Among the ongoing themes of the famous poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is are truth, the self, nature, the universe, and the arts. Less well-known is his actual and public advocacy for a water- and sewer-system in Brooklyn. Stephanie M. Blalock, Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jason Stacy tell the story in “‘One of the Grand Works of the World’: Walt Whitman’s Advocacy for the Brooklyn Waterworks, 1856–59” (Technology and Culture, 65: 1, January 2024, pp. 237-263). They write in the abstract:

When the Brooklyn Waterworks opened in 1859, it was one of America’s most advanced water and sewer systems. Yet after Brooklyn was annexed by New York City, the waterworks’ history slipped into obscurity, despite having a now-famous champion: the “poet of America,” Walt Whitman, whose brother worked on the project. This article shows the Brooklyn poet’s fierce, multiyear lobbying effort for the waterworks in various newspapers and introduces a wealth of newly recovered Whitman writings on the issue. As a journalist, Whitman exemplifies the nineteenth-century press as an intermediary between expert engineers and popular readers. The poet brought precise expertise, translated engineers’ technical arguments into everyday language for his readers, and fought the resulting day-to-day political battles over construction in print. Whitman, then, is an underappreciated case study of the confluence of technology, public health, and local journalism.

The authors describe the opening day of Brooklyn’s water system, and the role played by Whitman. In an ironic twist, there was to be a commemorative poem for the day, but a rival newspaper managed to avoid having Whitman write it:

The opening of Brooklyn’s new waterworks on April 28, 1859, was a red-letter day for the then-independent city. Eager citizens lined the streets, cannons boomed in the distance, and brass music echoed through crowded thoroughfares. Prominent guests gathered around the mayor to watch a festive procession of firefighters, police, soldiers, fraternal orders, benevolent societies, and schoolchildren, heralding a feat of engineering that placed Brooklyn among the great cities of world history … The governor was there, as were mayors and city council members from as far away as Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo. … Some 300,000 people reportedly attended the event—one with perhaps a degree of “acerbity” in his heart: the poet Walt Whitman, then an editor and reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Times.

Four years earlier, the Long Island–born Whitman had published the first iteration of his unorthodox book of poems, Leaves of Grass, a collection with little overt rhyme or rhythm. At the waterworks ceremony, however, the innovative poet had to indulge the performance of a more mundane kind of verse—a celebratory “Ode,” which included the refrain, “Then water for me, pure, gushing and free, / For water’s the emblem of true liberty.” The singsong piece almost certainly bothered Whitman, but being sidelined as a poet was probably even more galling. The “poetic effusions” read on the occasion were supposed to have been chosen by the editors of Brooklyn’s three daily newspapers: the Evening Star, the Eagle, and the Times. However, in a master class of backroom dealing, the Star’s editor announced and printed his poem (attributed to “a Lady”) as the one “selected by the committee,” thereby short-circuiting the contest’s rules. The Brooklyn Daily Times was outraged. And Whitman, whose journalism in that paper had firmly associated him with the waterworks, faced gentle mocking from rivals at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “Walt Whitman . . . applied for authority to write the Ode. When
informed that it was expected to be done gratis, he disappeared.” …

Indeed, while Whitman might have lost the contest over the “Water Ode,” he had for years used the partisan press and its penchant for anonymity to help make the waterworks a reality in the first place. Under Whitman’s guidance, the Brooklyn Daily Times became the local paper most dedicated to covering and supporting the project. He wrote more than seventy-five editorials celebrating the project as the beginning of a bright future for Brooklyn, defending the workers against greedy contractors and stingy politicians, and weighing in on specific engineering issues during construction. In sheer volume, Whitman’s writing on the waterworks surpassed his first edition of Leaves of Grass (43,000 words).

One part of this episode, for example, involved a question of whether to amend the original engineering plans so that a certain canal would be covered, rather than uncovered. Whitman rallied support for the covered version, and encouraged a wave of Brooklynites to lobby the New York state legislature, successfully, for the needed funds. Blalock, McMullen, Schöberlein, and Stacy quote from Leaves of Grass to note:

[I]n Whitman’s words, the “Brooklyn Water Works . . . is evidently one of the grand works of the world, having no superior anywhere [with] everything on a scale fit for the people of one of the principal and most populous cities of America.” While some historians have, then, identified the Brooklyn Waterworks as a key moment in the development of large-scale urban engineering projects, it was the popular press in general—and Whitman in particular—that sold the public on the effort and enabled its construction. … Between roughly 1856 and 1865, there was no real categorical difference between celebrating “the beautiful city! the city of hurried and sparkling waters!” in verse and meticulously advocating for a 7.5-mile covered brick conduit in the Long Island hinterlands.

The Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is probably best-known today as the originator of taxonomy–that is, the method of dividing up animals and plants into different related groups. What is less well-known is that Linnaeus posthumously published a book in 1749 called The Economy of Nature. Moreover, he occasionally made extremely positive statements about economics. Lisbet Koerner in Chapter 5 of her 2001 book “Linnaeus: Nature and Nation,” puts his views on economic theory into context.

A few quotations from Linnaeus sometimes pop up in economics writing. As Koerner point out, he wrote in a 1740 essay: “No science in the world is more elevated, more necessary, and more useful than Economics, since all people’s material well-being is based on it …” Or in a 1759 talk, he said: “Therefore nothing else could have come about among mankind apart from the birth of that science, which is called Economics.” Or in a 1746 speech: “The most savage wilderness, where hardly a sparrow can feed itself, can through good economics become the most wonderful land.”

However, when comments like these are quoted, it might be wise to suspect that they have been cribbed from a quotation dictionary or the internet, rather than based on a deeper reading of Linnaeus on economics. As a broad perspective , Linnaeus believed that all the areas of the world had different natural advantages for crops and other outputs, and that every area had pretty much everything it needed. Koerner calls this perspective “Edenic,” with the implication that all nations around the world can find what they need to flourish within their own geographic boundaries: as she puts it: “[H]e derived the more stringent hypothesis that every country possesses all the natural resources necessary for a multifunctional economy.” Thus, Linnaeus wrote at one point: “[O]ur own economy is nothing else but knowledge about nature adapted for man’s needs.”

However, in the mid-19th century, Linnaeus is also writing at a time when foods and goods from Asia are already well-known across Europe, and foods and goods from the “New World” of North and South America are beginning to be well-known. This caused him considerable concern. Koerner writes: “He even urged Scandinavians to return to the old `Gothic foods,’ such as acorns, pork, and mead.”

