THE IDEOLOGY OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: AMERICAN NATIONALISM’S NOM DE PLUME

 22 August 2022


In this article published by the Journal of Political Ideologies, USSC Associate Professor Brendon O'Connor, Macquarie University's Lloyd Cox and the University of Sydney's Danny Cooper argue that American exceptionalism is, in essence, a strand of American nationalism that only emerged in its distinctive modern form during the Cold War. The authors begin by unpacking this relationship between nationalism and exceptionalism in the first section and continue in the second section by examining the significance of two key thinkers on American exceptionalism – Alexis de Tocqueville and Seymour Martin Lipset. The third section crystallizes various meanings of the concept identified previously. The authors delineate three core pillars of exceptionalist thinking: a belief that the United States has a unique founding that set it on a path to having a special place in the world; that it is a land of unrivalled opportunity; and that it has a unique role to play in global affairs.

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BEHIND PAYWALL

Associate Professor Brendon O'Connor
Postgraduate Coordinator and Associate Professor in American Politics, United States Studies Centre (jointly appointed with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney)

Brendon O'Connor is jointly appointed between the US Studies Centre and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney as an Associate Professor in American Politics. He is the editor of seven books on anti-Americanism and has also published articles and books on American welfare policy, presidential politics, US foreign policy and Australian-American relations.

Cognitive Dissonance in America’s Dairy Land

Wisconsin farmers admire and depend on their undocumented Mexican laborers—and still vote for Trump.

by Brian Alexander

June 20, 2022
Washington Monthly

This May 20, 2019, photo shows Ryan Dunham on his farm in rural Westby, Wis. Dunham made the hard decision to sell his 50 head milking heard in April due to the challenging finances he faced from low milk prices. (Peter Thomson/La Crosse Tribune via AP)

At “dinner” time—in the middle of the afternoon—the dairy farmer, his wife, a brother-in-law, and a couple of friends gathered around the big kitchen table. There was a ham, and a turkey, and gigantic bowls of potatoes and vegetables, and two pies on the kitchen counter.

Two of the men were missing one finger each. “Caught it in a grain screw,” one explained. I was there to report a magazine story. The guests had come to work on the farm for a day, and the big meal was one of the perks.

Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together 

Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers

By Ruth Conniff

New Press, 313 pp.

The farmer needed the help. This was 1997. A wave of farm consolidation had been building across the country, and, as the farmer said to me, “We had to get big or get out.” That became a mantra across farm country, and especially on dairy farms.

Free market economics demanded it. As old New Deal supply-demand price management gave way, and as every link in the supply chain all the way to the retail shelf consolidated—think Walmart and Kroger behemoths—the price of milk and dairy products dove lower, cutting margins for farmers. They had to scale up to force per-unit prices down. Herds of 100 cows became herds of 300, then 1,000, then 2,000. So even as farms disappeared—in 1987, there were 146,685 farms with dairy cows in the United States; by 2017, there were 54,599—the industry produced more milk than ever.

You could celebrate this as “efficiency,” without considering the cost in the destruction of communities and the price paid by farmers, who now die by suicide at one of the highest rates of any occupation. Or you could read Milked, Ruth Conniff’s illuminating, distressing, yet oddly optimistic exploration of America’s Dairy Land.

Back in 1997, the farmer outside La Crosse, Wisconsin, had not hired any Mexican labor. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do—but he knew he had to do something. He could start his 14-hour day at 4:30 a.m., work as farmer, vet, mechanic, biologist. His wife could be accountant and business manager. But they could not run the place alone.

Their son had just started high school. The farmer hoped the boy would take over one day. The boy, having worked on the farm, and seen his father’s brutal schedule, didn’t want to take over, though he hadn’t told his father yet. He wanted to get as far away from a dairy farm as he could possibly go.

Conniff, a Wisconsin native and the editor in chief of the Wisconsin Examiner, writes a vivid tale. She writes about quinceañeras—the celebration of a Hispanic girl’s 15th birthday—in a land of Trump-voting farmers; about illegal immigration and economic necessity; about the gumption of both farmers and laborers. These are sources of optimism in what is sometimes a perverse story. Farmers respect hard work, family, devotion. With few exceptions, the Mexicans they hire share these qualities.

Mexican fathers milk cows while trying to parent misbehaving sons living 2,000 miles away with their mothers. Immigrant hands send wages home to build houses they hope to move into one day when they can return to their country. They work six- and seven-day weeks for years on end, doing jobs no American will do for the low wages the farmers pay. They navigate life in small-town America with limited English, occasional harassment, and fear of deportation.

