Conversable Economist

I have been the Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives since the first issue in Summer 1987. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which decided back in 2011–to my delight–that the journal would be freely available online, from the current issue all the way back to the first issue. You can download individual articles or entire issues, and it is available in various e-reader formats, too. Here, I’ll start with the Table of Contents for the just-released Summer 2024 issue, which in the Taylor household is known as issue #149. Below that are abstracts and direct links for all of the papers. I plan to blog more specifically about some of the papers in the few weeks, as well.

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Symposium: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017

“Sweeping Changes and an Uncertain Legacy: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,” by William G. Gale, Jeffrey L. Hoopes, and Kyle Pomerleau

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 introduced sweeping changes to individual and corporate taxation. We summarize the major provisions, trace the origins of the Act, and compare it to previous tax changes. We also examine the effects on the government budget, economic activity, and distribution of resources. Based on evidence through 2019, we find that the TCJA clearly raised federal debt and increased after-tax incomes, disproportionately increasing incomes for the most affluent. Its effects on GDP and median wages seem modest at best, although clear counterfactuals are difficult to identify. The impact on investment is less certain, and research is only recently emerging that addresses this question. Empirical analysis of longer-term effects may prove difficult due to the disruptions created by the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“The US Individual Income Tax: Recent Evolution and Evidence,” by Jon Bakija

This paper assesses the current state of the US federal individual taxation, and considers its recent evolution, with an emphasis on the changes to the individual income tax enacted in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), and evidence on their impacts. How has the design of the tax changed, and how has this affected tax revenues, the distribution of tax burdens, marginal tax rates, and the breadth of the tax base? What were the rationales for the changes, and what does economics have to contribute to the debate over whether the changes were a good idea? What have we learned so far from empirical research on the impacts of recent changes in individual tax policy, including especially the changes enacted since 2017, and what does this imply for the optimal design of individual taxation?

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“Lessons from the Biggest Business Tax Cut in US History,” by Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick

We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history. We draw five lessons. First, corporate tax revenue fell by 40 percent due to the lower rate and more generous expensing. Second, firms with larger declines in their effective tax wedge increased investment relatively more. In aggregate, we suggest a loose consensus from the literature that total tangible corporate investment increased by 11 percent. Third, the business tax provisions increased economic growth and wages by less than advertised by the Act’s proponents, with long-run GDP higher by less than 1 percent and labor income by less than $1,000 per employee. Fourth, provisions that increase foreign investment by US-based multinationals also boost their domestic operations. Fifth, some of the expired and expiring provisions, such as accelerated depreciation, generate more investment per dollar of tax revenue than others.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“US International Corporate Taxation after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” by Kimberly A. Clausing

The root dilemma that informs the past, present, and future of US international taxation is the tension between two desiderata: protecting the corporate tax base from erosion and ensuring the competitiveness of US multinational firms in the world economy. This article begins by exploring that tension, discussing the evidence behind these competing policy goals. It then considers the international tax provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. TCJA enacted transformative changes in US corporate tax policy, but it did not resolve long held policy concerns. While research on TCJA is in early stages, evidence indicates that TCJA substantially reduced corporate tax revenues, that TCJA’s international provisions (as a whole) raised less revenue than expected, that offshoring and profit shifting remain large policy concerns, that changes in US multinational company competitiveness were mixed, and that underlying trends in wages and investment did not change due to TCJA. While TCJA was unable to resolve the tension between competitiveness and tax base protection, the Pillar 2 international tax agreement shows more promise in that regard. As countries throughout the world implement a “country-by-country” minimum tax on multinational income of 15 percent, this has the potential to disrupt long-standing arguments about international corporate taxation.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“Are Opportunity Zones an Effective Place-Based Policy?,” by Kevin Corinth and Naomi Feldman

We evaluate the Opportunity Zones provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, focusing on its targeting and effects on investment and resident outcomes. The policy allowed substantial discretion for state governors to designate Opportunity Zones that were not necessarily the most distressed, though we find that in aggregate their ultimate selections were still somewhat well-targeted. However, we show that the policy is insufficient to encourage investment with a significantly below-market rate of return and provides the largest tax benefits to investment that would have occurred regardless of the policy. Consistent with these features of the policy’s design, a substantial amount of Opportunity Zone investment has been made, including in many lower-income areas. However, it appears that much of the investment would have occurred anyway, and the evidence to date mostly points to limited effects on resident wellbeing.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Symposium: Expanding the Appeal of Economics

