We discuss the misallocation of resources in education, the promise and perils of school choice, and how we can fix our broken education system.
And if you like this conversation, good news! All week this week at The Free Press—as summer ends and kids return to class—we’re pausing our usual news coverage to talk about education. We’ve invited six writers to answer the question: What didn’t school teach you?
With elite colleges peddling courses on “Queering Video Games,” “Decolonial Black Feminist Magic,” and “What Is a Settler Text?,” there’s never been a better time to go back to the proverbial school of life.
The long-advertised settlement in the private antitrust case House v. NCAA, is now public. The voluminous filing includes excruciatingly sparse detail on a complete overhaul of college sports in the U.S.
The antitrust consumer class action that gave rise to this ambitiously odd redesign puts an end to the illegal restrictions by the NCAA and five power conferences on how college athletes may be compensated. Not surprisingly, the main financial impact of the settlement will be on men’s Division I football and basketball. But it will reverberate throughout college sports, as is clear from critique and pushback over the last several weeks.
The House v. NCAA settlement compensates college athletes for illegally denied past proceeds from, for example, their name, image and likenesses. The centerpiece of the settlement, however, is injunctive relief, or preventing future harm.
* San Francisco Fed, Peterson Institute
** Initial proposal was a 10% tariff worldwide and a 60% tariff on Chinese-made goods; more recently campaign has suggested 20% worldwide and 60% on Chinese-made goods. Cost estimates from the Tax Policy Center, Peterson Institute, Center for American Progress
WHAT THEY MEAN:
From Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5:
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
In the Queen’s spirit, the Trump campaign’s 10-chapter, 5,398-word, platform starts with a pledge to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices” in Chapter 1, and then — four notches down in its own Chapter 5 — says this on trade policy:
“Trade deficit in goods has grown to over $1 Trillion Dollars a year. Republicans will support baseline Tariffs on Foreign-made goods, pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, and respond to unfair Trading practices. … By protecting American Workers from unfair Foreign Competition and unleashing American Energy, Republicans will restore American Manufacturing, creating Jobs, Wealth, and Investment.”
The weird grammar and “Mad Hatter” orthography makes the passage a bit hard to read. Converted from argot to standard English, it promises a lower trade deficit and a larger manufacturing sector, plus a couple of policies that ostensibly will get these things. One, the cryptic allusion to a “Reciprocal Trade Act” can be ignored; it’s a concept pitched by Peter Navarro in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 book, and unworkable in practice. (Precis below for those curious about this particular rabbit-hole.) The other, the “baseline tariff,” has been defined in campaign comments as a 10% tax (or more recently a 20% tax) on all imported products — shoes, over-the-counter medicine, groceries, tea, auto parts, toasters, etc. — plus a 60% tariff on all Chinese-made goods. VP Harris, channeling straight-ahead thinker Alice in her North Carolina talk last Friday, summarizes the idea as follows:
“A national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries. … It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs: a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication.”
Here’s a small but important first-aid example:
The current U.S. tariff on band-aids and similar bandages is zero. (Termed “adhesive dressings and other articles having adhesive layers” in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule; HTS Chapter 30, lines 30051010 and 30051050.) Americans spend about $3 billion dollars a year on them, buying some locally and some from abroad. Trade data report $893 million spent on band-aid imports last year, with Europe and the U.K. supplying $299 million worth, China $263 million, Mexico $142 million, other Latin American countries (mainly Brazil and the Dominican Republic) $88 million, and other countries the remaining $140 million. At face value, raising the U.S. tariff rate from zero to 10% for the European/Latin/etc. bandages, and to 60% on the Chinese, would add another $220 million in costs. A 20%/60% variant would be $285 million. In practice, some or most Chinese products would likely shift to other production sites, so the direct cost to Americans would be a bit less. U.S.-based producers, though, would presumably start charging more. Families’ and clinics’ bandage bills would then rise, probably by 6% to 10% (that is, $150 million to $300 million in extra costs), depending on how sharply imports from China shrank.
A larger 10% or 20% tariff across all industries, applied to industrial inputs as well as consumer goods, will have larger and more complex price effects — since about a third of U.S. inputs are ‘intermediate goods’ used by manufacturers and farmers, it would raise U.S. production costs as well as consumer bills — but the basic one is higher prices. How much? The first Trump administration’s tariffs (on metals, at 25% for steel and 10% for aluminum, and 25% or 7.5% on about $350 billion worth of Chinese-made goods), raised overall U.S. tariff rates from a 1.4% average to 3.0%. Analyses by San Francisco Fed economists and others suggest this likely contributed about half a percentage point to inflation. Three nonprofit studies this spring and summer, using the 10% worldwide tariff — Peterson Institute for International Economics, Center for American Progress, and most recently the Tax Policy Center — expect it would raise families’ bills for goods by $1,500 to $1,820. This would add 6% to 8% to the roughly $23,000 an average household now spends on food, appliances, clothes, gasoline, and other goods.
As to whether you can do both Chapter 5’s promise of higher tariffs and prices, and Chapter 1’s promise to “bring down all prices” (setting aside whether the methods proposed for either one are credible): trust Alice, not the Queen.
As a policy, Chapter 5 works directly against Chapter 1’s “bring down prices” promise. Assuming the Trump campaign abandons Chapter 1, doesn’t worry about price hikes, and sticks with higher tariffs, how credible are its claims that theses higher tariffs would mean lower trade deficits and manufacturing growth? Lots of things beyond trade policy, of course, go into big sectoral trends like this. But experience from the first Trump administration’s 2018/19 tariffs suggests “don’t count on it”.