Conniff’s farmers marvel at all this. Some come not only to respect the immigrant laborers, but also to love them. The farmer John Rosenow employs two Mexicans named Fermin and Roberto. Conniff writes,

Maybe the two men will want to take part ownership in the farm. John hopes so. He doesn’t have any children of his own, and he wants this to be his legacy: helping the next generation of immigrants take their place in the history of the valley.

But Conniff also makes the perversity clear, both explicitly and by implication. Farm owners twist in the convoluted political gymnastics that enable them to vote for Trump in 2020 while also supporting their workers’ ability to live in the United States despite being here illegally.

Bill Traun, for example, employs Lupe and Blanca, who give names to all of Bill’s cows. He loves that—and them. According to Conniff,

Bill didn’t like it when Donald Trump started saying bad things about immigrants. “It scared them, and it scared me,” he says. But over time, he felt that Trump’s anti-

immigrant rhetoric kind of faded out. And the border wall didn’t stop Mexican workers from coming to the farms in the area. During the pandemic, he notes, Trump sent a lot of aid to farmers.

Indeed, the farmers seem to admire the guts it takes to trek from rural Mexico to rural Wisconsin; that moxie contributes to their admiration of their Mexican employees.

This past March, a teenage girl fell from the new, higher border wall near San Diego and fractured her skull, neck, and back. On April 11, a woman died after becoming entangled in climbing gear while trying to scale the border wall near Douglas, Arizona. And on May 6, a man died while trying to scale the wall near San Diego. Two women, one in her 30s and one in her 50s, were seriously injured.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on April 29:

In 2016 … UC San Diego Health admitted border-wall injury patients at a rate of about 49 people per 100,000 local Border Patrol apprehensions. By 2021, that rate grew to about 449 people per 100,000 apprehensions.

The border wall does not stop people from coming to the United States. It never has. It only makes it more dangerous for immigrants to provide labor for Wisconsin farmers.

Some of Conniff’s farmworkers are robbed by gangs or abused by smugglers on their way to America. Some are raped. Some die in the desert. The suffering their laborers endure seems not to trouble some of the farmers. But they are in a bad spot, too. Millions of dollars might flow through their mega farms, but their profits are often low, after accounting for loan payments, seed, feed, equipment, and other expenses. And they can’t find American labor to muck out pens and assist in a calf delivery at three in the morning.

The problems Conniff explores require systemic reform. She suggests changing the current H-2A visa program, which covers agricultural workers. Now, these workers have to return to their home countries within a year. This doesn’t work for dairy farms, which operate around the clock, every day of the year. No farmer can afford to have workers leave for extended periods. Democrats offered legislation to put H-2A workers on a path to citizenship, but the bill failed.

Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice could crack down on the ever-increasing consolidation that has put farmers in this position in the first place. There are signs that this is beginning to happen.

But there’s much more involved than immigration law and antitrust policy. Conniff touches on the effect of International Monetary Fund austerity demands on Mexican agriculture, NAFTA, and other big-picture forces that could generally be grouped under the label of economic neoliberalism. These forces have conspired to create the situation in which farmers and workers now find themselves. Those of us who are subject to America’s increasingly bizarre food system are, of course, affected as well.

Iwould have enjoyed seeing more of this kind of context in Milked. Even so, Conniff’s great gift is in placing individual people and their lives at the center of what could otherwise come across as a big, complicated snoozer of a story.

The residents of rural America used to vote for Democrats. And one farmer told me recently, “I don’t see how anybody who farms couldn’t vote Democratic.” The voices Conniff brings to life evoke the days of New Deal programs like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, rural electrification, and antitrust enforcement, all of which were boons to rural America.

There are still rural votes to be had, and in a cockamamie electoral system that overweights land area, no political party can afford to ignore them. It’s vital to listen to what people in those areas are saying, thinking, and doing, and to learn how they’re coping and fighting small-scale battles of their own—not only for Democratic electoral success, but also for the health of the nation.

“Bill didn’t like it when Donald Trump started saying bad things about immigrants. ‘It scared them, and it scared me,’ he says. But over time, he felt that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric kind of faded out … During the pandemic, he notes, Trump sent a lot of aid to farmers.”

John Rosenow, one of Conniff’s main subjects, views the land with near-religious reverence. He’s also something of a liberal, which makes him a minority among his fellow farmers. But other, more conservative farmers join him on trips to Mexican villages. These trips are organized by a local woman, Shaun Duvall, a Spanish speaker who acts as translator and cultural interpreter between the farmers and the laborers. Once in Mexico, the American farmers meet the families of the people who work for them. They see the houses that are paid for by the wages workers send home. In the process, any Fox News–stoked fear dissolves and the farmers see parallel images of themselves. They reflect on how immigrants, many of them undocumented, have transformed small American towns—in some cases saving them from oblivion—by opening grocery stores, restaurants, and barbershops.