“Seeking the “Missing Women” of Economics with the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge,” by Tatyana Avilova and Claudia Goldin

Economics is among the most popular undergraduate majors, especially in top colleges and universities. However, even at the best research universities and liberal arts colleges men outnumber women by two to one, and overall there are about 2.5 males to every female economics major. We discuss why women major in economics less than men and describe a project to increase the number of female economics majors. The Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge was a randomized controlled trial, with 20 treatment and 68 control schools, that we ran for one year in AY 2015–16 to evaluate the impact of light-touch interventions to recruit and retain female economics majors. Treatment schools received funding, guidance, and access to networking with other treatment schools to implement programs such as providing better information to incoming students about the application of economics, exposing students to role models, providing mentoring, and updating course content and pedagogy. Using 2001–2021 data from the NCES-Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) on graduating undergraduates (BAs), we find that UWE was effective in increasing the fraction of female BAs who majored in economics relative to men in liberal arts colleges. Large universities did not show an impact of the treatment, although those that implemented their own RCTs showed moderate success in encouraging more women to major in economics. We discuss what we believe worked in the UWE program and speculate on the reasons for differential treatment impact.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“Valuing Identity in the Classroom: What Economics Can Learn from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education,” by Sergio Barrera, Susan Sajadi, Marionette Holmes, and Sarah Jacobson

Economics faces stubborn underrepresentation of minoritized identity groups. Economics instructors also largely use antiquated instructional methods. We leverage the literature from the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, which have rigorously studied instructional techniques and gathered evidence on a variety of methods that improve learning and reduce demographic gaps. We discuss four broad ideas: active and collaborative learning, role model interventions, modernized design of assessments and feedback, and culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy. We frame these approaches in the context of economics identity, share evidence regarding efficacy, and give examples of how the techniques have been and can be used in economics. In so doing, we provide a set of changes economics instructors can make, large and small, to improve their teaching for all students and to reduce demographic gaps in success and persistence in the field.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“Lessons for Expanding the Share of Disadvantaged Students in Economics from the AEA Summer Program at Michigan State University,” by Lisa D. Cook and Christine Moser

Since 1974, the American Economic Association Summer Training Program has provided training and mentoring to students from disadvantaged backgrounds in economics. The aim of the program is to encourage and prepare these students to apply to PhD programs in economics and ultimately to increase diversity in the profession. The program has been hosted by different universities over the years. This paper provides insights and lessons learned from the program’s tenure at Michigan State University from 2016 to 2020. In addition to discussing the structure and outcomes of the program, we provide advice to students, faculty, and potential hosts who may be interested in the AEA Summer Program or similar programs.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Articles

“What Went Wrong with Federal Student Loans?” by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis

At a time when the returns to college and graduate school are at historic highs, why do so many students struggle with their student loans? The increase in aggregate student debt and the struggles of today’s student loan borrowers can be traced to changes in federal policies intended to broaden access to federal aid and educational opportunities, and which increased enrollment and borrowing in higher-risk circumstances. Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program. The crisis illustrates the important role that educational institutions play in access to postsecondary education and student outcomes, and difficulty of using broadly-available loans to subsidize investments in education when there is so much heterogeneity in outcomes across institutions and programs and in the ability to repay of students.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“On the Economics of Extinction and Possible Mass Extinctions,” by M. Scott Taylor and Rolf Weder

Human beings’ domination of the planet has not been kind to many species. This is to be expected. Humans have radically altered natural landscapes, harvested heavily from the ocean, and altered the climate in an unprecedented way. Recent concerns over the extent and rate of biodiversity loss have led to renewed interest in extinction outcomes and speculation concerning humans’ potential role in any future mass extinction. In this paper, we discuss the economic causes of extinction in two high-profile cases—sharks and the North American Buffalo—and then extend our analysis to multiple species and discuss the possibility of mass extinction. Throughout, we present evidence drawn from authoritative data sources with a focus on shark populations to ground our analysis. Despite large gaps in our data, the available evidence reveals a worrisome trend: extinction risks are rising for many species and policymakers have been very slow to react.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

“Recommendations for Further Reading,” by Timothy Taylor

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

When a city bids to host the Olympic Games, part of the bid is a commitment that the city or the national government will cover any cost overruns–and experience suggests the cost overruns will be large. Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg discuss the patterns in “The Oxford Olympics Study 2024: Are Cost and Cost Overrun at the Games Coming Down?” (May 2024, University of Oxford Said Business School, Working paper | 2023-24). They write:

Given that the last three Summer Games cost USD 51 billion (in 2022 prices) and overran budgets by 185% in real terms – not including road, rail, airport, hotel, and other infrastructure, which often cost more than the Games themselves – the financial size and risks of the Games warrant study. … The Paris 2024 games, for instance, have seen costs surge from EUR 3.6 billion to 8.8 billion. Similarly, Los Angeles 2028 has revised its forecast from USD 5.3 billion to 6.8 billion. … For instance, cost overrun and associated debt from the Athens 2004 Games weakened the Greek economy and contributed to the country’s deep financial and economic crises, beginning in 2007 and still playing out almost a decade later (Flyvbjerg 2011). For Rio 2016, the Brazilian economy was doing well when the city bid for the Olympics. Fast forward a decade to two months before the opening ceremony and this was no longer the case. Rio was now in such dire straits that the governor declared a state of emergency to secure additional funding for the Games from money reserved for dealing with natural and other disasters (Zimbalist 2020).

Indeed, the International Olympic Committee has been finding that fewer and fewer cities want to host the Games–especially in democratic countries when people are given a chance to vote against doing so. For a sense of the patterns over time, here’s a table:

The costs in the first column are adjusted for inflation, and thus (roughly) comparable over time. As you can see, the Rio Olympics was especially costly, as was London. But notice also that the number of athletes has increased dramatically, especially from about 1976 to 1996. The number of events has also risen substantially; for example, up almost 30% from the 1992 Games Barcelona to the 2024 Games in Paris. (Patterns for the Winter Games are similar, but at a lower level.)

Budzier and Flyvbjerg point out that the main proposal from the International Olympic Committee to hold down costs has been “reuse/retrofit”: that is, minimize the amount of new construction for the Games and use existing facilities wherever possible. Paris is the first reuse/retrofit Olympics, and while costs do indeed seem lower, the same kinds of cost overruns seem to be occurring. They provide a figure showing cost overruns at the Olympics compared to other kinds of “megaprojects”:

I’m probably a bigger sports fan than your typical person, but I’d start cost control by by dropping the sports where professionals already have major global exposure in the non-Olympic events: soccer, golf, basketball, tennis. These sport also require large venues. Except for the awfulness of it all, I have no interest in the three-on-three Olympic basketball, or in watching Americans wipe out the world in flag football as scheduled for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

I’d also dial back on the glitz. I’ve heard television commentary to the effect that the organizers for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 are already asking: “How can we outdo the spectacle of the Paris Games?” I suspect the common answer is not: “Just focus on the athletes, and bring the Games in under budget.”

But at the end of the day, the answer to an ongoing record of large cost overruns is a greater pressure for honesty. As one example, apparently a lot of Olympic bids, made 12 years before the event, have no provisions for inflation. Multiply that lack of seriousness throughout the bid, and cost overruns should not be a surprise.

In discussions of US international economic ties, it sometimes feels a bit as if the only other country worth mentioning is China. Daniel Hamilton at the Brookings Institution put together a list of US international economic ties in a short essay “Who is America’s top commercial partner? (Hint: It’s not China.)” (March 21, 2024). Here’s a table from his article:

The first column shows trade in goods, which is measured by adding exports and imports to and from the US and the other economy. China is behind the European Union, which is perhaps not a surprise, but also behind Canada and Mexico. But of course, trade in goods is only one part of international commercial relations, and not the fastest-growing part. International trade in services is often conducted online, and here the volume of US-EU trade really stands out (especially if one adds in U.K.).

The third column of “foreign affiliate sales” measures the sales by, say, EU-affiliated firms in the United States and US-affiliated firms in the EU. The rule-of-thumb is that “affiliation” means at least 10% ownership of the company. This category of firm is often involves in offshoring/onshoring decisions: that is, if a company has a foreign affiliation, it will decide on which location to carry out production and hiring for various tasks. Here, US connections with the EU (and the UK) are especially strong.

The final column shows “foreign direct investment,” which is the amount of investment by those in one country in which they own at least 10% of a firm in the other area. (The 10% threshold is chosen because it implies a “large enough” ownership share to provide a voice in how the company is run.) Again, the numbers in the table are the sum of, say, US foreign direct investment in the EU and EU foreign direct investment in the US. In this area, US-China ties are smaller than US-Mexico ties, and either of those is a small fraction of the ties from the US economy to Canada, the UK, and the EU.