In addition, Linnaeus was innumerate and obsessed with gold. Koerner writes: “Linnaeus was obsessed by gold. `Does it not make all things into slaves? And where it is missing, is not everything missing?’ He loved handling gold coins, and was fond of displaying his hoard to his penniless students. Being innumerate, he counted great sums by one measure only: `a barrel of gold.’”

With these background beliefs, Linneaus was a true mercantilist of his time: that is, he favored exporting goods to accumulate more gold (or other precious metals), but opposed importing goods because paying for them might decrease the national store of gold. Koerner writes:

Linnaeus felt that states should be autarkies, withdrawing altogether from the commercial bonds tying them to peoples and places not politically subjugated to them. He artlessly elaborated his reasoning on this to the Academy of Science in 1746: `Everything that we buy from abroad is therefore more expensive, since we must fetch it from far away, and pay others who harvest it.’ …

Linnaeus was a state interventionist, too. Without pondering the matter deeply, he supported tariffs, levies, export bounties, quotas, embargoes, navigation acts, subsidized investment capital, ceilings on wages, cash grants, state-licensed producer monopolies, and cartels. To use modern analytical terms, he supported legislated market imperfections favoring domestic producers over foreign competitors and local consumers. …

This view also colored Linnaeus’ visit of 1746 to the Alingsås textile factory, an enterprise founded with much fanfare in 1724. After twenty years of state subsidies and trade barriers, this family-owned garment industry loomed, cut, and sewed only a few pieces of badly made garments, unable to compete with either smuggled foreign goods or homespun peasant wares. Yet Linnaeus, who was a friend of the owner (a fellow member of the Swedish Academy of Science), saw no problems with the losing enterprise. He gloried in the fact that “our own countrymen”—or “Swedish hands in Sweden”—now produced cloth as good “as ever other nations abroad.”

Linnaeus did not envision economic progress very clearly, but when he did, he had nothing to say about technological progress or international trade, but instead focused on “transmutationist botany,” the idea that if only other plants from around the world could be brought to Sweden, and grown there, then Sweden’s natural advantage would be able to shine. Koerner describes this view:

In the field of economic science Linnaeus always favored those of his students who specialized in transmutationist botany, a science that assumed that nature was so malleable that by means of floral transplants naturalists could assure independent yet complete state economies. For he believed that in order to accommodate the political fact that nations prosper best in a state of self-sufficiency, God had so created the natural world that each principality duplicated in miniature the world economy. Nature provided all the ingredients necessary for a complex and complete economy within each geographic area constituting an independent commonwealth.

As an example, Linnaeus once wrote about how wonderful it would be if Sweden would start growing tea, so that it would not have to trade for tea. Toward the end of his life, he described one of his legacies as having brought 600 plants to Sweden.

Moving either within or between countries is often part of a life change that triggers substantially better outcomes. Take a half-step back from the current disputes in the US and the European Union about recent surges of migration, and consider the topic more broadly. David McKenzie has written “Fears and Tears: Should More People Be Moving within and from Developing Countries, and What Stops this Movement?” (World Bank Research Observer, February 2024, 39:1, pp. 75-96). As context, McKenzie writes:

The United Nations estimates that there were 272 million international migrants in 2019. While this might seem like a large number, it is only 3.5 percent of the global population. Emigration rates are lower still for the regions with the poorest people: emigrants are only 2.5 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa and 2.2 percent of the population of South Asia (World Bank 2016). Rates are much higher for small island states, with more than 40 percent of Jamaicans, Tongans, and Samoans living abroad. But even in these very small, isolated countries, many people do not move. Internal migration rates are much higher. Data on what constitutes an internal move is hard to compare exactly across countries, but the United Nations (2013) estimates that there are 763 million persons living within their own country but outside their region of birth. Combining this with the international migration data leads to a rough estimate that approximately one billion people, or one in seven of the world’s population have ever migrated.

Although McKenzie is focused on the global picture, it’s perhaps worth noting that movement within the United States has been on a gradually downward trend, as well. The reasons are not clear, because the trend of downward mobility is so wide that it affects all groups: homeowners and non-homeowners, the elderly and the non-elderly, higher and lower incomes, and so on. But the downward trend seems pretty clears, as I discuss (for example) here and here.

In my own life, I’ve moved across regions of the United States twice as a child, and then five times as an adult. Among the readership of this blog, I suspect that multiple long-distance moves are not at all unusual. But it’s quite different from the experience of most Americans and most people around the world.

As you might imagine, there’s active research in this area, and McKenzie offers a crisp overview of the evidence. Can the gains from moving be explained by observable factors like education level or age? (No.) Can the gains from moving be explained by unobservable factors like personality traits including persistence? (Harder to say, but probably not.) Can the seemingly low level of moving, given these gains, be explained by factors like costs of moving, quotas that limit movement, pessimistic estimates of potential benefits from moving, short-run time horizons that see only the immediate costs of moving, but not the longer-term benefits? (All of these factors seem real, but the gains from moving are so large that these factors don’t seem like enough to explain the lack of moving that occurs.)

The existing research seems to leave a puzzle: the explanations for a lack of moving aren’t powerful enough. Additional reasons for the lack of moving are needed. Here, McKenzie suggests two possibilities, which he calls “fears” and “tears.”

In the discussion of “fears,” McKenzie writes:

I think economists have devoted far less attention to what I call fears, which is the enormous uncertainty associated with migration that is difficult to quantify. This type of unquantifiable uncertainty, also known as Knightian uncertainty, may include fears about the safety conditions at destination (Shrestha 2020 finds Nepalese migrants overestimate the risks of death), the ability to make friends and fit in, about whether one will like living in the new location, and soon. With Knightian uncertainty, there is no unique probability distribution of possible outcomes of employment, wages, and amenities, and so individuals cannot make decisions by just choosing the action that maximizes expected utility. Bewley(2002) argues that in such cases, there can be a bias towards inertia. A decision-maker may remain with the status quo unless one alternative dominates another under all possible probability distributions. This can create a bias towards immobility, since individuals will only move if doing so is better under all possible probability distributions. This may also explain why we see less migration in the aggregate than an expected cost-benefit calculation would suggest, since individuals do not know if they personally will be the ones benefiting from movement, even if on average across the full range of possible distributions the aggregate benefits are positive.