Most tellingly, the Americans find themselves admiring the farms and communities their current and former employees enjoy in Mexico: some fruit trees, a few animals, lots of family, and many celebrations. The Mexicans, in turn, seem to feel a little sorry

BRIAN ALEXANDER
Brian Alexander is a journalist and author. His two most recent books are Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, and The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town.

More by Brian Alexander

It’s the Monopoly, Stupid
Unchecked corporate power is fueling inflation.

by Phillip Longman

June 20, 2022

Washington Monthly 

Credit: Sipa USA via AP

LONG READ

On the evening of October 24, 1978, President Jimmy Carter sat up straight behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, interlocked his hands, and began reading from the prepared remarks laid out in front of him. “I want to have a frank talk with you tonight about our most serious domestic problem,” Carter told the camera. “That problem is inflation.”

Since the summer, the cost of living had been increasing at a rate not seen since the Ford administration. Worse, the new burst of inflation was accompanied by stubbornly high unemployment, creating a return of dreaded “stagflation.” According to one of his key advisers, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter worried that if they didn’t come up with something new and substantive to say that night, “we’ll be laughed at.”

The largest single cause of accelerating inflation during Carter’s term was monopolistic control over the flow of oil, but the president saw no palatable options for breaking up the OPEC cartel anytime soon. Nor, thanks to political opposition from both Big Business and Big Labor, could he put in the kind of mandatory wage and price controls Richard Nixon had once ordered up.

Also off the table was giving in to Republican demands for dramatic cuts in government spending and higher interest rates. Carter was not yet desperate enough to sign on to that agenda because it risked a wholesale revolt from Democrats to his left like U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy and would quite likely induce a recession.

So Carter played another card: Blame inflation on government bureaucrats.

Carter told the nation that his administration was “cutting away the regulatory thicket that has grown up around us and giving our competitive free enterprise system a chance to grow up in its place.” As evidence, he pointed to a bill he had just signed that stripped the Civil Aeronautics Board of its power to regulate airline fares and routes. “For the first time in decades, we have actually deregulated a major industry,” Carter bragged. “Of all our weapons against inflation, competition is the most powerful,” he explained. “Without real competition, prices and wages go up, even when demand is going down.”

Carter tapped a high-energy Cornell economist turned policy entrepreneur named Alfred Kahn to oversee the dismantling of the CAB, and was so pleased with the result that he elevated Kahn to the new position of “inflation czar.” Later, Carter would double down on the idea that the most powerful tool for fighting inflation was depriving the government of its ability to regulate prices, signing bills that deregulated railroads and trucks, and passing the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which set in motion deregulation of the financial sector. The overarching theory was that if the government would just get out of the way, market competition would lead to greater efficiency and therefore to lower prices for consumers.

Inflated heads: Today’s high prices were brought to you by Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, Stephen Breyer, Alfred Kahn, Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, and Larry Summers. Credit: All photos: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Most Republicans applauded these moves, for obvious reasons, but Carter also got support from important Democrats. Ted Kennedy was a key supporter of the airline deregulation bill Carter signed that day. Influenced heavily by Kahn and by Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law, many had come to believe that federal regulatory agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the CAB had been captured by the industries they were supposed to regulate. Stephen Breyer, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice, successfully teamed up with another Kennedy staffer, Phil Bakes, in helping the senator to become a champion of the new liberal cause of getting better deals for consumers through deregulation. The “New Deal faith in the science of the regulatory art,” Kennedy said at one point, was “a delusion.”

Today, we are paying a big price for that false lesson. Democrats and Republicans cooperated over the next four decades in dismantling much of the regulatory apparatus and antitrust enforcement that since the New Deal (and even before) had governed America’s financial, transportation, and telecommunication markets, foreign trade, and corporate mergers. As they did so, the underlying assumption was always that less government intervention in markets meant more competition, and that more competition would in turn bless the world’s consumers with more and cheaper stuff. But over the long term, the primary effect of this radical change in the country’s political economy was to foster an enormous growth in corporate power that set us up for today’s inflation.

As merger frenzies concentrated markets in sector after sector, corporate giants used their increasing power at first mostly to suppress wages. Over time, they also maximized profits through downsizing plants and equipment, shrinking workforces and inventories, and relying on brittle, sole-source supply chains to reach outsourced production facilities in low-cost, mostly Asian countries. As a result, when shocks like the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine came along, the industrial system had no spare capacity and became riddled with choke points, setting off a prolonged frenzy of price gouging that doesn’t self-correct.

