On an aggregate level, American labor productivity gains are stagnating at only 1.6 percent annually since 2019, though the United States is still significantly outperforming Europe and Japan. But U.S. policies to boost productivity and living standard gains must clearly differentiate between leading-edge sectors such as information and retail trade—which have consistently high productivity growth—and lagging sectors such as agriculture, construction, utilities, and manufacturing—which have very slow or negative productivity growth.
In particular, policymakers should adopt a two-pronged approach to productivity. Sectors such as agriculture (0.5 percent productivity growth since 2019), construction (-1.3 percent productivity growth), utilities (0.4 percent productivity growth), and manufacturing (-0.1 percent productivity growth ) have persistently pulled down overall productivity gains. These are also the sectors at the heart of the recent inflationary surge, with sharply rising prices for goods such as food, housing, and automobiles undercutting living standards. The weakness in domestic productivity growth in these sectors, especially manufacturing and agriculture, has also left the United States vulnerable to future supply chain shocks and further worsened the housing shortage.
At a time when working families are struggling with higher prices, a recent study from the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC) highlights how credit card rewards can serve as a “lifeline” to working families. The report notes that earned rewards are equivalent to a 17-cents-a-gallon discount at the gas pump, and that cardholders with an annual income of less than $60,000 redeem rewards at rates consistent with upper-income cardholders.
Given EPC’s opposition to legislative efforts to effectively cap credit card fees, there is some potential inherent bias in the analysis. But at the same time, the results are noteworthy and suggest that policymakers should take a much closer look at whether or not extending price caps to credit card interchange fees would leave working families better or worse off.
A resurgent UK Labour Party is looking like it may be heading back into government in Britain after voters go to the polls on July 4th. What would a change of governing party in Britain for the first time in fourteen years mean for foreign relations? And is Labour—and the center-left more generally—prepared to secure their nation’s interests in a new age of global instability?
If Labour leaders do form a government this year, they will do so in a dramatically changed world compared to when they last left office, in the end days of Gordon Brown’s premiership in 2010. The global financial crisis preceded a period of low economic growth, the rise of right-wing populism and authoritarian rulers, and a breakdown in the rules-based order that liberal democracy was founded on. Britain itself withdrew from the European Union, a construct that had seemed such a stable feature of increasing integration.
Today, we live in a more dangerous world than many Labour politicians will have known in their adult lifetimes.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently finalized two rules for the country’s electricity grids that represent the most significant paradigm shift towards expansion in over a decade. Marking a renewed focus on long-neglected transmission policy, the rules fundamentally alter and begin to standardize the thicket of existing approaches to regional transmission planning by codifying principles of longevity, transparency, and engagement. FERC, the independent agency responsible for regulating interstate energy transmission and wholesale electricity markets, issued Orders 1920 and 1977 at a time of growing policymaker and consumer concern over the state of U.S. electricity infrastructure, which is managing a complex transition through the rise of more frequent extreme weather events, a shifting generation mix, and growing demand from end-use electrification, new manufacturing facilities, and data centers. Although more will be needed on the legislative front — particularly on permitting reform, something PPI has adamantly pushed for — FERC has made commendable progress on the planning side of transmission with these new rules.
The orders underscore the need for increased transmission capacity in our nation’s grid. As demand for electricity balloons, there is growing concern that the country’s transmission networks are hard-pressed to meet household and industry needs, and woefully underdeveloped to reach Biden’s electrification and clean generation goals in the next decade. Growing investment in clean energy generation across the United States faces a bottlenecked grid system caused in no small part by a convoluted set of planning processes. More broadly, the regulatory regime governing the electricity sector comprises an antiquated patchwork of utilities, commissions, and state and federal agencies, ill-suited to accommodate the rapid integration of new technologies or a coordinated, long-term approach to transmission planning.
The rules attempt to address these concerns by providing frameworks for a more collaborative and transparent regional approach to planning that encourages forward thinking and clears unnecessary siting holdups. Order 1920, which was approved 2-1 on a partisan basis with Democrat-appointed commissioners in the majority, contains a number of planning requirements, notably for transmission operators to produce scenario-based regional transmission plans with outlooks of at least 20 years, and to conduct this planning every five years using the best available data. The order also requires that operators determine how projects might achieve seven outlined economic and reliability benefits in the evaluation and selection of long-term regional transmission facilities, further ensuring that long-term transmission needs are considered and addressed cost-effectively. To encourage innovative approaches to transmission planning, Order 1920 obliges operators to consider grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) such as dynamic line ratings and advanced conductors, though without directly mandating their use — likely to avoid overreach, constitutional challenge, and to ensure these technologies are only deployed where doing so has explicit operational and financial advantages.