I won’t try to draw out any implications or lessons here. I’ll just say that when thinking about or discussing how international economic ties affect the US economy, it’s useful to have some magnitudes in mind.

Manufacturing jobs have a talismanic force in the politics of the US and many other high-income countries. The underlying belief often seems to be that governments of other countries have enacted policies that allowed them to steal US jobs, and that if the US government just got tough, the US economy could get those jobs back. But US politicians of both parties (and indeed, politicians in high-income countries around the world) have been making similar claims for decades now. Perhaps the actual situation with manufacturing jobs is more complex?

Kyle Handley offers some long-term perspective going back to the 1950s in “What happened to U.S. manufacturing? The evidence on technology, trade, and structural change” (Economic Innovation Group, July 2024).

As a starting point, consider some basic patterns of US jobs in manufacturing and services, from the always useful FRED website run by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The first figure shows total US manufacturing jobs since 1950. The second figure shows total US services jobs since 1950.

As a starting point, notice that the total number of US manufacturing jobs has not exceeded 20 million at any point in the last 75 years. The total number of services jobs was already higher than 20 million back in 1950, and now stands at 136 million. Even when total manufacturing jobs were rising in the 1960s and 1970s, the total increase over two decades was a rise from about 15 million to 19 million jobs; in those two decades, services jobs were rising from 35 million to 85 million. In short, manufacturing jobs have not been a major determinant of total US employment growth for a long time.

The reason behind this broad pattern is that productivity growth in manufacturing has been relatively high, so that lower numbers of workers could produce ever-more. Here’s figure from Handley’s essay. Manufacturing jobs were almost 40% of total US jobs back in 1950, but are now about 10%. However, the bottom panel shows that the real value-added per manufacturing worker has roughly doubled over that time.

Total US manufacturing jobs peaked in the 1970s; by the 1984 presidential election, Walter Mondale was arguing that Ronald Reagan had presided over a “Rust Bowl” economy. But most of the recent focus on manufacturing jobs looks at the period starting in the early 2000s, when China joined the World Trade Organization and dramatically expanded its role in the global economy. The figure above clearly shows the drop in US manufacturing jobs that starts in the late 1990s and continues through the Great Recession.

Looking back, that sharp decline had several reasons: the surge in Chinese exports was one, but another was the way in which new digital technologies and automation were increasing the productivity of some manufacturing workers and reducing the demand for others. Another issue was the sharp rise in US housing construction in the early 2000s: some of the workers with the skills and background for manufacturing jobs could easily transfer to construction jobs–which worked OK until the housing boom turned into a bust.

Thus, the underlying story here is not a reduction in the share of manufacturing jobs, which has been happening for decades, as part of an overall shift to services jobs. However, the transition out of manufacturing jobs in the early 2000s was especially rapid. As Handley writes: “The China Shock occurred very fast and U.S. labor markets were simply not able to contemporaneously adjust to the jobs lost in manufacturing …”

This shift to services jobs is happening everywhere, including China. Handley writes:

The same pattern prevails in nearly all advanced, high-income economies. The manufacturing share of employment declines at a rate of 30 to 65 percent in Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United States from 1980 to 2012. … Using the OECD’s Trade in Employment data we can trace out the path of manufacturing employment since 1995 using internationally comparable data across countries. China remains a manufacturing juggernaut, but its manufacturing employment has been trending sharply downward, peaking at 151 million manufacturing jobs in 2013 and falling to 129 million by 2019. Worldwide manufacturing jobs fall over the same period from 355 to 324 million.

Handley offers this table showing the share of global manufacturing jobs for some key countries. If you compare 2000 to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, you can see that China has a lower share of global manufacturing jobs, while the countries with a substantially greater share of global manufacturing jobs include Vietnam and Indonesia.

Just to be clear, I do believe it’s important that the US economy retains a significant manufacturing capability. Having manufacturing and research in geographic proximity can lead to a more clear-headed perspective on technological problems and solutions. But as manufacturing technologies and productivity continue to rise, in the US and around the world, the number of total US manufacturing jobs might stabilize or even rise somewhat, but truly large gains in manufacturing jobs are not likely in the United States or any high-income country.