Call it “choke-flation.” With perverse irony, it now threatens Joe Biden with the same political fate as Jimmy Carter, only this time the stakes are much higher, given the authoritarian drift of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan’s time. To avoid that fate, we must counter the false narratives peddled not only by Fox News but also by out-of-touch establishment economists who would have Americans believe that too much liberal government is to blame for inflation, and not the predations of unregulated monopolies.

Just as Carter and Kennedy had hoped, a first-order effect of deregulating airlines was to spawn a round of price cutting. Scores of discount start-up airlines surged into the market (remember People Express, ValuJet, and Air Florida?), and incumbent carriers responded by extracting steep cuts in wages and benefits from their workers, which they initially shared with their customers. But as airlines began engaging in price wars, most of the new starts went broke within a few years, and the surviving incumbents began combining into increasingly dominant mega-carriers that no longer had any legal requirement to serve the public interest.

By the mid-1980s, many Democrats who had voted for deregulation were already regretting it. One reason was that because the CAB no longer existed, hundreds of medium-sized cities lost air service or found themselves forced to pay much higher fares. In 1986, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was unequivocal:


This is one Senator who regrets that he voted for airline deregulation. It has penalized States like West Virginia, where many of the airlines pulled out quickly following deregulation and the prices zoomed into the stratosphere—doubled, tripled and, in some instances, quadrupled. So we have poorer air service and much more costly air service than we in West Virginia had prior to deregulation. I admit my error; I confess my unwisdom, and I am truly sorry for having voted for deregulation.

Ted Kennedy also came to deeply regret his vote, because of the way deregulation injured another key constituency once firmly in the Democratic coalition: organized labor. At a 1988 event in Washington, D.C., Kennedy buttonholed Phil Bakes, the former staffer who, along with Stephen Breyer, had been his point person on airlines 10 years before. “This goddamn dereg … you know, Phil, you double-crossed me. You lied to me. You said the unions were going to support deregulation.” According to one account, people at the event gawked as Kennedy continued to shout at Bakes about deregulation. Bakes was then the president of Eastern Airlines, where the financier Frank Lorenzo had put him charge of driving down labor costs through union busting.

By this time, the Reagan administration, while furthering Carter’s moves to deregulate the financial sector, was also embarking on a wholesale retreat from antitrust enforcement. Under the influence of the conservative jurist Robert Bork and market fundamentalists concentrated at the University of Chicago, the Department of Justice in 1982 adopted new prosecutorial guidelines—subsequently followed by every administration until Biden—that ignored the clear statutory language of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Act and thereby set off a frenzy of anticompetitive mergers. Meanwhile, a new generation of federal judges, many of them products of the Federalist Society and a vast, lavishly financed, conservative “law and economics” movement ensconced in the nation’s law schools, began further eroding traditional anti-monopoly policies by striking down cases against dominant firms engaged in predatory behavior, such as price gouging, loss leading, and price discrimination.

This meant that the flying public just had to take it when consolidating airlines increasingly under the control of financiers like Lorenzo and Carl Icahn began using their unregulated market power to push through more and more reductions in the quality of the product. These include smaller and smaller seats, nonrefundable tickets, overbooked planes, fewer direct flights, and more changing planes at “fortress hubs” controlled by a single airline. The nominal cost of flying declined on high-volume routes where some competition remained, but after adjusting for the changes in the cost of energy, overall fares declined at a lower rate in the 10 years after deregulation than they had during the 20 years before when the government set prices and routes. (See “Terminal Sickness,” in the March/April 2012 issue of this magazine.)

By 1998, air service was so wracked by bankruptcies, layoffs, regional inequality in service, and increasing concentration of ownership that Alfred Kahn complained that the promise of deregulation had been undone by the failure to enforce antitrust laws. “I’ve been saying for these 20 years when you deregulate an industry, the antitrust laws become more important rather than less,” the disillusioned Kahn told a reporter for the Houston Chronicle. “That’s because now customers are dependent not on regulators to protect them but on competition.”

Yet it is not clear that Kahn should have blamed lack of antitrust enforcement alone for the debacle; other policy shifts were also at work in making his reforms even more destructive. Early in his first term, Bill Clinton signed legislation, for example, that removed any regulatory barriers to compensating CEOs largely through stock options, thus inadvertently accelerating the trend toward “shareholder” control over corporations and the financialization of the economy. Kahn would be doing barrel rolls in his grave if he learned that all four remaining major airline carriers share common ownership by the same three gigantic investment pools. This interlocking financial control means that the major airlines don’t compete with each other any longer except over who can maximize returns to their owners by cutting costs the most and raising fares the fastest. In the first three months of 2022, average domestic airfares rose by a staggering 40 percent, with only a small portion of this attributable to rising energy costs. And that was, as we’ll see, only the beginning.

The same pattern now recurs in sector after sector. Start with the evidence from surging profit margins.