Another significant new policy included in the order is a requirement to identify opportunities for in-kind replacements of existing facilities to be “right-sized” and thus increase their capacity in a cost-effective manner. Incumbent utilities will be offered federal rights of first refusal (ROFRs) to develop these “right-sized” facilities to avoid the construction of redundant transmission projects. The cost allocation provisions of Order 1920 mandate six-month engagement periods with predefined Relevant State Entities along with plans for a default cost allocation method for selected long-term transmission facilities. They also encourage loosely defined state agreements between providers and Relevant State Entities for selected participants to determine how project costs will be shared among stakeholders. These provisions, in tandem with a mandated process inviting states and consumers to fund some or all of facilities that would otherwise not meet operators’ selection criteria, enable consumers to only pay for projects that benefit them and highlight a renewed emphasis on transparency and state involvement in transmission planning.
Order 1977, which was approved with unanimous consent, complements the new planning framework by adding a backstop measure to prevent proposed projects from fading into obscurity when states fail to act. Specifically, it establishes a process for FERC to exercise its limited authority over siting transmission lines in accordance with amendments to Sec. 216 of the Federal Power Act enacted via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The amendments clarified FERC’s authority to issue permits when state commissions have (i) not made siting determinations by one year following application submission or National Corridor designation, (ii) conditioned approval such that projects are no longer feasible or inadequately reduce capacity constraints, or (iii) denied an application. While affirming states’ primary role in the siting of transmission lines, the rule promotes timely review of siting applications and leaves room for FERC to preclude individual states from inhibiting projects that would be beneficial at the regional or national level.
The rule also introduces a Landowner Bill of Rights which ensures that landowners are notified of potential transmission line projects and permitted to intervene in open Commission proceedings, and codifies an Applicant Code of Conduct to facilitate good-faith engagement between applicants and landowners during the permitting process. To drive home the engagement imperative, transmission line applicants are further required to conduct outreach to environmental justice and Tribal communities. Mandated Environmental Justice Public Engagement Plans will be used to create Environmental Justice Resource Reports to identify impacted communities and detail the effects of projects, and similarly, Tribal Engagement Plans will feed into Tribal Engagement Resource Reports for the same purpose. These stakeholder engagement requirements will hopefully break the cycle of inadequate notification and litigation by residents and quicken project approval through a more proactive and transparent input process. But they must take into account a project’s broader dispersed benefits and avoid granting landowners and local communities an undue veto when entire regions stand to gain.
Taken together, the new rules lay down a much-needed groundwork for the future of transmission in the United States. They provide for a set of processes that bring together state, federal, and private entities to assess and develop long-term transmission projects to meet the needs of Americans in a more holistic and cost-sensitive way. Yet to a certain extent, these changes seem so obvious that many Americans might be surprised that such planning practices were not already in place. In reality, they represent only a fraction of the reforms needed to boost transmission development to the pace needed in order to restore reliability, meet growing demand, and enable the clean energy transition. These new planning mechanisms for enhanced project longevity and regional engagement are crucial in their own right, but as FERC Commissioner Allison Clements notes, more is needed than just the “raw ingredients” for states and transmission providers to build out the grid at a scale consistent with demand.
To keep this momentum, Congress needs to step in. There have been promising attempts at using legislation to speed up the environmental review and permitting process, but outside of the small changes included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress has not yet been able to hammer out an agreement on comprehensive permitting reform. With existing proposals such as the 2022 Manchin-Schumer deal and a range of transmission-specific bills including the SITE Act, FASTER Act, and SPEED and Reliability Act, there is ample opportunity to do so. And despite recent disagreements over a comprehensive permitting deal, the issue itself remains a bipartisan concern.
Without comprehensive permitting reform and steps to improve interregional planning on top of these regional transmission changes, these new FERC rules alone will not solve the transmission gridlock. Facilities connecting transmission regions are the most difficult type to plan, pay for, and permit under the current regime, despite their crucial role in limiting the impact of local extreme weather events and serving as the most important type of transmission line for connecting remote wind and solar resources to large cities and manufacturing hubs. Further executive and legislative action will be necessary to expedite energy projects like these, and while FERC has undoubtedly taken important steps toward optimizing the U.S. transmission infrastructure, building out a sufficient network will take leaps and bounds.
Washington, D.C. — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Bruno Manno as Senior Advisor. Manno will lead the newly established What Works Lab, a pioneering initiative dedicated to exploring and implementing innovative education pathways that promote economic and social mobility.