By “tears,” McKenzie is referring to the emotional shock that many of us feel when leaving one place and moving to another. He describes the underlying dynamic in this way:

I think a bigger part of the reason for tears upon moving and not having these same tears upon deciding to stay is the inability to picture what you are giving up when you do not move. It is easy to visualize that moving entails losses from not being able to meet up with your current friends, go to your current favorite restaurants, or enjoy your current favorite running trails. But it is much harder to visualize the losses that not migrating brings: the friends in the new place that you will never meet if you do not move, the experiences of a brand new environment that you will never get to appreciate, and soon. Gabaix and Laibson (2017) argue that people have only noisy information about the future and that it is harder to forecast the further into the future one looks, with these features causing individuals to behave as if they have very myopic preferences, preferring the present. A similar idea might apply when considering the signals individuals have about utility indifferent locations—they will have much more precise signals about their utility in their current location than in alternative locations which could result in a preference for not moving. Studies of how consumers make purchase decisions have discussed the possibility of opportunity cost neglect, whereby they sometimes fail to recognize what they are giving up by choosing one purchase over another (Frederick et al. 2009). It may be particularly easy to neglect the opportunity cost of not moving when what is being given up is hard to picture.

I might try to summarize these issues with the idea that some people are raised with (or even born with?) the idea that large movements at various junctures of life, education, and jobs are to be expected. But for many others, the idea of big move requires an substantial and willful act to muster a sense of positive imagination about how a long-distance move can improve your life.

Edmund Phelps won the Nobel prize in economics in 2006 for “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” However, he has spent a considerable chunk of this time in the last few decades musing over strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and, more generally, a dynamic economy. Jon Hartley interviews Phelps on both topics, and more, at his Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century website (July 10, 2024, “Edmund Phelps (Nobel Prize Winner and Columbia Economics Professor) on His Career and Contributions To Macroeconomics”). Here are a few points that caught my eye:

On how Phelps came to think about what he called “the equilibrium rate of unemployment,” which is often referred to today as the “natural rate of unemployment:

While thinking of Frank Knights Risk, Uncertainty and Profit and Keynes’s “sticky wages,” I noticed two things: Knight while offering a departure from neoclassical models in acknowledging the presence of uncertainty, particularly among investors, did not assert that uncertainty could sometimes be a force driving wide swings of employment. And Keynes in his General Theory had offered a theory of employment without offering a theory of wage-setting  by firms.

What I did was introduce a formulation of wage behavior that included the expectations of the rate at which wages are changing in the economy as a whole – if these expectations were to adjust slowly, the wage rate would adjust slowly too.    While the Phillip’s Curve is essentially a statistical estimate of a mechanistic hypothesis, my theory is microeconomic in that it derives from the conception of decision-making of individual firms – it came to be termed “micro-macro.”

Exploring expectations further lead me to developing a model of a theoretical economy built around price expectations and behavior of that nature which postulated that the rate of inflation depends on the rate of unemployment and the expected rate of inflation. This model featured the “natural rate of unemployment.”

Regarding the natural rate, I should clarify that Milton Friedman and I were not working on the idea of the natural rate together. Rather it was a coincidence that came about in our independent research. What I dubbed the “equilibrium rate of unemployment,” Friedman had dubbed “the natural rate of unemployment.” It just so happened that it was Friedman’s term that stuck.

On what people need from the economy, and what is not included in current economic theory:

People need an economy that provides them not only with pecuniary rewards but also non-pecuniary rewards. They need work that is interesting and engaging with occasional opportunities to use their creativity, to hit upon and share new ideas with managers. For a good life, they need to feel a sense that they are at times succeeding at something.

This comment from Phelps reminded me of a comment he made in an interview with Howard R. Vane and Chris Mulhearn published in 2009 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor). Phelps said: 

I’ve been trying to develop a new justification for capitalism, at least I think it’s new, in which I say that if we’re going to have any possibility of intellectual development we’re going to have to have jobs offering stimulating and challenging opportunities for problem solving, discovery, exploration, and so on. And capitalism, like it or not, has so far been an extraordinary engine for generating creative workplaces in which that sort of personal growth and personal development is possible; perhaps not for everybody but for an appreciable number of people, so if you think that it’s a human right to have that kind of a life, then you have on the face of it a justification for capitalism. There has to be something pretty powerful to overturn or override that.

On the idea that a dynamic and innovative economy can’t just rely on some prominent scientists and inventors, but needs a broad-based commitment across the population to seeking innovation:

My focus is on grassroots innovation – ordinary people, as I call them, participating in the economy, using their imagination to create new products and new methods of production. My indigenous theory differs sharply from Schumpeter’s theory in which innovation is exogenous coming mostly from scientists and navigators outside of the economy. Western societies are rife with dissatisfaction and despair. For some time I have been pointing to the loss of modern values – mainly individualism (not to be confused with selfishness), vitalism, and the desire for self-expression –  as a major cause of the loss of dynamism, thus the slowdown of innovation and economic growth. This is not to say there is no innovation happening. We’ve still got a few geniuses out there, some of whom have new ideas of immense commercial value. But we’re not going to get anywhere close to the mass of innovation that we had from the 1880s until about 1970 until a more fundamental shift in societal values occurs.

For more on Phelps and his ideas about the value of broad-based economic dynamism vs. narrow and short-term corporatism, see this earlier post about an essay that Phelps wrote a few years ago: “Phelps on Dynamism and Corporatism” (May 9, 2017).

Stephen Smith tells the story of how he lived in a walk-up building in New York City–that is, no elevator–which seemed like a good idea until he developed a health problem that made walking up stairs difficult. For awhile, he viewed it as just one of those inescapable problems. But then he visited relatives Romania, and talked to a friend in Rome, and saw that small apartment buildings in other countries poorer than the United States often had one or more elevators. What was going on? Smith started a Center for Building in North America, and how has a report out on “Elevators” (Center for Building in North America, May 2024). I found out about the report from an short overview essay he wrote for the New York Times (“The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed,” July 8, 2024).

In case you don’t feel like reading 100+ page of international comparisons of elevators, here are a few high points. Consider elevators per capita, as shown by the bars in this figure (the narrow lines show total elevators for each country):

One might hypothesize that the US has fewer elevators because it has more single-family homes, but this doesn’t come close to explaining the size of the differences. Smith writes:

Single-family houses aside, the United States has over 32 million apartments, while Spain has fewer than 13 million apartments but about the same number of elevators. The U.S. has 40 percent fewer elevators per capita than the Netherlands, despite 30 percent of the American housing stock being in multifamily dwellings (and 19 percent in buildings with at least 10 units), compared to a total multifamily housing share of just 21 percent in the Netherlands. New York City has roughly the same population as Switzerland and even more New Yorkers live in apartment buildings than Swiss residents do, but New York only has half the number of passenger elevators. No matter how you slice the numbers, America has fallen behind on elevators.