In April, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report that broke down the three main factors contributing to the price hikes charged by nonfinancial corporations. Since the bottom of the COVID-19 recession through December 2021, inflation in this sector, which constitutes three-quarters of the private economy, ran at an annualized rate of 6.1 percent. The rising cost of labor accounted for a small part of this, and the cost of raw material contributed substantially more. The overwhelmingly largest factor, however, was surging corporate profits, which accounted for more than half (53.9 percent) of the rise in prices.

These statistics undermine the idea, championed by the economist Larry Summers and many others, that today’s inflation is primarily caused by excessive government spending and monetary policies that have given ordinary Americans too much money. Both factors helped millions of Americans to make up for the income they lost when their jobs disappeared during the pandemic. Meanwhile, even at a time of spreading labor shortages, nominal wage growth still lags or is barely keeping up with overall inflation, signaling, as the EPI report puts it, that “labor costs are still dampening, not amplifying, inflationary pressures.” By contrast, according to an analysis published by The Guardian, between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2022 the median profits of the top 100 publicly traded companies surged by 49 percent.

Abundant examples illustrate the business practices behind these statistics. Last fall, the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank, listened in on the earnings calls of hundreds of publicly traded companies, in which CEOs provide investors with projections of future profits. A consistent theme: CEOs bragging that inflation was giving them cover to raise prices above costs. The CEO of Hostess told shareholders, “When all prices go up, it helps.” A survey by Digital.com of retail businesses found that 56 percent said inflation has given them the ability to raise prices beyond what’s required to offset higher costs.

Why are corporations able to get away with this profiteering? After all, every economics textbook teaches that in a competition economy, any company that jacks up prices far above costs will soon find other firms stealing away its customers with better deals. It’s why many economists oppose laws against profiteering; their models tell them that market forces will automatically correct any abuse. It may also be why even some economists who work for the Biden administration drastically underestimated how long inflation would endure. They failed to focus on the fact that we don’t have anything like a competitive economy anymore; in sector after sector, we have an economy increasingly dominated by just a few, often colluding firms that have stripped out almost all slack capacity and that don’t need to worry about competitors under selling them because they no longer really have any competitors.

This is particularly true in sectors where we have seen the steepest price rises. In the meat-packing industry, just four large conglomerates control 55 to 85 percent of the supply chains for beef, pork, and chicken while enjoying near-total local monopolies. During the worst of the pandemic, the Big Four posted record profits by hiking up their prices by far more than their costs. According to a White House report, fully half of the rise in food costs since December 2020 is attributable to monopoly pricing by the meat-packing industry. Meat-packers give the excuse that they are just passing along higher costs—but then what explains their soaring profits? Tyson’s earnings per share have increased by 71 percent over the past year.

Rental car companies provide another good example of how consolidation amplifies inflation. The falloff in travel following the outbreak of COVID initially hit the industry hard. Rental companies dropped their prices by more than a fifth and began selling off cars. Hertz, which also controls its former competitors Dollar and Thrifty, declared bankruptcy. But the industry was soon able to more than recoup its early losses and go on to post record profits through ongoing price gouging.

That’s because it operates as an effective oligopoly. The Hertz group, which emerged from bankruptcy after attracting $5.9 billion in new hedge fund money, shares the market with only two remaining major players: Avis (which controls Budget and Zipcar) and Enterprise (which controls Alamo and National Car Rental). Because there was so little competition left in the industry, it didn’t have to worry about the worldwide shortage of new cars that occurred during the pandemic. It learned instead that it could pull in record profits just by selling off one-third of its inventory into a red-hot used car market while jacking up the price of renting the remaining cars in its diminished fleet. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of renting a car or truck is now 47 percent higher than it was in 2019 before the pandemic struck.

To keep this sweet deal going, the Big Three rental companies don’t have to engage in illegal price fixing. With so few players, it is easy to coordinate prices and output just by sending signals to one another in public. Hertz’s CFO announced on an earnings call this April, “We don’t view inflation as necessarily a bad thing for us, as this creates more discipline across the industry in terms of pricing and asset allocation, which you can see currently.” Just to make sure investors and other members of the oligopoly got the message, he let it be known that Hertz is committed to keeping its prices high by keeping fewer cars in its fleet than is necessary to meet demand. And what is the company doing with the money it saves with this strategy? It’s redeploying its assets to engage in a $2 billion stock buyback program.

It should come as no surprise that other members of the oligopoly are engaged in the same pricing and allocation “discipline.” Rather than build its fleet size back up to meet surging demand, the Avis Budget Group holding company, for example, bought back 20 percent of its outstanding stock in just four months late last year. According to its CFO, this represents “over $1 billion of value created for shareholders.” In May, Avis reported record first-quarter profits, further swelling its stock price by double digits. Meanwhile, anyone needing to rent a car paid more for it—if they could find one.

