AI is making enormous demands on electricity grids around the world. Exactly how enormous isn’t easy to say, since statistical agencies aren’t reporting the AI sector separately and the companies themselves aren’t exactly forthcoming about the topic. So researchers have to do a bit of guesswork to come up with some numbers.

Continue reading AI Energy Demands: E-bike feet, miles, the country of Thailand? →

We have worked closely with the Bureau of Labor Statistics for decades and, in the belief that people are more likely to value what they understand, are adding some historical context focusing on the early days at the Bureau, to the ongoing discussion of the many probable repercussions of President Trump’s firing of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on August 1st, AKA “Jobs Friday.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics was established in 1884 to study the many issues affecting working men and women. In the words of the first commissioner, Carroll D. Wright, the mission was to conduct “Judicious investigations and the fearless publication of the results.” That was a tall order for a team of three on a $25,000 budget! Continue reading The BLS over time: “A tin can tied to my coat tail” →

All fields of science are now addressing legacies of injustice that can shape who participates in specific fields, research projects, and policy outcomes, but many focus on research labs, or on  top-down administrative changes. In a recently released study of college students’ awareness of institutional, structural, and cultural racism and sexism in the field of ecology, Karina A. Sanchez, Amanda J. Bevan Zientek, and Emily A. Holt,  all part of the University of Northern Colorado’s department of biological sciences, identified college classrooms as centers of social change around the world. They intend their work to help fill the research gap on how inequities can be addressed in colleges and universities. Continue reading How to Diversify Ecological Science →

As we were wrapping up this issue, the president-elect announced the creation of an “External Revenue Service” (ERS). It will, as he put it, demonstrating his idiosyncratic understanding of trade, “collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade….” Almost no one aside from him and his circle of advisers thinks that foreigners, rather than US consumers, pay tariffs, but let’s set that aside for now.

Instead, let’s look at tariffs over the long sweep of history. According to a useful factsheet from the Congressional Research Service, tariffs were an easy way to collect revenues in the early history of the country, which didn’t have a developed administrative structure. There were only so many ships sailing to unload goods in so many harbors, so taxing those goods was not much of a technical challenge. The government was small and didn’t need that much revenue anyway.

The tariff and revenue histories are illustrated in a quartet of graphs below. From 1792 to 1930, federal revenue averaged less than 3% of GDP. (Obviously those old GDP figures are guesses, but let’s take them as a decent approximation of reality.) From 1792 to the eve of the Civil War, 1860, tariffs provided an average of 86% of total federal revenue. (There were some bumps before the Civil War, notably the War of 1812, which juiced expenditures and savaged imports.) Besides borrowing heavily, the federal government increased excise taxes, reducing dependence on tariffs and leaving them accounting for just over half of federal revenues in the last third of the 19th century. With the introduction of the personal income tax (PIT) in 1913, tariffs receded in importance; since 1945, the PIT has accounted for 45% of federal revenues.

(Speaking of federal revenues, the popular notion that taxation has been growing like Topsy can’t survive fact-checking. As the graph shows, federal revenue as a share of GDP has been nearly flat for the last seven decades; in fact, the 2024 share, 17.1%, is below the 1951 share, 18.4%.)

With the growth of the PIT, and federal revenues generally, tariffs (or customs duties, to use the technical term) have largely disappeared as source of federal revenue. (In the graph on the lower left, you can see a spike around 1930, the time of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which many, though not all, economists believe contributed to the Great Depression.) Customs receipts barely cracked 1% of total revenue in the 1990s and 2000s. With the tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration, and preserved by Biden, that share doubled to 2% in 2019–2022, but they’ve eased back to 1.6% in 2024. That looks poised to change

Since Trump has floated the idea of replacing the PIT with tariffs—switching from “taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service,” as he said in the Truth Social announcement of the ERS—it’s interesting to experiment with how large those tariffs would have to be to plug the revenue gap. In the first three quarters of 2024, goods imports were $3.3 trillion at an annual rate, and the PIT brought in $2.5 trillion. Matching that would require a tariff rate of 70%. The effective tariff rate last year—revenues divided by the value of goods imports—was under 3%. Obviously a 70% tariff would decimate imports, but we’re not even considering that.

It all seems like a stretch.