The What Works Lab will highlight and document evidence-based approaches to prepare individuals for a lifetime of opportunities. The Lab’s initial focus will encompass five key project topics: addressing challenges in education and workforce development, promoting opportunity pluralism, organizing pathways programs, bridging ideological divides through a governing agenda, and fostering responsible citizenship to nourish civil society.
“Through the years, Bruno Manno has been a friend, a mentor, and an invaluable partner for PPI’s work on modernizing America’s K-12 public schools and creating alternative career pathways for the majority of young Americans who do not have college degrees,” said Will Marshall, President of PPI. “That’s why we’re delighted to announce he’s joining PPI to head an exciting new project — the What Works Lab. The Lab’s mission is to identify and validate the most promising initiatives around the country for equipping young people with the skills and opportunities they need to thrive in today’s economy.”
Manno brings a wealth of knowledge to PPI, having served most recently as the Senior Advisor for the Education Program at the Walton Family Foundation. His work has consistently focused on helping children find unique paths to opportunity and purpose, aligning perfectly with the Lab’s mission to create diverse and effective educational pathways.
The What Works Lab will collaborate with other PPI initiatives, including the New Skills for a New Economy Project and the Reinventing America’s Schools Project. This cooperation will harness the collective expertise of PPI staff and senior fellows to address the multifaceted challenges facing the American workforce and education systems.
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.
“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” warned Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, in a recent speech on Canada’s sluggish economic growth. Inflation, high costs of living, and insufficient growth rates continue to dominate Canada’s political narrative. Since 2019, Canada’s economy has grown by an intolerably slow rate of roughly 1.5 percent a year. That’s faster than European states like the United Kingdom and Germany, but much less than the United States.
Within the overall gloomy picture, Canada’s digital sector has been one of the few bright spots. Since 2019, the output of the information and communications technology sector has grown by 21 percent. Data processing was up by 52 percent, and computer systems design was up by 39 percent.
In particular, within Canada’s digital sector, mobile application development and support has turned out to be a vibrant source of growth. Apps are no longer just about playing games or scrolling through social networks. Instead, people are using apps to connect with their health-care providers, interact with their cars, and for banking and shopping. At the same time, mobile apps have become increasingly important to all sorts of businesses—apps to track trucks, to monitor energy systems and forestry operations. The Progressive Policy Institute has estimated there are 385,000 “App Economy” jobs in Canada as of April 2024, up 47 percent since 2018.
New PPI regulatory reform proposal inspires bipartisan legislation on Capitol Hill
Washington, D.C. — To promote transparency and accountability in federal rulemaking, U.S. agencies should be required to give the public and Congress early notice of their intent to create new regulations, so concludes Stronger Regulation from the Get-Go, a new report released today by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).
“By providing early notice, regulatory agencies can benefit from public input and congressional oversight, which will lead to more defensible regulation,” says Keith B. Belton, the report’s author. Its core proposal has become the basis for H.R.8204, the Regulatory Early Notice and Engagement Act (RENEA), recently introduced in Congress by U.S. Representatives Don Davis (D-N.C.), Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.), and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).
“This legislation is about ensuring that federal agencies operate with full transparency and engage the public in the regulatory process from the outset,” said Congressman Don Davis. “By providing early notice of proposed regulations and inviting public input, we can make the regulatory process more inclusive and effective. I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan legislation which promotes good governance, strengthens public trust, and ensures that regulatory decisions are made in the best interest of the American people.”
Belton’s report suggests requiring federal agencies to explain the rationale for every newly initiated rulemaking activity and make this information available to Congress and the public through a regulatory early notice. This early notice would identify the problem to be addressed and invite public recommendations on achieving the rule’s objectives at the lowest cost. The bill puts Congress in an oversight role and codifies requirements from a 1993 Executive Order, issued by President Bill Clinton and affirmed by every president since, which outlines the philosophy behind federal regulation.
The early notice proposal builds on PPI’s previous work on regulatory accumulation and reform. In 2013, PPI called for the creation of a Regulatory Improvement Commission — a base-closing-style body that would compile a list of existing regulations that have outlived their usefulness and recommend their modification or rescission. Now, as Congress is considering new reforms for regulatory oversight and transparency, PPI is again proposing a bipartisan solution to streamline and improve the rulemaking process.
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.
In this episode of the Liberal Europe Podcast, Ricardo Silvestre (Movimento Liberal Social) welcomes Tamar Jacoby, from the Progressive Policy Institute, former journalist and author, now living in Ukraine where she reports on the war and the work done by the government and civil society to modernize and make Ukraine a more liberal democratic country.