Variations on this pattern prevail in many other sectors, including central industries on which the whole economy depends. Coming into the pandemic, a highly consolidated freight rail industry, now largely controlled by private equity funds focused on maximizing short-term returns, learned that it could earn record profits by laying off tens of thousands of workers and stripping out physical assets like rail yards and locomotives. Service standards deteriorated, but with the industry dominated by just six remaining major carriers that enjoy near-total local monopolies, captive shippers had nowhere else to go. (See “Amtrak Joe vs. the Robber Barons,” November/December 2021.) The consequences for inflation became clear last year when an improving economy created an increase in demand for freight transportation that overwhelmed the railroads’ remaining capacity, causing supply chain bottlenecks that continue to drive up prices for everything from energy and food to consumer electronics.

Union Pacific, for example, having laid off thousands of workers before the pandemic and shut down a major terminal outside of Chicago as cost savings measures, had to turn away container traffic from West Coast ports for a week last year when undelivered containers started stacking up. Perversely, such bottlenecks give Union Pacific and the other five members of today’s railroad trust even more opportunities to profit through price gouging. On an earnings call in January, Union Pacific promised that due to “our disciplined pricing approach, we expect to yield pricing dollars in excess of inflation dollars”—in other words, we promise to deliver still-higher profits by further jacking up prices beyond what it costs to run the railroad. Currently, Union Pacific and other major railroads have such fat profit margins that they only spend 60 cents in operating expenses for every dollar of revenue they rake in.

Or consider ocean shipping. Once it was a source of falling prices in the U.S., as the use of containers and super-efficient mega-ships made it economical to outsource production to distant places like Japan, China, or wherever labor and other costs were lowest. But today, thanks to a huge increase in concentrated ownership over the past 10 years, roughly 80 percent of all global shipping capacity—and 95 percent of East-West trade—is controlled by just three cartels that allow freight carrier firms to coordinate rates. This they do with gusto, raising the rates for shipping between the United States and Asia by more than 1,000 percent since the beginning of the pandemic and taking home profit margins as high as 56 percent. Studies by the Kansas City Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank suggest that such profiteering could be responsible for as much as one-sixth of the ongoing rise in inflation.

Some observers insist that increasing corporate concentration cannot be a major cause of today’s inflation since the trend has been building since the 1980s while inflation has only surged more recently. But that is hardly a paradox. The combination of deregulation, financialization, and monopolization has been causing inflation in many sectors for decades; what’s different now is that in the aftermath of the disruptions caused by the pandemic and by the effects of decades of corporate outsourcing and downsizing, the same three forces are amplifying inflation throughout the whole economy.


Price-gouging monopolists are driving up inflation and forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which analysts fear will lead to a recession this year.

For two generations we’ve endured rampant inflation in health care, for example. The reason is not that Americans consume more health care than people in other advanced nations; it is that we pay ever-higher prices for the same pills and procedures with no better results. And that’s largely because of a surge of hospital and insurance company mergers, cartelization of medical supply chains, patent monopolies on drugs and medical devices, and, most recently, moves by private equity firms to wrest more “shareholder value” out of nursing homes, dialysis centers, and other key parts of the health care delivery system.

Now, the same forces are causing inflation to spill out of sectors where competition is also disappearing, which had to happen eventually. Even in cases where monopolists might have at first lowered prices in the past, the effect over time has been the opposite, as per plan. As students of business history well know, John D. Rockefeller built the Standard Oil monopoly by colluding with railroads to sell kerosene for far less than any of his competitors could until he no longer had competitors and could charge whatever he liked. Later chain stores sold at below cost or forced their suppliers to do so in order to drive mom-and-pop stores out of business and gain monopoly pricing power. The abuse of such predatory pricing and price discrimination to build monopolies became so bad that Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act in 1936 to make that business model explicitly illegal.

But Robinson-Patman and similar fair trade laws have not been enforced since the 1980s, while enforcement of antitrust statutes has also lapsed, allowing for the return of the same monopoly play. Using gobs of Wall Street capital, Jeff Bezos sold books, Kindles, and later almost everything else on Amazon at a loss for more than a decade until he built up a retail platform with such gigantic market share that merchants must now pay monopoly prices for access to it. Google and Facebook literally give away products to consumers for free in order to build up the monopoly power they now use to charge advertisers monopoly prices—a corner that destroys competition and drives up prices across the whole economy.

Even when predatory pricing fails to build an enduring monopoly, the effect is often ultimately inflationary. Classic examples include Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, and other so-called unicorns that built gigantic market shares over the past decade by using Wall Street money to sell their services at far below cost. Because this practice drives other producers, like traditional taxi drivers and small restaurants, out of business, consumers pay more in the long run.

