The myth of the extinct single-income American family
Also: Will the GOP ever do anything on climate change?
“America’s problems are problems of poor policy rather than senescent technology. This does not mean that they are insignificant: unless we fix them, the U.S. growth rate will be permanently reduced. But it does at least mean that they are fixable.”- Capitalism in America by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge
In This Issue
The Micro Reads: longevity, Starship, clean water, and more …
The Short Read: The myth of the extinct single-income American family
The Long Read: Will the GOP ever do anything on climate change?
The Micro Reads
🧬 What would you do with 50 extra years of life? - Peter Diamandis | This links to a tweet by the founder of the XPrize Foundation. I urge a peek at the replies. They’re pretty interesting, ranging from pursuing a passion career to working a low-pressure job and just observing a rapidly changing world to becoming a full-time learner.
🚀 Starship is Still Not Understood - Casey Handmer | A fascinating deep dive into the underestimated potential of SpaceX’s heavy-lift, reusable spaceship. From the blog post: “Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.”
🚢 America’s Supply Chain Collides With California’s Nimbyism - Bloomberg | How many of these stories, every day, every year, are happening across America? From the piece: “It turned out that the main problem wasn’t an absolute space constraint but a local zoning regulation. Long Beach prohibits companies from stacking off-loaded containers more than two high. The law is not a safety regulation but an aesthetic one. City officials decided that stacks of containers more than eight feet high were too ugly to tolerate.”
💧 Alphabet designed a low-cost device to make drinking water from air. Now it’s open-sourced - Fast Company | Every important innovation doesn’t need to be nuclear fusion or CRISPR. From the piece: “The design, called an atmospheric water harvester, pulls in outside air, then uses fans and heat from sunlight to create condensation, producing clean drinking water drip by drip. In a new paper published today in Nature, the team calculates how much this type of device could potentially help give more people access to water that’s safe to drink. Globally, as many as one in three people still drink unsafe water that can spread diseases.”
📱 Tweetstorm of the issue:
The Short Read
👨👩👧👦 The myth of the extinct single-income American family
Political candidates sometimes latch onto a single, high-profile issue or policy that becomes their calling card and raises their profile. Based on this new ad (below), Blake Masters, a top executive at billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s investment firm, is hoping the notion “You should be able to raise a family on one single income” will get him the GOP nomination for US Senate in Arizona:
Now I say “notion” because Masters doesn’t present any sort of plan to make it easier to raise a family “on a single income.” So maybe it’s more of an aspirational goal. As Masters tells it, “We used to be able to do this” and then blames “globalization and decades of inflation” for why American parents “can’t really do it anymore.”
That sort of language suggests what’s going on here is little more than a flimsy populist appeal to economic nostalgia — a suspicion reinforced by, you know, the lack of a comprehensive plan. A serious agenda might include, say, pro-density housing regulatory reform. But the last time I checked, populist conservatives were railing against that idea as an attack on suburbs.
Let’s take a look at the core idea: Can Americans really not raise a family on a single income? (Keep in mind here that (a) Masters seems to be referring to a family situation where the father works and the mother says home, and (b) it’s hardly clear that mothers work more than they would prefer.) Such analyses are common on the populist right and left. And they are problematic and unduly pessimistic. This from my AEI colleague Michael Strain (bold by me):
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that from 1990 to 2019 the median male worker’s wages grew by 23%. The bottom 10% of male workers saw their wages increase by 36% over this period. Male workers in the 20th percentile — those who earn more than the bottom 19% but less than the top 80% — had 30% wage growth. All these figures are adjusted for inflation. That is, they account for increases in the prices of housing, health care, education and transportation . . . but also for the prices of many other goods and services. The upshot: It is hard to argue that price increases are overwhelming the wage gains of male workers. . . . It is perfectly possible to finance a middle-class life on one income. According to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, 26% of married mothers with minor children whose husbands earn between $75,000 and $99,000 are out of the labor force, as are 31% of mothers with husbands who earn between $100,000 and $249,000.
Of course, policymakers should address the costs of raising a family, from healthcare to housing to education. Likewise, they should push policies that would increase worker productivity, a necessity for higher take-home pay. But populists typically argue for a more closed, drawbridge-up economy — less trade, reduced immigration — that would undermine the long-run productive capacity of the US economy. It would be a recipe for stagnant family incomes and less economic opportunity.
The Long Read
🌻 Will the GOP ever do anything on climate change?
Folks on the right often mock left-liberal and progressive elites for not walking the walk when it comes to climate change. Lots of alarmist talk on the left about global warming being an “existential threat” and such, conservatives will snark, yet look at all those energy-sucking second homes and all those carbon-spewing airplane trips to conferences around the world — not to mention vacations.
That “own the lib” charge of left-wing unseriousness, even hypocrisy, about climate change should, however, take into account what’s happening with President Joe Biden’s evolving Build Back Better legislation. In Biden’s new proposed BBB “framework,” the price tag has declined to $1.75 trillion from $3.5 trillion. And that’s meant Democrats have been forced to painfully jettison some cherished ideas such as paid family leave, free community college, and new Medicare dental and vision benefits.
But the climate change portion of the bill, at least in terms of spending on all manner of subsidies — for investment in zero-carbon power plants, for new high-voltage transmission lines and grid-level energy storage, for the purchases of electric vehicles — hasn’t changed that much. This from Goldman Sachs:
The biggest winner in the framework is clean energy, which appears to get a similar amount of tax benefits and spending as it would have in the House-proposed legislation, despite the framework's much smaller overall cost. Notably, most of the clean energy provisions appear to last for 10 years in the framework, while nearly every other proposal would last for a shorter period than previously proposed.
And this from Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic:
But even as the bill’s overall spending has been cut in half, its amount of climate spending has barely budged, moving from $600 billion to $555 billion. The bill has lost key climate policies along the way, such as the Clean Electricity Program, and the Senate has shown itself as unable as ever to straight-up mandate reductions in carbon pollution. But the spending once allotted to those programs has been shifted to surviving climate policies and directed into new ones. To have the bill lose 50 percent of its overall spending but only 4 percent of its climate spending shows that the Democratic Party, despite significant internal constraints, has prioritized aggressive action on climate change.
Obviously, Republicans are going to vote against all of the above. But at some point that sort of broad rejectionism will crumble, whether forced by climate chaos or by enough worried GOP voters. On that latter point, a Gallup survey published last spring found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans ages 18 to 29 believe humans are the main cause of global warming, compared to just a third of Republican baby boomers.
So generational change seems on the way. And perhaps when that moment comes, Republicans will offer a proposal something like the one devised by Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute. It goes beyond the ides of many Republicans who currently do show interest in the climate issue. In addition to more basic research funding for clean energy innovation, Trembath would, for instance, support investment spending “from early-stage research to commercial deployment,” as he wrote last year in an essay for National Review.
In the past, Republicans might instinctively reject such ideas as “industrial policy.” But the Trump-era GOP seems less concerned by such policy activism. Indeed, Trembrath notes that “in just the past two years, they have co-sponsored, introduced, and/or helped pass policies to accelerate demonstration and deployment of nuclear-energy and carbon-capture technologies, including the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (NELA), the USE IT Act, and the Section 45Q tax credit for carbon removal.”
If the GOP takes Congress next year, there might be more room to negotiate on climate change policy than currently appears.