For federal regulators, the stakes have never been higher. On the one hand, the Biden Administration sees regulation as an important mechanism to advance its ambitious
policy priorities — and is employing a whole-of-government approach unprecedented in terms of both its breadth and depth — for example, to address climate change, to advance its pro-labor agenda, and to regulate artificial intelligence.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is taking aim at regulatory overreach. In its last two terms, SCOTUS has shown a growing interest in
curtailing the so-called administrative state, narrowing the ability of regulators to interpret broadly their statutory authority — for example, by vacating Biden regulations to forgive student loan debt and narrowing the scope of federal jurisdiction over waters subject to pollution control. The current SCOTUS term — which began in October — offers more of the same. Among the cases to be decided are those challenging long-standing tenets of administrative law, such as the major questions doctrine, the non-delegation doctrine, and Chevron deference.
The stakes are high because, once in place, regulation has staying power. The Code of Federal Regulation (CFR), a compendium of all federal rules — has grown from just two volumes in 1938 to approaching 250 volumes and more than 185,000 pages — four times larger than the U.S. Code of Laws, a compendium of statutes enacted by Congress. Containing more than one million restrictions (and counting) and touching every aspect of American life, the CFR has expanded by 3% year after year (see Figure 1), reflecting the roughly 3,500 new rules issued annually by more than 70 regulatory agencies employing hundreds of thousands of regulators.
When crafted well, regulation saves lives and improves the quality of life. Our food is safer, air is cleaner, consumers are better informed, and household savings are better protected — in no small part because of regulation that sets a high bar on performance that Americans have come to expect. But when crafted poorly, regulation can extinguish opportunity: builders who must wait more than a decade for a federal permit, food processing facilities that must adhere to thousand-page rulebooks from two different federal agencies, innovators who must navigate an increasingly lengthy and costly government approval process that, in some cases, was never applied to competing products that had been in commerce for decades.
Whether a regulation provides a net plus or minus depends critically on the process used to create it. A flawed process leads to flawed outcomes, and vice versa.
With so much riding on regulation, now is an opportune time to identify and fix flaws in the process. The purpose of this report is to propose a new reform, developed by the author in collaboration with the Progressive Policy Institute, that would promote transparency and rigor in federal rulemaking. It has recently been introduced in Congress as H.R.8204, the “Regulatory Early Notice and Engagement Act (RENEA) by Representatives Don Davis (D-N.C.), Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), and Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.).
FACT: Estimated Cost to Families of Trump Tariff Proposal: $1,500 – $1,700
THE NUMBERS:
Median U.S. household budget for goods, 2022:*
$19,154
Extra U.S. household costs from a 10% tariff:**
$1,500 – $1,700
* Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey. The total includes BLS’ 2022 figures for mean household spending on food at home, alcohol, natural gas, fuel oil, housekeeping supplies excluding postage stamps, household furnishings, apparel and services, new vehicle purchases, gasoline, medicines, toys, and personal care products.
** $1,500 estimate from Center for American Progress; $1,700 from Peterson Institute for International Economics
WHAT THEY MEAN:
This fall’s core choice is more basic than policy: Can a person who has attempted to overthrow a settled election, and called for the “termination” of unspecified parts of the Constitution, keep an oath to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States” and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”? But though secondary concerns this time, policies still have human consequences. Three notes therefore on tariffs and prices, with an introduction and a coda:
Intro: As we noted in March, the Trump campaign’s proposal of a 10% worldwide tariff, plus 60% on Chinese-made goods, would be the highest U.S. tariff rate since the late 1930s. Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Navarro — a former trade personality as Trump-era “Director of the Office of Manufacturing and Trade Policy,” a minor player in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and current resident of the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami — skirted federal prison policy last week by connecting with news website Semafor for an email interview. He uses the opportunity to hold forth on a hypothetical second Trump term (mass deportations, immediate purge of the Federal Reserve), air grievances with former colleagues, and insist that tariffs do not affect prices: “In a general equilibrium world, tariffs over time boost growth and real wages; they are not inflationary.”
What do definitions and evidence say?
Definition: As the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, explains to hopeful U.S. exporting businesses, a tariff “is a tax levied by governments on the value including freight and insurance of imported products,” which “increase[s] the cost of your product to the foreign buyer and may affect your competitiveness.” In the case of consumer goods, retailers pay tariffs at the border, and shoppers ultimately pay. For industrial inputs, the tariff payers are farmers, manufacturers, construction firms, and other goods-using industries, and tariffs raise their production costs. This in turn raises the prices they charge customers, and/or erodes their competitiveness against imports or exports. Either way, tariffs are meant to raise prices and generally succeed.