Why is that? Well, at the most basic level, elevators cost a lot more in the United States. Smith’s estimate is that it costs about “three times as much to install an elevator as developers in high-income peer countries in Europe and Asia.” This difference can be broken down into differences in the amount of labor needed and the cost of the components:

Labor is the major cost in installing and maintaining elevators, and basic rules of thumb suggest that it takes roughly twice as long to install an elevator in a new building in the United States as in Europe. In the U.S., the variable length portion of an installation requires around one week per floor of labor from a full-time, two-person crew, plus perhaps some extra time for fixed components that don’t vary according to height. In Western Europe, typically elevators are installed by the same crews at a rate of at least two stops per week.

In turn, the higher labor costs are driven by other factors. Elevators in smaller and mid-sized buildings other high-income countries commonly have smaller cabins, enough to hold someone with a wheelchair and another person pushing them, but not necessarily enough to roll a hospital gurney in and out.

Smith also emphasizes that the building code rule governing elevators vary across states, and across cities within states, making it hard for economies of scale in production to develop. In addition, competition among companies in the elevator industry is harder, because the best company to deal with a specialized elevator installed earlier is the company that installed it originally–and switching to another competitor would have high costs.

In addition: “The International Union of Elevator Constructors is one of the most powerful construction unions in North America, and it resists trends like preassembly and prefabrication, creating more work and causing further tightening in the labor market.” In contrast, many high-income countries across Europe have government-sponsored schools of technical education that provide a steady supply of elevator construction workers. Smith writes:

Contrary to stereotypes about organized labor in the United States as compared to Europe, the elevator sector in the U.S. is heavily unionized, and organized labor exerts much greater power over the process of installing and maintaining elevators. The binational International Union of Elevator Constructors (IUEC) represents most workers in the field in the United States and Canada. The union handles recruitment into the industry, makes a strong and successful effort to limit entry into the field, and limits the ability of firms to use new technology and factory production to streamline the installation and maintenance of elevators in North America. The result is higher compensation, more work for citizens and little opportunity for immigrants, and less efficient work overall, contributing to high final costs. The labor shortage is, paradoxically, somewhat of a self-reinforcing mechanism, strengthening the hand of the IUEC at the bargaining table to create more work through prohibitions on efficiencies in the installation process in particular.

In short, the Big Four elevator companies (Otis, Schindler, Thyssenkrupp, and KONE) have no reason to advocate for big changes in the market, nor does the dominant union. Instead, they have incentives to advocate for additional layers of building rules to be added at the state and city level.

The global trend in elevator regulation has been for countries outside of Europe to adopt European elevator safety norms – a trend which North America has so far resisted. There are not significant differences between the European and North American elevator safety rules (and in fact as far back as the 1980s, before a lot of global harmonization had occurred, more than three-quarters of the rules in national standards were already the same), but the mere existence of separate codes and standards, which are not interchangeable when it comes to manufacturer certification, drives up costs. The cost consequences of these variations in codes and standards come in two forms: costs driven by different certification processes and separate markets for parts, and costs driven by actual differences in products. In the first category, divergences in North America from global, European-based norms lead to a much smaller North American market for parts. This small North American elevator component market can be very profitable for those who manage to enter it, but entry is difficult for small- and mid-sized foreign firms given the greatly increased cost of and headaches involved in certifying parts to a unique set of rules that only apply to the United States and Canada, which make up a small share of the global elevator market. … Beyond the differences between North American and global standards, there is an unusual amount of intra-country variation in technical rules in the United States compared to nations abroad. This variation between U.S. states can lead to requirements and complexity that drive costs up even further.

There’s some irony in America’s elevator problem. Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act passed back in 1990, the US has far more ramps, automatic door openers, and accessibility in public buildings than is common in many other countries. But when it comes to medium-sized apartments, up to five and even six stories, buildings without elevators are common and accessibility concerns apparently go out the window in favor of rules set by Big Elevator and its union. After Smith’s dissection of the elevator market, one wonders what other elements of the high price of housing in the United States might be accounted for by rules and regulations operating unseen and unevaluated.

Thinking back over the half-century or so that I have been paying attention to the US economy, I can’t offhand remember a time when most people believed that the quality of American jobs was high and/or rising. Here’s how Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri, and Benjamin Glasner describe the common complaints in their report, “The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus” (Economic Innovation Institute, June 2024).

Consider a common narrative one hears about todayʼs economy. It goes something like this: Workers are experiencing an age of unprecedented disruption. The rise of e-commerce and automation, increasing foreign competition, and the proliferation of gig platforms have upended the typical employer-employee relationship and the stability that workers used to enjoy. As a result, more workers are taking on side gigs or cobbling together multiple part-time jobs just to get by. Not only that, but even good jobs are more precarious than in previous eras. Back when manufacturing ruled the U.S. economy, workers could expect a job for life. Today, they are forced to switch jobs more often than ever before.

However, when Ozimek, Lettieri, and Glasner then consider the actual statistical evidence behind these fears, often with comparisons back to 1980 or the 1990s, they don’t evidence in support. For example, they write:

Not only has it long been uncommon for workers to hold more than one job at once, Americans today are even less likely to have multiple jobs than they were in the past. Multiple jobholders have trended down from 5.9 percent of workers in 1994 to just 5.0 percent today. … If not through multiple jobs, perhaps workers are responding to increased disruption or precarity by working longer hours? Just the opposite. In the early 1960s, production and nonsupervisory employees—workers who do not manage other workers—averaged close to a 40-hour workweek. By 1980, that had fallen to just over 35 hours per week. Today, itʼs under 34 hours per week—close to a historical low during non-recessionary periods.

What about part-time work? Are Americans being forced to settle for part-time jobs when they would rather have the security of full-time employment? Here again, the answer is clearly no. In total, roughly 19.3 percent of the labor force works part-time, lower than in 1980. Only 2.6 percent of the labor force does so out of economic necessity—close to a historical low. The vast majority of those who work part-time do so by choice and the vast majority of those who want full-time work can find it.