A variation of this pattern occurs when deregulation brings an initial surge of competition but later an increase in corporate consolidation. In airlines, as we’ve seen, deregulation set off ruinous competition that, after a shakeout, has allowed today’s unregulated airline oligopoly to engage in fantastic price inflation combined with further cuts in quality. In April, airfares rose by another 18.6 percent, the largest one-month increase since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking airline prices in 1963. Rising fuel costs account for some of this, but as Delta Air Lines President Glen Hauenstein recently told an investor conference, Delta only needs to collect an extra $30 or $40 per the average $400 roundtrip ticket to cover rising fuel costs, which it is more than getting through fare hikes. As a result, Delta is telling investors to expect a profit margin this year of 12 to 14 percent or more.

Meanwhile, Delta and the three other remaining major carriers have announced that they will be cutting the numbers of flights they offer this summer, blaming the fact that large numbers of employees are quitting. But rather than improve working conditions, airlines cut capacity. The effect on their bottom line will be to further boost their pricing power and profit margins as travelers compete for a dwindling number of airline seats.

The effect of this monopoly behavior is not only inflationary but also likely to end in recession. In a normal competitive market, these firms would be investing in new plants and capacity—buying more cars to rent, for instance, or ordering more airplanes—which might keep the economy humming along without inflation. Instead, by merely raising prices, they are driving up inflation and all but forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which more and more market analysts fear will lead to a recession as early as this year.

Which brings us all the way back to Jimmy Carter and the false idea that the best way to fight inflation is by taking away the government’s ability to manage competition. It is true that excessive and poorly conceived regulation can itself become a source of monopoly by creating high barriers to entry for new businesses. One example is Carter’s deregulation of energy markets, which led to a boom in natural gas production that helped break the back of the energy crisis that was driving 1970s inflation in the first place.

Nor were Carter-era deregulators wrong that regulatory agencies can sometimes be “captured” by the powerful industries they are supposed to be regulating. Much of today’s health care cost inflation, for instance, is due to the iron control that the American Medical Association has over reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid. (See Merrill Goozner, “The AMA’s Dark Secret“.) Indeed, the deregulation movement that Carter-era liberals began has itself been captured by corporations and laissez-faire conservatives, whose well-funded think tanks, lobbyists, and allies in Congress and the courts have bollixed up the federal rulemaking system considerably. With a new conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court, they may shut it down altogether. (See Marcia Brown, “Limitations of Statute“.)

Taken together, the competition policies we have been following for the past 40 years have gone so far in the wrong direction that what we have today is not a deregulated, market-driven economy, but one regulated by financiers who have cornered different markets large and small and who are now using their monopoly power to jack up prices and profits. The Biden administration, by its words and actions—including sweeping antitrust executive orders and the hiring of tough enforcers—clearly understands this. So does the public. A recent poll showed that a strong majority of Americans blames large corporations for today’s inflation and wants the federal government to crack down. About the only people who don’t get it are a handful of economists, like Larry Summers, who are nevertheless influential in elite media and Democratic circles. If Biden is to escape the same fate as Carter, he and his allies need to avoid being led astray by economists in thrall to their own models and do a better job of showing the American people that they have a plan that addresses inflation’s root cause: abusive corporate power.



PHILLIP LONGMAN
Phillip Longman is senior editor at the Washington Monthly and policy director at the Open Markets Institute.

More by Phillip Longman

Yes, Americans Are Better Off Under Biden
Households have seen a stunning rise in employment and income, even considering inflation.

by Robert J. Shapiro

August 22, 2022

President Joe Biden gives a thumbs up as he boards Air Force One 

at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. 

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)


Ronald Reagan closed his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in October 1980, urging Americans to ask themselves if they were better off than they were four years ago. Of course, Reagan, like a sharp prosecutor, knew the answer before he posed the question. Inflation and unemployment were soaring. Perhaps the reason why Republicans aren’t posing that question today is that they, too, know the answer. Based on jobs, incomes, wealth, poverty, and health insurance, Americans are better off today, including inflation.

No one can argue with President Joe Biden’s job record—more than 9.5 million unemployed Americans found jobs over the past 18 months, and the unemployment rate fell from 6.4 to 3.5 percent.

Whether Americans’ incomes are higher is more complicated, because the pandemic disrupted the economy in so many ways. First, GDP collapsed in 2020, and unemployment soared—followed by massive public spending that extended into Biden’s term in 2021 and helped us recover. But supply problems, especially energy, ignited inflation, and spending, worsened it. While the fast-rising employment has produced a record 14.9 percent surge in overall wage and salary income since Biden took office, how much has inflation eaten away at those unparalleled gains?