Recent Experience: Moving from on-paper definition to recent experience, the 2018/19 tariffs on metals and Chinese-made products raised the U.S.’ overall tariff rate from 1.8% to 2.8%. Most of the impact seems to have fallen on manufacturers and other goods-users — logically, since while the permanent U.S. tariff system mainly taxes clothes and other consumer goods, Trump-era tariffs are more on industrial supplies. The Government Accountability Office’s examination of the process for making “exclusions” to the China tariffs illustrates this: GAO found 52,810 relief appeals, over half of which — 27,646 — came from buyers of capital goods and industrial inputs worried they couldn’t find affordable alternatives. Another 12,633 came from buyers of auto parts. Assessments of the resulting price increase — e.g. by the Peterson Institute for International Economics and San Francisco Fed staff economists — range from 0.3% to 1.3%.
Next: The campaign proposal is much larger. Two independent nonprofits, studying its probable effect this month, basically agree on what to expect. Mary Lovely and Kimberly Clausing, writing for the Peterson Institute of International Economics earlier this month, estimate an additional $1,700 in additional costs per U.S. household, with the greatest loss of purchasing power in the lowest-income families. Brendan Duke, a former National Economic Council economist now with the Center for American Progress, finds a similar $1,500 increase in costs per middle-income household, with specific examples including $120 in higher payment for fuels, $90 for medicine, $220 for autos and boats, $80 for consumer electronics, and $90 for food. Overall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey reports that on average households spent $19,154* on goods in 2022. Against this background, a $1,500 or $1,700 cost increase is something like an 8% or 9% burst of inflation in goods prices, or an equivalently high “tax increase” depending on the angle from which you look at it. Prices are higher either way.
Coda: Again, policy issues are secondary this fall. But Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Chair of the House’s January 6th Committee in 2022, reminds us of why Dr. Navarro must do his interviews from the Miami FCI this summer, and that policy can’t be wholly separated from the really basic choice:
“Peter Navarro abandoned his oath to the Constitution and abused the public trust while he worked as a trade adviser to former President Trump when, in the days leading up to January 6th, he worked to keep a defeated incumbent in the White House. He abused it again when he willfully defied a lawful subpoena from the January 6th Select Committee to answer questions about the lead-up to that deadly day. Last summer’s guilty verdict and today’s sentence are the consequence.”
FURTHER READING
Looking back:
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers assesses estimates of potential to roll back price increases through tariff cuts, finds a 1% price reduction credible (2022), with link to Peterson Institute for International Economics research.
… and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey puts these numbers in context with data (through 2022) on how much families spend.
And completing the ideological balance (though not quite parallel with the PIIE and CAP studies, as the focus is on macro rather than extra household costs), Erica York of the Tax Foundation sees a GDP contraction and higher prices ahead.
Update from the Federal Corrections Institution/Miami:
Navarro interview on mass deportations, Federal Reserve purge, grudge against Gary Cohn, tariffs, etc.
The Federal Correctional Institution in Miami, with explanations of work requirements (7 ½ hours per day), media policy (press visits allowed, though not “to provide publicity for an inmate or special privileges for the news media, but rather to ensure a better-informed public”), and a non-luxurious but also non-Spartan commissary menu.
And Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) reminds us of why he’s there.
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.
It looks like a video shot with a phone from an apartment window. The camera pans a line of cars stopped on the roadway below, and it takes a minute to understand what we’re looking at.
Then a cortege comes into view: about 50 people walking slowly behind a coffin draped with the Ukrainian flag. When the shot widens, we see that traffic traveling in the other direction on the eight-lane road has come to a halt, and people have gotten out of their cars. A few are standing solemnly as the funeral passes; most are kneeling on the asphalt, heads bowed in respect.
By the time I see the social media post, “The funeral of a fallen defender in Kyiv today,” nearly a thousand viewers have reacted with comments or emojis. Among the most common: Heroyam slava — glory to the heroes.
Memorial Day in the U.S. was set aside to honor those who fell in the Civil War. Now Americans play “Taps” and put flowers on graves of those who died in many wars, all in the past. Here in Ukraine, people can only dream of the day when the flag-draped funerals have ended and battles are distant memories commemorated by a nation at peace.
In this year of high-stakes elections, none are likely to tell us more about the health of liberal democracy than the marquee contests in the United Kingdom and the United States.