We also find zero evidence for the idea that workers are switching jobs more frequently than before. The share of workers changing jobs in a given year has fallen significantly, from 16.9 percent in 1980 to 11.1 percent today. Over the same period, the median length of time someone works for a given employer has gone up from 3.2 years to 4.1 years. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the low levels of job turnover are a cause for concern. Job switching tends to meaningfully boost a workerʼs lifetime earnings, and it also helps knowledge and productivity gains to spread throughout the economy.

Their roll-call of evidence about how wages and work conditions are not in fact declining, but are better than a few decades ago, goes on and on. Here, let me mention what people actually say about their jobs in response to surveys. The General Social Survey has since 1972 been conducted by an opinion research center based at the University of Chicago, with funding from the National Science Foundation. When Americans are asked about their job satisfaction, here’s what they say:

Yes, there’s some fluctuation, like a drop in job satisfaction during the pandemic. But between 80-90% of Americans have been either “very” or “moderately” satisfied with their job going back to 1972.

That’s just one survey, right? Well, the Gallup poll does a job satisfaction survey, too, asking: “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your job? Would you say you are — completely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or completely dissatisfied with your job?” In 2023, the answer was 50% completely satisfied and 41% somewhat satisfied. The highest level of satisfaction was down a bit from the pre-pandemic answers of 2020, when 56% reported being completely satisfied and 33% were somewhat satisfied.

That’s just two surveys, right? Well, the Conference Board also does a survey of job satisfaction: “The Conference Boardʼs multi-decade survey of U.S. workers recently found that job satisfaction has improved for thirteen consecutive years, resulting in the highest levels recorded since the surveyʼs inception in 1987.”

Sure, there are plenty of issues with the labor market and the economy as a whole. But as one example, concerns about high prices for housing, or health insurance, or a college degree, or inflation in general are not actually complaints about the jobs that people have. The desired for salaries and wages with higher buying power and jobs with better career prospects aren’t quite the same as hating your current job, either. There’s a kind of fake profundity that delights in solemnly announcing how the world is going to hell. Almost two centuries ago, John Stuart Mill was writing disapprovingly about how “the man who despairs when others hope… is admired as a sage”–as if pessimism was necessarily synonymous with hard-earned wisdom, rather just emotional dyspepsia.

Janet Bush of the McKinsey Global Institute interviews Chad Syverson in “Unpacking the Mysteries of the Global Economy” (July 2, 2024, audio and text available).

Does productivity growth just mean lost jobs?

Janet Bush: There’s a perception that productivity means efficiency and lost jobs. I remember somebody said to me, “Oh, productivity—you’re fired.” Unpack that for us.

Chad Syverson: That is an example of the fallacy of reasoning causality from an accounting identity. There are many specific ways to measure productivity, but they’re all basically ratios of output to input, how much comes out of a production process divided by how many inputs go into it.

And the notion that you’re describing with that person’s comment comes from looking at that definition and thinking, “Oh, that’s how you causally affect productivity. So OK, I want productivity to be higher. It’s outputs over inputs, so if I make inputs smaller, productivity will go up.”

Well, the problem with that is—and this is true whenever you reason from an accounting identity—it’s not just inputs that are changing when you decide to cut inputs. You know, those inputs are doing something, presumably, and you’re going to affect what they’re doing if you try to cut those inputs, like, say, workers or worker hours.

And that might be useful stuff that makes output. And it’s quite possible you could actually reduce output even more than you reduce input, so therefore, your productivity actually has gone down.

It’s kind of interesting. You know, I totally understand sort of the sentiment behind what that person said. I hear it a lot, but it’s usually in that direction, the messing up the identity for causality. Because if someone said, “Oh, I need productivity to go up, I know what I’ll do, I’ll just make more output”—if you said that to someone, they’d say, “OK, what magic wand do you have that lets you wave and get more output for nothing?”

Because everyone recognizes, well, if you want more output, you need more inputs, too, et cetera. But somehow that doesn’t quite always become as obvious when someone does the inverse, which is, “Well, I’ll just cut inputs, and of course productivity will go up.” But as I said, that’s not the only thing that’s going to change when you do that.

On the enormous potential of artificial intelligence for productivity gains:

I will say, I think it’s the best candidate for a new general-purpose technology we’ve had in decades. And it’s made me more optimistic that we will end the productivity growth slowdown than anything else that’s happened since I started looking deeply at the slowdown ten years ago. So, yeah, I’m on the optimistic side.

I think it has amazing potential. As you say, it hasn’t diffused that widely yet, but the early returns, so to speak, I think are quite optimistic. … But one lesson of general-purpose technologies is, their full effect comes when they’re put together with complementary investments, often intangible.

It’s not usually the direct replacement effect that drives the productivity gains. It’s these complementary things. What that means is, you wouldn’t look at AI and say, “Oh, what does AI do?” “Well, it predicts text, so I’m going to go look and see where text prediction would be the biggest thing.” OK, if you’re a lawyer and you’re writing briefs, you’re not going to do that anymore. That all may happen. I’m not denying that’s going to be part of what AI does. But I think the biggest things and the broadest things that AI could do, we haven’t really fully grasped yet, because it needs to be put together with other stuff that’s currently being invented and created.

My guess is, the biggest, the most affected sectors, we don’t really know yet. And we might be surprised actually by quite a few of them.  … Something I’ve written about lately is that there can also be a period when new technologies arise where you actually get slow measured productivity growth. And so, the technology can be present. It can be being placed into service by businesses, but you don’t actually see it in the productivity numbers. …

This is work I did on what’s called the productivity J-curve. You get this period of initial undermeasurement of the true productivity effects of new technology, and then, later, overmeasurement.

This is work I did with Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock. We did some calculations treating existing technologies, kind of going back in time and supposing, “Oh, here comes this new technology. We’re going to pretend like it’s got this AI sort of effect going, where you’re not going to fully see it early and to compute exactly what you ask.” Like, how long does this stuff take for it to work through this measurement issue? And the answer is, we looked at computer hardware, computer software, and R&D spending in general. In each of those cases, the answer is decades. You can have a period of undermeasurement that’s ten to 20 years long. And then, of course, the overmeasurement period on the back end can last just as long. The size of this undermeasurement varies over that period. So it might be five to ten years before you hit bottom of the undermeasurement, and then you start coming back in the other direction. But the point is, you can go pretty long periods of time where the technology’s out there, it’s being installed, it’s starting to be used, but you’re still not seeing its full effect reflected in the productivity statistics.

