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.
The Progressive Policy Institute launched its Campaign for Working America in February 2024. Its mission is to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that can help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a new economic offer to working Americans, find common ground on polarizing cultural issues like immigration, crime, and education, and rally public support for defending freedom and democracy in a dangerous world. Acting as Senior Adviser to the Campaign is former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, who represented northeast Ohio in Congress from 2003 to 2023.
Since 2016, Democrats have suffered severe erosion among non-college white voters and lately have been losing support from Black, Hispanic, and Asian working-class voters as well. Since these voters account for about threequarters of registered voters, basic electoral math dictates that the party will have to do better with them to restore its competitiveness outside metro centers and build lasting governing majorities. The party’s history and legacy point in the same direction: Democrats do best when they champion the economic aspirations and moral outlook of ordinary working Americans.
To help them relocate this political north star and to inform our work on policy innovation, PPI has commissioned a series of YouGov polls on the beliefs and political attitudes of non-college voters, with a particular focus on the battleground states that have decided the outcome of recent national elections.
This report is the first in a series of Campaign Blueprints detailing new ideas that can help Democrats reach across today’s yawning “diploma divide” and reconnect with the working-class voters who have historically been the party’s mainstay.
Introduction
In the 21st century, education has become America’s most significant marker of class privilege. People with bachelor’s and advanced degrees have mostly prospered, while wages for those with less education have fallen. This divergence in economic fortunes lies at the heart of our country’s present economic and political discontents.
In days past, Americans could get good jobs that paid a family-sustaining wage with just a high school diploma. In today’s increasingly intangible and data-driven economy, most jobs require at least some postsecondary education and training due to automation and technological advancements — demanding different knowledge and skills. If we don’t act now to prepare our current and future workers for these opportunities, more Americans will experience downward mobility and fall further behind.
Some Washington policymakers think we can solve this with “college for all.” It’s true that, on average, a bachelor’s degree confers higher lifetime earnings on those who have them. But most Americans don’t earn degrees. Today, 62% of American adults have no bachelor’s degree, and that number rises to 72% for Black adults and 79% for Hispanic adults. Despite this reality, federal and state policies remain strongly biased in favor of subsidies to Americans who go to college, specifically those who acquire a 4-year degree. In 2018, the federal government spent roughly $149 billion on higher education versus $58 billion for workforce-related education and training. Since the latter figure also includes Pell Grants and veterans’ programs, Washington really only spent about $16 billion, spread across 17 separate federal programs that provide workforce-focused education, employment, and training assistance.
The nation’s chronic underinvestment in work-related learning, experiences, and supports isn’t just unjust, it’s bad economics. It squanders our most precious resource — our workers — and subtracts from U.S. productivity growth and competitiveness.
American workers deserve better than a binary choice between an overpriced college degree program and a patchwork of public and private job training programs of uneven quality. Instead, U.S. leaders should equalize opportunity for workers, regardless of what path they choose. This means building a world-class education system that is inclusive of all options, not just college, to ensure greater upward mobility for American workers.
“Tariffs are taxes—taxes that weigh most heavily on the poorest Americans. Protectionism is, and always has been, regressive, a fact most brutally illustrated by the tariff tables themselves, according to figures compiled by Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute.”
Just days before President Biden signed the landmark bipartisan infrastructure law, with a historic $65 billion investment in broadband, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo urged her home state to use the money wisely.
With more than 97% of Rhode Islanders already having high-speed broadband on their doorsteps, Raimondo warned that states like Rhode Island should “not spend this money overbuilding” because their needs “will be more around affordability.”
As a fiscally savvy former Governor, Raimondo knows what she’s talking about. The Ocean State’s officials should follow her lead as they decide how to use Rhode Island’s $108 million in broadband funds from the infrastructure program. We must not “overbuild” what we don’t need – meaning we don’t need to build duplicative broadband networks where they already exist — while under-investing in what we urgently need — assistance for folks who can’t afford internet service.
There’s nothing wrong with a state regulatory agency setting service standards for connectivity, such as time to repair an outage — as long as the regulators adopt a reasonable and workable approach.
Unfortunately, staff at the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) have jumped the shark. The regulators are proposing to impose draconian outage repair requirements and penalties on carriers, that would require all VOIP (Voice over IP) and wireless outages to be fixed within 24 hours, with costly fines escalating over time. The standard would effectively impose fines on carriers for not fixing outages right away, even when that outage is well beyond the provider’s control.