All signs point to a crushing defeat for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party after 14 tumultuous years in power. Poised for victory is a renovated Labour Party, ably led by Keir Starmer and leading the Tories in polls by more than 20 points.
On Wednesday, Sunak surprised the country by announcing a snap election on July 4 rather than wait until the end of the year.
A Labour victory would cap a remarkable turnaround for a party that suffered a devastating rout in 2019. That year, Boris Johnson and the Tories breached Labour’s “Red Wall” across England’s industrial heartland, winning over working class voters with promises to “get Brexit done” and “level up” economic conditions in the less prosperous north.
Labour’s return to power also would be a major morale boost for Europe’s center-left, which hasn’t had much to celebrate lately.
Washington, D.C. —Today, Diana Moss, Vice President and Director of Competition Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, released the following statement in response to the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust lawsuit against live events behemoth Live Nation-Ticketmaster.
“PPI applauds the DOJ for moving enforcement against the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly to the front lines of antitrust. A successful suit would bring justice to the millions of American consumers who pay the heavy price of Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s ongoing dominance in live events. The company’s wingspan blankets the entire live events supply chain, where it deploys exclusionary practices that have long stifled competition, to the detriment of fans, artists, and smaller competitors. These practices have driven business repeatedly back to Ticketmaster, where it extracts its monopoly “toll” in the form of sky-high ticket fees. Antitrust enforcement against Live Nation-Ticketmaster is long overdue.
“The Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger was allowed to proceed in 2010, but the decision was an abject failure of antitrust enforcement. Instead of blocking the merger, the DOJ required the company, then with an 80% share of the ticketing market, to comply with ineffective conditions. Live Nation-Ticketmaster violated these anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation requirements, entrenching its dominance and keeping smaller competitors in live events in fear and in check.
“Thirty states joined the DOJ’s complaint, a strong endorsement of the gravity of harms imposed on consumers, artists, and smaller rivals by the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. The complaint is notable in that it uses all tools in the arsenal of antitrust enforcement to hold Live Nation-Ticketmaster accountable for illegal conduct. This includes claims under both Section 1 and Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Moreover, structural relief, achieved by breaking up the company, is the only effective way to fully restore competition.
“PPI’s analysis of the ticketing industry has explained what a break-up remedy for Live Nation-Ticketmaster might look like. Restoring competition to live events markets would require breaking Ticketmaster off from Live Nation, as well as breaking it up into smaller companies. More competition would create stronger incentives to compete on ticket fees, quality of service, protecting ticket buyers’ privacy and data, and improving ticketing platform technology.
“PPI has also been a leading voice in opposing legislation that has been backed by Live Nation-Ticketmaster targeting the resale market. The only place where there is a semblance of competition in ticketing is in resale, but some state and federal legislative proposals would hand more market power to Live Nation by hindering the resale market.”
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.
THE NUMBERS: Largest container ship by year, in TEU* capacity –
2024:
24,327 TEU (MSC Irina)
2020:
23,992 TEU (Ever Ace)
2014:
19,100 TEU (CLC Globe)
2010:
14,770 TEU (Emma Maersk)
2004:
8,500 TEU (CLC Asia)
2000:
8,160 TEU (Sovereign Maersk)
1990:
4,614 TEU (American New York)
1974:
2,984 TEU (Hamburg Express)
1956:
56 TEU (Ideal-X)
* “Twenty-foot Equivalent Units.” A TEU represents one 20 x 8 x 8.5 foot shipping container; a 40-foot container is two TEUs.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
After a squad of tugboats pulled the stranded Dali away from the Key Bridge wreckage on Monday, the Port of Baltimore’s operators hope to reopen their main shipping channel by the end of May, and Danish shipping giant Maersk plans to start container service to the Port again by early June. With a brightening outlook for Baltimore’s port workers and users, here are four notes on the container-shipping fleet:
There are more container ships each year: Alphaliner, a Paris-based maritime consultancy, counts 6936 container ships operating worldwide this week, up from 5,101 in 2014. Mainly built in China, Korea, and Japan, these ships make up about 6% of the world’s 105,000 cargo vessels, but (being large ships) have a seventh of the world’s 2.2. billion deadweight tons — that is, carrying capacity — of merchant shipping. The full container fleet has a combined capacity of 29.7 million TEU, up about 10% from the 25.8 million TEU at President Biden’s inauguration, and up 50% from the 19.9 million TEU of 2014. This growth is not slowing: Denmark-based shipping association BIMCO says 350 new container ships launched in 2023, and 2024 will likely top 475. A table illustrates:
2024
29.7 million TEU
2020
25.8 million TEU
2014
19.9 million TEU
2010
12.8 million TEU
2000
4.3 million TEU
1990
1.2 million TEU
1980
0.5 million TEU
They are getting bigger: The Dali is 948 feet or 300 meters long, with deadweight tonnage of 116,851 tons and a crew of 21. Built by Hyundai and launched in 2015, it has a capacity of 9,971 “TEUs,” meaning it can carry just under 10,000 standard 20’ x 8’ x 8.5’ shipping containers at a time. Twenty years ago, the Dali would have been easily the world’s largest container ship. Today it’s still well above median — average capacity across the whole fleet is now about 4,600 TEU — but has less than half the 24,000+ TEU capacity of its largest relatives.