On a possible resurgence of dynamism in the US economy

[T]here’s been a long-running decline in measures of dynamism in the economy, especially in the US, but throughout much of the OECD. What do I mean? Total labor turnover, people leaving jobs and getting new jobs, for example. Business formation. How many new businesses are being created every year? Those things have been on a long-run decline, and when I say long run, I mean, back to the ʼ80s at least. OK, so there have been 30, 40 years of slowdowns in measures of dynamism. And some people were saying, “Well, maybe this is tied to the productivity growth slowdown.” Like, these chickens are coming home to roost.

Well, what’s happened since COVID, as we’ve emerged from COVID, those things have turned around. After decades of decline, labor market dynamism accelerated again. Business formation in the US is up one-third. One-third more businesses are being formed per month now than were in 2019. This isn’t just folks who are tired of the office life starting a consulting company in their spare bedroom. If you look specifically at what are called high-propensity businesses, or businesses that at foundation have features that we know predict hiring and growth for those businesses in the future, those are also up a third.

So it really does look like there’s a reinjection of whatever the secret sauce is that creates a dynamic economy in the last several years. And I think that that’s what makes me encouraged that the last three quarters of pretty fast productivity growth might continue. We might actually accelerate through that return to trend, rather than just stop at the trend.

Here’s my attempt to resolve all the issues of shared American identity in under 1,000 words. It was published back in 2013 as an opinion piece in the (Minnesota) Star Tribune newspaper.

“Analogies for America: Beyond the Melting Pot”
Timothy Taylor

Melting pot or salad bowl? For decades now, these two contestants have been slugging it out in the contest for most appropriate metaphor for how the cultures and ethnicities of America fit together. But my preference is to think of America as chocolate fondue.

The popularization of “the melting pot” metaphor is usually traced to a soppy, sentimental and very popular play of that name by an immigrant named Israel Zangwill that opened in Washington in 1908. The melting pot metaphor is a way of expressing “E pluribus unum” — “Out of many, one” — the already old saying adopted in 1782 for the Great Seal of the United States (and which you can see on the back of the $1 bill). “E pluribus unum” has also been imprinted on U.S. coins since the 18th century.

The traditional criticism about the melting pot was that what is special about American culture isn’t its homogeneity, but rather its ability to absorb the elements of many cultures, then pass them around to everyone. For example, as John F. Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book, “A Nation of Immigrants”: “One writer has suggested that a ‘typical American menu’ might include some of the following dishes: ‘Irish stew, chop suey, goulash, chile con carne, ravioli, knockwurst mit sauerkraut, Yorkshire pudding, Welsh rarebit, borscht, gefilte fish, Spanish omelette, caviar, mayonnaise, antipasto, baumkuchen, English muffins, gruyère cheese, Danish pastry, Canadian bacon, hot tamales, wienerschnitzel, petit fours, spumoni, bouillabaisse, mate, scones, Turkish coffee, minestrone, filet mignon.’ ”

In our multicultural and individualist age, the common complaint is that the metaphor says that Americans should surrender our cultural and ethnic identities. This critique strikes me as overwrought. Yes, the culture of the country where you live is constraining. But what’s distinctive about modern America is the looseness of these constraints, and the array of available choices.

However, it does bother me that the melting pot metaphor is a relic of a bygone time, when melting different metals together was a common for many industrial workers. It also bothers me that melting different metals together produces a desired outcome only if you adhere to a formula. Bronze is copper and tin. Brass is copper and zinc. If you just dump different metals into a melting pot, what comes out is likely to be flawed and brittle, not strong or useful. When supporters of the melting pot metaphor start talking, it often turns out that they have a clear mental formula for what it means to be American — and it isn’t always my formula.

The notion of America as a salad bowl seems to have been popularized by the eminent historian Carl Degler. His book “Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America” was a commonly used textbook from the 1950s up through the 1980s. In the 1959 edition, he wrote: “[S]ome habits from the old country were not discarded; in those instances the children of immigrants even into the third and fourth generations retained their differences. In view of such failure to melt and fuse, the metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, although the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.”

While the salad bowl metaphor has a healthy, crunchy “eat your vegetables” ring to it, it seems awkward to me as well. After all, who is the pale and crunchy iceberg lettuce? Who is arugula? Who are the artificial bacon bits? Who are anchovies? Salad ingredients are not all created equal.

Salad is always falling apart, and you can almost never get all of the ingredients, in just the right proportions, into your mouth at the same time. Imagine the oversized modern salad bar, with multiple kinds of lettuces and vegetables, but also seeds and nuts, tuna salad, slices of chicken or ham, bean salad, hard-boiled eggs, crackers and popcorn, along with choice of soup and dessert. It misses what is cohesive and distinctive about America to see the country as a long buffet of ingredients, which we all choose to exclude or include according to our transient appetites of day.

My own suggestion is that America is chocolate fondue. Our different cultural and ethnic backgrounds are the strawberries, pineapple, and cherries, the graham crackers and cookies, the pound cake and brownies, the rice crispy treats and marshmallows, the popcorn and the peppermint sticks. Then we are dipped in America. We swim in America. We are coated in America. Because Americans can and do come from all ethnicities and races, we all look like Americans.

Of course, chocolate doesn’t always deliver on its promise. It can become grainy, rancid, burnt and bitter. Some people have no taste for chocolate, or are even allergic to it. America has often not lived up to its promises and ideals. But when I think consider all the human beings who have ever lived, in all the different places and times around the world, I feel profoundly fortunate to be living in modern America.

There’s an old story about when heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis decided to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1942. A friend of his objected, and said: “It’s a white man’s Army, Joe, not a black man’s Army.” But Joe Louis had observed the Nazi propaganda machine close up, as the result of his two epic fights against the German Max Schmeling (who was not a Nazi, but whom the Nazis attempted to exploit). So Louis told his friend: “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”

In that spirit, I’d say lots of things are wrong with America, but often, the best answers for what’s wrong with America are a bigger dose of what’s right with America. On the Fourth of July, I choose to sit with family and friends, and to savor the textures and sweetness of our shared American experience.

————

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at ­Macalester College in St. Paul.

I published this essay in the (Minnesota) Star Tribune newspaper two years ago in 2022.

76 Theses on American patriotism

It might be time for a reminder on what makes a patriot. 

By Timothy Taylor

1. Patriotism is love for one’s country.

2. To describe patriotism, one can adapt St. Paul’s comments about “love” in 1 Corinthians: “Patriotism is patient, patriotism is kind. Patriotism is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury … .”