US government debt is climbing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates show that “debt held by the public” is 99% of US GDP in 2024, and projected to rise.

Is there a point where investors around the world might hesitate to buy more US government debt? For example, at some point investors might feel as if they had enough US government debt in their portfolios, and prefer to look at other options. Or at an extreme, global investors might suspect that the US government might be tempted to use inflation or other mechanisms to reduce the real value of what it needs to repay. Here, I don’t want to speculate about probabilities of different scenarios, but to ask the practical question: what data might tell us if this scenario is unfolding? David Wessel offers guidance in his essay: “How to tell if the US Treasury is having trouble borrowing in the bond market” (Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, July 23, 2024).

The basic fact to understand here is that when the US Treasury issues debt, it does so through an auction: that is, those who are willing to pay higher interest rates will “win” the auction and obtain the Treasury bills and bonds. As a result, it’s very unlikely that an auction of US Treasury debt would literally fail, in the sense that there wouldn’t be “enough” bidders to absorb the debt. Instead, if many global investor were less willing to supply capital to the US Treasury, the interest rate paid by the Treasury would rise. But as Wessel points out, there are behind-the-scenes measures of whether there are “enough” bidders to buy US Treasury debt.

One measure is the share of debt at any auction purchased by “primary dealers.” Wessel explains:

Immediately after each auction, the Treasury discloses what fraction of successful bids were from primary dealers. These two dozen investment firms, designated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are expected to bid in all Treasury auctions at reasonably competitive prices on a pro rata basis; that is, if there are 25 primary dealers, each is supposed to bid for at least 4% of each auction. In a sense, they are the bidders of last resort. If primary dealers take an unusually large share of an action, that’s seen as sign of weaker demand from others than market makers anticipated.

The primary dealers then plan to resell US Treasury debt in secondary markets over time. During the pandemic, the share of federal debt being purchased by primary dealers went up, but now it seems to have fallen back.

Another measure looks at the total bids for Treasury debt in a given auction, compared to the total amount of debt being offered at that auction. In a truly failed auction, the “bid-to-cover” ratio would fall below 1. Here, the pattern seems to be that the bid-to-cover ratio for Treasury debt rose substantially during and after the Great Recession of 2007-9, but the ratio has now fallen back to levels from 15 years ago.

What about if large shares of US Treasury debt are being purchased by foreign investors, who might decide to pull back for some combination of economic and political reasons? This figure shows total holdings by foreign investors of US Treasury debt rising (dark blue line, left axis), but also shows that as a share of total US debt, the share of that debt held by foreigners is falling (light blue line, right axis).

There are reasons for concern about the functioning of the broader market for Treasury debt. As Wessel points out:

In the past few years, there have been a few disruptions to the Treasury market—unusual volatility or a sudden spike in yields—that suggest that at times of stress, the market may not be as liquid as it once was. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, so many institutional investors wanted to raise cash by selling Treasuries that the Fed bought $1 trillion in Treasuries over three weeks “to restore normal market functioning.”   Such episodes underscore that the stock of U.S. Treasuries outstanding is growing faster, while the capacity of banks and dealers to serve as middlemen has been shrinking …

But at least for now, the concern that there might at some point be insufficient buyers for Treasury debt–even at higher interest rates–isn’t showing up in the auction data.

The idea of “geoengineering” as a response to the risks of climate change involves putting particles, probably sulfur, into the atmosphere to counterbalance the effects of carbon and other warming gasses. The idea is controversial. One side emphasizes the risks of tinkering with the climate; indeed, the 2013 movie Snowpiercer and the follow-up TV show envision a future where geoengineering to counterbalance global warming goes too far and leads to an ice age. On the other side, if you feel that the risks of climate change are immediate and enormous, and that attempts to reduce carbon emissions at a global level are not close to sufficient, then the logic of that position pushes you to consider alternatives that you might not otherwise prefer–from geoengineering to a renaissance of nuclear power, and others. (For some previous posts over the last decade or so on geoengineering, see here, here, here, and here.)

But just as increasing sulfur emissions into the atmosphere would be a form of geoengineering to push back against climate change risks, reducing sulfur emissions into the atmosphere will be a form of geoengineering that increases climate change risks. Back in 2020, the International Maritime Organization agreed to reduce sulfur emissions from shipping. The goal was to reduce conventional air pollutants related to sulfur in port cities, and from this perspective, the policy was a big success. But from the perspective of climate change, it may well have made the problem worse. Syris Valentine tells the story in a readable way, with links to the underlying scientific studies, in “How cleaning up shipping cut pollution — and warmed the planet,” subtitled “When the maritime sector slashed sulfur emissions, it became an accidental experiment in geoengineering” (Grist, July 18, 2024).