As of this month, 121 ships can carry 20,000 TEU or more. The largest one on the water today is MSC Irina, owned by Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Corporation, whose capacity more than doubles Dali’s at 24,326 TEU and 240,739 deadweight tons. Delivered in March 2023 from a Chinese shipyard and currently in Busan, MSC Irina is 400 meters/1,312 feet long.
They are mostly new: The container-ship concept is almost 70 years old — the first, Ideal-X, launched from Newark in 1956 — but most of the actual ships are young, and every 20,000+ TEU ship has been built since 2017. UNCTAD’s most recent Review of Maritime Transport says the average container ship is 14 years old, while the average age of cargo vessels in general — container ships plus bulk carriers, general cargo, tankers, ro/ro, etc. — is 22.
And they don’t need many people: Though not exactly a giant floating robot, a modern container ship isn’t far from that. Dali’s forlorn crew totals 21 people — 20 from India, one Sri Lankan, finally getting some land time today after being stuck on board doing maintenance and responding to investigation queries since March — and even MSC Irina with its 24,000 containers needs just 25. To put this in perspective, this is no more staff than you’d find in a medium-sized restaurant or hardware store. Alternatively, Great Republic — the largest 19th-century clipper ship, built to sail back and forth from New to Australia — needed a crew of 67 to manage about 5000 tons of cargo.
UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport series has data and trends for container ships, oil tankers, port efficiency, and more. The most recent edition, out last November, counts 105,400 cargo ships around the world, or about 5,000 more than the 99,800 they found in 2020.
Alphaliner Top 100 has day-to-day updates of current container capacity, worldwide and by shipping firm.
The Copenhagen-based Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO), in a January “Shipping Number of the Week”, reports a likely 478 new containership launched in 2024, after a record 350 in 2023.
… and a decade-old but still evocative visualization of daily maritime transports, with small lights representing a hundred thousand ships against a darkened blue-grey ocean backdrop
Ship comparisons:
Combining various tallies — UNCTAD for cargo, military sites for navies, FAO for fisheries—– the world’s large-vessel fleet comes out at about 170,000. (105,000 cargo vessels, 45,000 large fishing boats, 10,000 navy ships, 5,000 cruise ships, with miscellaneous cable layers, LNG tankers, yachts, and so forth making up the rest.) At the top end, container ships are the longest by about 20 meters. Bulk ore carriers and supertankers are a bit shorter but have more cargo space. A quick look at the largest in each category:
Oil tankers: Ultra-Large Capacity supertankers, though shorter than the top container ships at 380 meters, at 442,000 deadweight tons can carry twice the cargo weight. The largest are the four T1s, dating to the early 2000s and named for continents. TI-Europe is in Singapore.
Bulk cargo carriers: The 35 Valemax-grade iron-ore freighters are very slightly smaller than the tankers, 360 meters long with deadweight tonnage up to 400,000 tons. Built between 2011 and 2016 (again by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese yards) they carry iron ore from Brazil and Australia to China.
Military: U.S. Navy’s 337-meter Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier is the largest naval vessel on the water, launched from the Newport News yard in 2013, and the first of the 11 Ford-class carriers replacing the Nimitz-class fleet.
Roll-on/Roll-off: The standard automobile carriers are a bit smaller. The largest is the 265-meter MV-Tonberg, built by Mitsubishi in 2012 and operated by Norwegian carrier Wallenius Wilhelmsen. It can carry 8500 cars and trucks at a time.
Fishing: The largest fishing vessel, the Vladivostok 2000, is 228 meters and 49,000 tons. A converted oil tanker with a dismal history of IUU (illegal/unreported/unregulated) fishing, V2K is blacklisted in the South Pacific but continues to operate in northern waters. It’s currently berthed in the eponymous city of Vladivostok.