3. A good person can certainly be a patriot. But that doesn’t imply that all good people are patriots, or that the better the person, the more patriotic — or that all patriots are good people.

4. It’s quite possible for a bad person to be a patriot. But that doesn’t imply that all bad people are patriots, or that a lousier person is more patriotic, or that all patriots are bad people.

5. Patriotism is analog, not binary. Some Americans will be 100% patriots, while others will be mid-level or mild patriots, or not patriotic at all. And that’s just fine.

6. Patriotism has multiple dimensions, including feelings about the central political understandings and shared history of a country, the physical landscape of the country, and fellow-citizens of the country.

7. For Americans, patriotism includes allegiance to the bedrock principles of freedom and equality as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

8. American patriots can be glad that the Constitution has been amended in the past, and can also hope to see it amended in the future.

9. If you support a fundamentally different system of government than described in the U.S. Constitution, you are not an American patriot.

10. Patriotism includes love of the physical country. When American patriots picture “from the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters,” their hearts are moved.

11. Patriots like to visit other parts of their country, if circumstances allow. If you have no desire to engage outside your city or state or region, you are not patriotic.

12. Patriotism means loving the entire country. A generalized dislike of certain areas — say, southern states, the Boston-D.C. corridor, California, inner cities or rural areas — is unpatriotic.

13. Patriots experience a twang of emotion when crossing their national border. Sir Walter Scott wrote: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,/ Who never to himself hath said,/ This is my own, my native land!/ Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,/ As home his footsteps he hath turn’d/ From wandering on a foreign strand!”

14. If you become a citizen of another country, or even seriously consider it, you are not an American patriot.

15. Expressing a desire to leave the country if your preferred candidate does not win an election is not patriotic.

16. Wishing that your state or region would secede from the rest of the country, or that the United States should be divided into multiple countries, is not patriotic.

17. Sometimes patriots will be so exasperated with their country that they say or do things that do not reflect their deeper feelings. If rare and regretted, such outbursts should be readily forgiven.

18. American patriots believe in civil liberties and constitutional protections for all residents, not just for the patriotic.

19. American patriotism includes a general affection for other Americans. An affection that excludes groups as defined by religion, race/ethnicity, or geography is unpatriotic.

20. Patriots will respect and even cherish dissent from other patriots, knowing that it arises within a shared love of country.

21. Still, dissent is not the highest form of patriotism, any more than criticizing your spouse is the highest expression of a loving marriage.

22. When patriots communicate with others outside their country, they will feel some internal pressure to counter even justified criticisms of their country.

23. American patriotism includes a respect for religious belief, although patriots need not be religious.

24. A patriot loves the actual and existing United States. A love that depends on the beloved being without flaw is no love at all.

25. Patriotism doesn’t spare one’s own country from criticism, but it also doesn’t single it out for exceptional criticism.

26. Patriots from different countries respect each other’s loyalties.

27. If you view yourself as a “citizen of the world,” you are not an American patriot.

28. Patriots have some interest in U.S. history. When you love something, you also like knowing its back story.

29. Patriotism need not proclaim itself at every moment. But patriotism will not hide, nor be ashamed.

30. Those who are perpetually unwilling to express affection for their country are not acting patriotically.

31. Patriotism trumps political partisanship. Indeed, American patriotism rejoices in a range of opposing views.

32. Challenging the patriotism of others based on routine political disagreements is unpatriotic.

33. Patriotic symbols can be overemphasized: We all know couples for whom the wedding ceremony seemed more important than the marriage.

34. Patriots often find it suspicious when others speak boastfully in affirmation of their patriotism.

35. A patriot can deeply disagree with American political leadership; most patriots sometimes will.

36. A claim of patriotism can be a cover for iniquity. George Washington warned in his 1796 Farewell Address “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

37. A claim of patriotism can be a cover for misbehaviors and crimes. Thomas Boswell famously quoted Samuel Johnson as saying: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” For some scoundrels, it’s a first refuge.

38. “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism,” as George Orwell wrote: “By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

39. A claim of patriotism has been used as an excuse for in-groups to denigrate others.

40. A claim of patriotism can sometimes be little more than a cloying and bathetic sentimentality.

41. Some are queasy about being identified as patriotic because they fear being grouped with those who make misguided claims of patriotism. This reaction cedes the name of patriotism to those who do not deserve it.

42. Patriotism cannot reasonably be blamed for all the actions taken in its name, any more than love, democracy, equality or freedom can be blamed for all the actions taken in their names.

43. Despite the ways in which patriotism can be misused, those who sneer at patriotism are acting unpatriotically.

44. Carl Schurz was an emigrant from Germany who became a Union general during the Civil War, a senator from Missouri and a secretary of the interior. He was once challenged for criticizing his adopted country. He replied, “My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.”

45. Some people will react to grave injustice by losing their patriotism. For patriots, this outcome is sad, but can be understandable. But there is no reverse jujitsu by which those who lose their patriotism should be judged as extra-patriotic.

46. People who have been mistreated by their country often still display a deep patriotism. When the boxer Joe Louis was asked how he could volunteer for the U.S. Army during World War II as a Black man who had experienced racial prejudice, he replied: “Might be a lot wrong with America but nothing Hitler can fix.”

47. Deploying patriotic symbols doesn’t prove one is a patriot.

48. Refusing to display or acknowledge patriotic symbols doesn’t prove that one is not a patriot. But an open discomfort with the symbols of patriotism will raise reasonable doubts about patriotism.

49. Those who deface patriotic symbols like the American flag may have a righteous cause, but they act unpatriotically in doing so.

50. Patriots at many times throughout history have been social, economic and political critics.

51. It is logically incoherent to believe that a patriot must be either unaware of the flaws in one’s society or else must be a supporter of those flaws.

52. Mark Twain wrote: “[T]he true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.”

53. Political liberals can be patriotic even when they believe that the government has failed millions of citizens — for example, with a lack of economic security and low quality education and health care.

54. Political conservatives can be patriotic even when they believe that social and political values of deep importance are eroding and government is overstepping its bounds.

55. Libertarians can be patriotic even when they believe that many laws (say, drug prohibitions) are fundamentally unjust.

56. Anti-tax protesters can be patriotic even when they believe that the government practices theft by taking their money.

57. Pro-lifers can be patriotic even though they believe unborn children have been murdered through legal abortion. Pro-choicers can be patriotic even though they believe America offers insufficient support for the rights of women to control their own bodies.