Sulfur emissions from maritime sources dropped 80%. Studies done before the program was adopted estimated that this reduction would save at least 500,000 lives during the next five years, mainly in port cities around the world that bear the brunt of these emissions.

On the other side, several studies also suggest that less sulfur in the atmosphere had led to shifts in cloud patterns that could double the amount of global warming over the next decade. For those who want details of the evidence, here’s a prominent study published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and another study published in Communications Earth and Environment. As one might expect in this area, the studies are not in full agreement: here’s a preprint, awaiting review, of a study that finds a smaller effect.

A group of seven researchers are concerned enough about this issue that they are publishing an open letter, forthcoming in a journal called Oxford Open Climate Change, asking the International Maritime Organization to alter its rules so that ships would continue to emit more sulfur when out on the open seas, away from population centers. The idea is to keep the immediate health benefits of lower sulfur emissions near port cities, but also keep sulfur in the air to counterbalance the warming effects of carbon emissions.

The practical tradeoff here is real, and so are the challenges of thinking about geoengineering. If you favor an immediate, do everything now, all-hands-on-deck approach to addressing risks of climate change, then continuing the previously existing form of geoengineering–in the form of having ships emitting sulfur while away from land–makes sense. If you are opposed to this form of geoengineering, even though this practice of ships putting sulfur into the atmosphere has existed for some decades, then you are also willing to accept that the need for reducing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere should be balanced against other environmental concerns.

John Bangsund seems to have coined “Muphry’s Law” in his “Scenes of Editorial Life” column in The Society of Editors Newsletter (March 1992). He writes:

Muphry’s Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy’s Law. Muphry’s Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

As one of his several examples:

The editor of the English translation of the Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966) does not thank his proofreader, but he does list the “principal collaborators in translation and literary review”, among them such eminent people as J.R.R. Tolkien and James McAuley. My copy is not just a first edition — it is a copy that got through before the press was stopped to correct a little mistake in Genesis, chapter 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s siprit hovered over the water.”

As someone who proofreads hundreds of pages each year for my job as Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I live in particular fear of the typos that are not caught by spellcheck, because the incorrect version is nonetheless an actual word. I have professional nightmares about economics articles that discuss “pubic finance in the Untied States.”

However, whenever my deep and abiding love of proofreading is at low ebb, I can always take comfort in the words of Ambrose Bierce, who in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) offered this definition:

PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.

The prominent biologist E.O. Wilson (1929-2021) was perhaps best-known for his studies of ants. His 1990 book with evolutionary biologist Bert Hölldobler, The Ants, won the Pulitzer prize for General Non-Fiction in 1991. They then followed up in 1994 with a more “popular science” (that is, easier to read for nonspecialists) book called Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration. In the opening chapter, they write:

Our passion is ants, and our scientific discipline is myrmecology. Like all myrmecologists–there are no more than five hundred in the world–we are prone to view the Earth’s surface idiosyncratically, as a network of ant colonies. We carry a global map of these relentless little insects in our heads. … The abundance of ants is legendary. … The British entomologist C.B. Williams once calculated that the number of insects alive on the earth at a given moment is one million trillion (10¹⁸). If, to take a conservative figure, 1 percent of this host is ants, their total population is ten thousand trillion. Individual workers weigh on average between 1 and 5 milligrams, according to the species. When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings. But being so finely divided into tiny individuals, this biomass saturates the terrestrial environment. …

How have ants and other social insects come to lord over the terrestrial environment? In our opinion their edge come directly from their social nature. … The most advanced social insects, those forming the biggest and most complicated societies, have attained this rank through a combination of three biological traits: the adults care for the young; two or more generations of adults live together in the same nest; and the members of each colony are divided into a reproductive “royal” caste and a nonreproductive “worker” caste. …

In our view, the competitive edge that led to the rise of the ants as a world-dominant group is their highly developed, self-sacrificial colonial existence. It would appear that socialism really works in some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.

The comment about Marx is just a throwaway line for Hölldobler and Wilson. Their discussion immediately refocuses on ants. But it had enough of an edge to give me a smile.

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.