Cruise ship: The Icon of the Seas at 385 meters, launched last January and built for 7,600 passengers. By comparison, the largest 19th-century passenger ship, Victorian super-engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 211-meter Great Eastern, could carry nearly 5,000. The BBC onIotS.
Shipbuilding:
A gloomy two-pager from CRS on cargo vessel construction worldwide, and the very modest U.S. role in it over the last 50 years.
And some maritime-logistics lit.:
GPS and satellite communication, 60-foot propeller blades, computer terminals, and crane loading — Horatio Clare’s Down to the Sea in Ships (2015) tracks the Gerd Maersk, a 6,600-TEU ship built in 2006 — still operating, en route this week from Oakland to Qingdao — on a two-month trip from Felixstowe through the Suez Canal to Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and Los Angeles. Detail on crew life (Filipino ratings, European and Indian officers; no alcohol at any time), cargo loading, rules for avoiding Red Sea pirates, the approach to the Port of L.A., etc.
Coal-burners and on-board smokestacks, radio, and breakbulk cargo — Richard Hughes’ In Hazard (1938), recounts the fictional passage of a British general-cargo vessel with a ‘globalized’ 1930s crew (Chinese ratings, U.K. and American officers, few if any alcohol limits) from Virginia through a gigantic Caribbean hurricane.
Wood, rope, canvas, muscle, and wind — Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) on the Pilgrim’s five-month journey from Boston to pre-Gold Rush California via Cape Horn, and back a year later. (Mostly New England crew with some Europeans; strict alcohol limits for sailors, but not for the mates or captain.) Lots here to disenchant age-of-sail romantics – a drowning, a scurvy case, two of the Pilgrim’s 12 sailors flogged for back-talk, ice storms, constant deck-scrubbing, etc. Also looks at early California: Los Angeles, “a large and flourishing town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, with brick sidewalks”, is full then as now of helpful and friendly people; on the other hand, “nothing but the character of the people prevents Monterey from becoming a great town”. San Francisco has promise (“if California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity”); also see the large Native Hawaiian role in West Coast shipping, and Dana’s very disparaging, no-filter comments on visitors from Russia’s Alaska colony, whose southernmost fort was 90 miles north of present-day Oakland.
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.
When an Interstate 95 overpass collapsed in Philadelphia in June, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, responded with a master class in executive leadership.
Slashing through thousands of pages of red tape with a stroke of his pen, Shapiro focused solely on rebuilding as fast as possible and refused to let interest group politics or bureaucratic inertia slow things down. Shapiro stunned the world by cutting the ribbon on a fully rebuilt span just 12 days later.
This “Philadelphia Miracle” should have been top of mind when President Joe Biden travelled to Baltimore recently with a promise to “move heaven and earth” to rebuild the destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge. but then the coda: “And we’re going to do so with union labor and American steel.”
One might dismiss this sop to organized labor as a typical election-year throwaway line. But it actually holds a clue to the riddle of why Biden’s infrastructure agenda is drifting and why skeptical voters aren’t yet giving the president full credit for his legislative wins.
If you’re worried about threats to liberal democracy in America, emanating primarily from Donald Trump but also from parts of the progressive left, a new memoir published by two veteran civil rights activists provides a refreshing reminder that a better path remains open.
Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain: The Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism, by Norman and Velma Hill, two black civil rights leaders, provides a fascinating account of their years working closely with Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin to make their country live up to its ideals. Norman and Velma (whom I came to know while writing a biography of labor leader Albert Shanker), were in the thick of many of the central battles for racial and economic justice in the mid-twentieth century.
They first met in 1960, fighting racial segregation in Chicago. In 1963, they helped Randolph and Rustin organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As the Black Power movement began to gain salience in the mid-1960s, they shifted to work with organized labor. Norman took a job with Rustin at the A. Philip Randolph Institute to provide a bridge between trade unions and the black community. Velma worked for the United Federation of Teachers to organize mostly black and Hispanic teacher aides in New York City at a time when many black city residents were distrustful of the union.
Throughout, the Hills battled segregationists and union-busters on the right as well as forces of illiberalism and black separatism on the left. In a sense, then, they’ve written two books in one. The first is a familiar—though still deeply affecting—morality tale in which they combat the pure evil of white supremacy and largely prevail. The second story involves the internecine battles on the left with other advocates of black advancement. Like their mentors Randolph and Rustin, the Hills believed in several key principles that received pushback at the time: interracial coalition politics; a common economic agenda across racial lines; nonviolence in achieving social change; democratic norms at home and abroad; and an optimism about the possibilities of America.