58. Some patriots oppose all wars for reasons of conscience. Such patriots will not hesitate to serve their country in other ways during times of war and peace.

59. Patriots will wince at E.M. Forster’s famous comment: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” A patriot may question whether treason must be morally preferable to breaking faith with a friend. But when two great loves come into conflict, it can be the stuff of tragedy.

60. It’s possible to hope that your country withdraws from a war being fought abroad, and still to be a patriot. U.S. patriots were not obliged to support the wars in Vietnam or Iraq.

61. An American patriot who opposes an American war will nonetheless not give aid and comfort to the enemy, nor rejoice in military defeats.

62. Those who damn their country most loudly, or who spell America with a swastika or as AmeriKKKa, are not those who love it the most.

63. When voting, it’s legitimate to give some preference to a political candidate who reveals a deeper sense of patriotism.

64. There is no reason to believe that politicians or those who work for a government paycheck are more patriotic than non-politicians and those who do not work for the government.

65. Those who view the ideal human being as detached from emotional ties to places, people, or institutions are not patriotic.

66. Patriotism is not jealous of other loyalties, but reinforces ties to family, culture, religion, hometowns and regions.

67. Patriotism includes a belief in the uniqueness and exceptional character of the United States: You can’t love something without feeling it is distinct.

68. If you love something, you also believe that it contains the seeds of good.

69. Patriots will find it hard to comprehend those who deny any patriotic attachment. David Hume wrote: “When a man denies the sincerity of all public spirit or affection to a country and community, I am at a loss what to think of him. … Your children are loved only because they are yours: Your friend for a like reason: And your country engages you only so far as it has a connection with yourself … .”

70. Patriots have a visceral feeling of relationship with other patriots, living and dead, extending to those who are just becoming U.S. citizens.

71. Some people fear that patriotism means surrendering their individual judgment, either to political authorities or to national loyalties. This is a misapprehension of American patriotism.

72. A patriot will respond to those who mock patriotism with clear disagreement and cold dismissal, flavored with sadness. But those who mock deeply held beliefs like family, religion or patriotism have little reason for surprise if the response is more energetic.

73. American patriots will not prefer a one-size-fits all centralized model of governance. They appreciate that fellow-citizens in other localities and states should have some flexibility in their self-governance.

74. Patriotism is a social glue. Political scientist William Galston wrote, “If the human species best organizes and governs itself in multiple communities, and if each community requires devoted citizens to survive and thrive, then patriotism is … a permanent requirement … .”

75. The Declaration of Independence declares that governments derive their just powers “from the consent of the governed.” A broadly shared patriotism is a form of ongoing consent that makes democratic governance possible in a sprawling and diverse country.

76. My wife and I note each anniversary of our first date — although our shift from friendship to dating was not clear-cut at the time. Similarly, the Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776; the delegates didn’t actually sign the Declaration of Independence until a formal copy was made in August; and the U.S. Constitution was not ratified until June 21, 1788.

But in matters of close affection, annual commemoration matters more than historical details. In that spirit, patriots will feel the tremors of their endearment every July 4.

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.

When thinking about global energy consumption, and the closely related risks of climate change, it’s useful to have some grounding in the basic facts. Here, I pass along a few figures from the annual Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2024). At a global level, the shift to non-carbon energy sources is more limited than many people seem to believe. In addition, carbon emissions and coal production are becoming more concentrated outside the United States and Europe, as other parts of the world economy develop. For all the controversy over US- and EU-based policies to encourage non-carbon energy, the outcome of carbon emissions for the world as a whole is going to be determined elsewhere.

As a starting point, here are the sources of “primary” energy in 2023 (that is, combining electricity generation, transportation, industrial uses, everything) for the world as a whole. Out of global primary energy of 620 exajoules in 2023, 81% is fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas). Noncarbon sources are the remaining 19%. If you focus on the “other renewables,” leaving out nuclear and solar, that’s 8% of total output. If the goal is to replace fossil fuels without (much) expanding nuclear and hydro, the “other renewables” would need to multiply more-or-less tenfold to cover existing energy demand. Of course, a ten-fold increase wouldn’t be enough, because the billions of people living in lower- and middle-income countries badly want to consume more energy, not just replace existing fossil fuel use.

It’s already true that over 60% of global energy consumption is happening outside the higher-income OECD countries. Here’s a breakdown by region. Notice also that the growth rate of energy consumption over the past decade is near-zero in the United States and negative in western Europe, but rising in Africa, India, and China.

Here’s a similar table, but describing per capita energy consumption, not total energy consumption. As you see, the average person in the world consumes 77 gigajoules of energy. The average American consumes 277 gigajoules, or more than triple the global average. However, the average person Africa consumes 21 gigajoules, the average person in India 39 gigajoules, and the average person in Central and South America 58 gigajoules. It seems plausible that developing countries may find ways for the standard of living to improve without consuming US levels of energy, but it seems impossible that the they can do so without some quite substantial rises in per capita energy consumption.

The report offers a breakdown of different sources of primary energy, and I’ll just note that, globally speaking, coal has been on the rise.

A more detailed breakdown is that China is 51.8% of total global coal output, India is 11.1% and Indonesia is 8.5%. Coal output is rising in all three countries. Meanwhile, the United States is 5.8% of global coal output and western Europe is 4.8%–and in both the US and Europe, coal production has been falling about 5% per year for the last decade. Indeed, news reports are suggesting that whatever China’s announced goals for clean energy, its expansion of coal is ongoing.

Given this background, it’s perhaps not shocking that global carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2023.

If you break down this total,, 31.9% of these global carbon emissions were from China in 2023, and another 8% of global emissions were from India. The Asia-Pacific region as a whole–adding in Japan, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, and others–already accounts for 53.7% of global carbon emissions, and total carbon emissions in this region have been rising 2% per year in the last decade. Meanwhile, the US accounts for 13.2% of global carbon emissions in 2023 (with the total declining an average of 1.2% per year in the last decade) and western Europe accounted for 10.1% of global carbon emissions in 2023 (with the total falling an average of 2.2% per year in the last decade).

At about this point, it’s common to note that historically, carbon emissions from today’s high-income countries have been much larger. This is true, but looking ahead at efforts to reduce global carbon emissions, it’s also not especially relevant. If global efforts to reduce carbon emissions don’t focus heavily on the biggest current emitters, as well as offering a cost-effective path to higher energy use and a higher standard of living for lower-income people across the world, the effort will not succeed.