1. Trade Balance: Each February the U.S. Trade Representative Office publishes a report entitled “The President’s Trade Agenda,” explaining Administration trade goals for the coming year. The 2017 edition, the Trump administration’s first, cited a U.S. manufacturing trade balance stat to argue that its predecessors had gotten things wrong:
“In 2000, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods was $317 billion. Last year [i.e. 2016] it was $648 billion — an increase of 100 percent.”
This ‘$648 billion’ is far below the “1 trillion” manufacturing deficit cited in the 2024 platform. That is because, since the 2018/19 tariff round, the U.S. trade deficit has risen sharply in general and grown more concentrated in manufacturing, which had hit $891 billion in 2020 and reached $1.06 trillion in 2021 before turning down a bit by 2023.
What happened? As an economic axiom, national goods/services trade balances equal national savings minus national investment. A tariff hike, as a form of tax increase, should reduce government “dissavings”. Unless offset by a fall in private-sector savings, it should mean a slightly lower trade deficit. If fiscally outmatched by a tax cut elsewhere, though — as in 2018 and 2019 — the trade deficit will not fall but rise. Thus, the last Trump administration drove up the trade deficit rather than cutting it as it promised. Since tariffs are a form of tax applied particularly to goods buyers and goods-using industries (e.g. retail, manufacturing, and agriculture pay a lot more when tariffs rise; financial services or real estate not so much), the higher Trump-era tariffs are likely a reason the overall deficit has become more concentrated in manufacturing and the agricultural surplus has gone. The most likely outcome, if the Chapter 5 stuff goes into effect, will be similar but larger.
2. U.S. manufacturing sector: Likewise, manufacturing growth slowed after the first set of tariffs. At 10.9% of U.S. GDP in 2018, manufacturing was down to 10.3% by 2021 and has stayed there. With respect to employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds manufacturing job growth not negative but slower after the tariffs than before: about 135,000 net new jobs per year from the financial crisis low in early 2010 to the spring of 2018 just before the Trump tariffs; an average of 57,000 per month since then.
The Census has U.S. exports, imports, and balances from 1960 to 2023 on one convenient page.
And BLS’ database (use Employment, Hours and Earnings for manufacturing and other sector employment).
And down the rabbit hole:
As promised fort hose interested: The “Reciprocal Trade Act” concept, set out by Dr. Peter Navarro (a first-term Trump trade official, recently released from the Federal Corrections Institution in Miami) in essay #26 in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” book, starting on page 765.
The idea is that either “our trading partners lower their applied tariff rates on specific products to U.S. levels in cases where their applied tariffs are higher,” or if they don’t, “to uphold the principle of reciprocity, the U.S. raises its tariffs to mirror levels”. In practice, there are about 150 “tariff schedules” in the world. This is somewhat less than the count of countries and non-independent customs territories, since some countries (e.g. the 27 EU members) are in Customs Unions and use the same tariff schedule. Tariff schedules are quite long: America’s 4,392-page schedule has 11,414 different 8-digit tariff lines (setting aside the extra complexity created by anti-dumping orders, FTAs, 232 and 301 tariffs, and so forth). According to the WTO’s Tariff Profiles 2023, Somalia’s 5,469-line schedule is the shortest, and the others range up from Mozambique’s 5,549 through Nigeria’s 6,890, Switzerland’s 8,703, the EU’s 9,785, Argentina’s 10,811, the Philippines’ 10,896, and India’s 12,088, to peak at Algeria’s 16,785.
All use the same basic 96 chapters, and the same “headings” and “sub-headings” down to 6 digits, so statistical agencies know which types of goods are moving around. But at the “8-digit” level which defines tariff rates, different countries’ tariff systems vary widely. For example, New Zealand has 75 tariff lines for shoes (mostly zero or 10%), while the U.S. has 134 shoe lines from zero to variable compounds like “90 cents/pair + 37.5”. Likewise, the U.S.’ nine jam lines go from 1.4% (currant) to 3.5% (apricot) to 7.0% (peach); Norway’s eight lines (Chapter 20) mix apricots and peaches together and give them a zero, but charge 8.34 kroner/kg for blueberry jam. To make this “Act” work, Customs officials and Congressional staffers would need to write up and then administer a system in which the U.S. had not nine jam lines and 134 shoe lines, but enough — likely several thousand – to match every jam and shoe line in each of the other 150 schedules. Across the entire schedule, the number of tariff lines would likely wind up in the millions. Not going to work, no.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
The devastating effects of pandemic K-12 public school closings continue to haunt America’s students. As around 50 million students and more than 3 million teachers go back to school, it is time for a temperature check on learning loss recovery.
There is also a big and pressing reason for this checkup: the federal government provided $190 billion to states and communities for learning loss recovery, and the legal deadline to commit funds for specific use is September 30, 2024. After the largest ever one-time federal investment in K-12 schools dubbed ESSER (for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief), we need to know what difference—if any—those dollars are making in the recovery effort.
The good news: some students are recovering from learning loss, and federal relief funds have had a positive effect on helping students catch up.
The bad news: many students, especially low-income and minority students, are not recovering from learning loss, and we also do not know what new district and school programs helped students catch up.