These fines — which would be automatically credited back to customer accounts — could add up quickly in the case of widespread outages, well in excess of what a customer pays for monthly voice service.
Why is this a problem? Significantly, the proposed action would impose a completely unrealistic perfection standard that provides no flexibility for factors well beyond the control of the carrier. Reasonable exemptions should be included that at a minimum provide an accommodation when there is a lack of commercial power, wildfires, snowstorms, earthquakes, floods, or falling trees, on the one hand, and lack of access to customer premises on the other. However, the staff proposal does not include sufficient flexibility. It is not hard to imagine the absurd results that this will create. For example, imagine a planned commercial power shutoff (e.g., a PSPS or “public safety power shut off”) put in place by Southern California Edison due to a wildfire that results in a loss of power to a community that stretches into two days and impacts all homes and businesses. Under the standard proposed, VOIP providers would be fined for the loss of their service even though the loss of power (and its restoration) is well beyond their control and core business.
In addition, there is nothing a provider can do to correct or prevent an outage when the cause is outside of the provider’s control, whether they are fined for the outage or not. While the proposed CPUC standard exempts outages during governor-declared states of emergency, factors outside of the voice provider’s control arise at other times, including snowstorms, floods, or downed trees, on the one hand, and lack of access to the consumer on the other.
Indeed, it’s a fact of life that some outages take longer to fix than others. A tree falling on a broadband cable in a remote area will take more time to repair than the typical suburban line problem. A lot of trees falling because of a storm will stress repair capabilities. The staff’s proposed standard does not account for these modern-day realities.
If the CPUC staff’s proposal is adopted, this could result in less build-out of new lines to vulnerable rural areas. Suppose that a carrier is deciding whether to build out new facilities in an area that is prone to outages due to natural causes (e.g., fire, earthquakes, floods, etc.). Punishing the carriers too heavily for unavoidable outages will make some proportion of the new lines uneconomical to build and maintain. Similarly, on a statewide level, given different and competing regulatory environments throughout the nation, excessively strict outage penalties could discourage telecom investment in California more generally — an unnecessary loss for the state and its consumers.
At the same time, the new standards will give customers an incentive to game the system, since they benefit directly from the fines. If a carrier can’t get access to a customer’s home or property to fix a problem, then the fines—and customer credits—can mount up quickly, even if the carrier can’t do anything.
Finally, excessively onerous service quality standards will require additional repair equipment and personnel, artificially boosting the price of voice services for California residents. Requiring an unrealistic 100% 24-hour repair standard, particularly if it includes causes beyond the provider’s control, is a luxury that poor and middle-class consumers cannot afford.
Nobody likes communication outages, and nobody disagrees that they need to be fixed as soon as possible. But customers also like low prices, greater innovation, and more telecom investment in rural areas. Excessively tight outage repair standards and punitive penalties undercut both of these.
It does not have to be this way. A more effective framework to protect consumers would calibrate penalties and fines to better focus on outcomes that are squarely within the control of the provider. For example, in New York, rather than punishing VOIP providers for loss of service due to a power outage that is beyond their control, automatic consumer credits do not kick in until commercial power has been restored for 24 hours. And the credit is directly proportionate to the length of the outage and the price of the service the customer pays. This still protects consumers while establishing more realistic expectations for providers.
It is time for California regulators to recognize that more and more regulation is not the key to success and effective consumer protection, especially when such regulation punishes conduct well outside of the control of the regulated company.
Regulations and penalties should be targeted and measured to protect consumers and encourage businesses to continue to invest and operate in the state.
American housing policy is a mess. Although housing already constitutes the largest budget item for most families, government artificially inflates the prices of homes by suppressing their supply. In many regions, housing has become unaffordable for low-income and working-class Americans, and for young middle-class adults starting out in life. Rich and poor increasingly live apart, driving unequal educational opportunities and political and racial polarization. Because housing can be prohibitively expensive in the most economically productive regions of the country, many Americans are no longer moving to opportunity; instead, they move for affordability.
Potential solutions are controversial. Democrats and Republicans tend to differ on matters like rent control, funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher program, and efforts to desegregate residential areas through the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule under the Fair Housing Act.
Intriguing possibilities of bipartisan reform, however, have emerged in one area of housing policy: local zoning barriers that inhibit housing growth and exclude people by income (and, in turn, often by race as well). Several states and localities have adopted zoning reforms in recent years, frequently with support from both parties. The federal government has also devoted some attention and funding to the issue.