For all of the “pain at the pump” stories, the answer is that wages and salaries have kept pace with inflation since Biden took office—and by this measure, most Americans are much better off than before the pandemic hit in 2020, and before he took office in 2021.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Department of Commerce provides the best data on the nation’s earnings. It reports that before adjusting for inflation, Americans earned $11,346 billion in wages and salaries in June 2022, a 14.9 percent jump from $9,872 billion in January 2021 and 16.6 percent more than the $9,734 billion total in February 2020, just before the pandemic. So, take account of inflation’s impact by applying the BEA’s deflator for personal consumption expenditures, a better inflation measure than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using that deflator raises the original wage and salary total, now expressed in June 2022 dollars, to $10,673 billion for January 2021 and $10,717 billion for February 2020. Finally, divide the three results by the number of people earning wages and salaries on each date.

The math may sound complex, but in fact it’s simple: In June 2022, the average working American earned $74,643 in wages and salaries, compared to $74,624 in January 2021 and $70,274 in February 2020. Even with 9.5 million more people working, the average working person earned as much in June, after inflation, as when Biden took office. And compared to just before the pandemic, when employment was comparable to today, the average person earns 6.2 percent even after inflation. The answer to Reagan’s question is “Yes” on wages and salaries as well as jobs, a remarkable achievement given the pandemic.

A technical note: Other data, especially from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), suggests that wages and salaries have not kept pace with inflation. Like most economists, I rely on the BEA because the deflator for personal consumption spending is more accurate than the CPI and because the BEA’s data on wages and salaries is more complete than the BLS’s. Both depend on the National Compensation Survey. But the BEA adjusts for gaps in the survey, including people working in private households, employees of nonprofit and religious membership organizations, and so on. The BEA also adjusts the NCS data for COVID-19’s impact on the collection of that data, using analyses by the Federal Reserve and others.

Americans are also significantly wealthier than before Biden took office. The pandemic and the jobs boom were primarily responsible. As the Omicron variant spread, government checks enabled more savings and increased spending that helped drive up employment. According to the Federal Reserve, after inflation the net assets of Americans increased by nearly $2 trillion from the first quarter of 2021—when Biden took office—to the first quarter of 2022. (We exclude the top 1 percent because their assets are notoriously hard to measure.)

And it’s not the typical case of the rich getting richer. The fastest growth in net assets occurred among low- and moderate-income households. From the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, the inflation-adjusted wealth of households in the lowest income quintile jumped 15.2 percent and just 0.8 percent for those in the top income quintile (again, excluding the top 1 percent).

Under Biden, Americans are better off in other ways, too. The Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University reports that the poverty rate, which reached 16.1 percent in December 2020, fell sharply under Biden to 14.1 percent by May 2022. It’s the same story on health care coverage: The Department of Health and Human Services reported that from late 2020 to early 2022, the percentage of uninsured Americans fell from 14.5 percent to 11.8 percent among adults (ages 18 to 64) and from 6.4 percent to 3.7 percent among children, both record lows.

If not for the pandemic and the policies required to address it, inflation would be modest—and but for the inflation, Biden would have one of the best records of any postwar president (at least thus far).

Imagine how Donald Trump would brag if he could tout record job creation, record low poverty, and record health insurance coverage—not to mention wealth gains and wage and salary gains that kept up with inflation. That’s a message that Democrats should carry into the fall campaigns.

ROBERT J. SHAPIRO
Follow Robert on Twitter @robshapiro. Robert J. Shapiro, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is the chairman of Sonecon and a Senior Fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He previously served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under Bill Clinton and advised senior members of the Obama administration on economic policy.More by Robert J. Shapiro

The most productive 'gerontocracy' ever

John Stoehr
August 20, 2022

Joe Biden (AFP)

The Los Angeles Times reported the results of a new survey that found that most Californians would prefer neither the current president nor the former president reruns for office in 2024.

The LA Times poll followed similar polling in July by Gallup, Politico and others. Each found much the same thing. Voters thought the old dudes were old. They’d had a good run. Let’s see some new faces.

These polls were silly.

The likelihood of voters maintaining that opinion two years from now is approximately 0 percent. Joe Biden said as much when he pointed out, correctly, that if us oldies fight again, I’ma win it all over. More enduring than any survey is the incumbent’s built-in advantage.

But why did pollsters ask that particular question? For one thing, it gets attention. It makes for some great headlines. For another, in July, Biden’s job approval was – to put a fine a point on it – in the shitter. His legislative agenda had stalled. Inflation was soaring. The right-wing media was hammering him. The future looked bad.

His polling was so low (37.5 percent), the punditariat started writing his obituary. The press corps reported on whether someone else should lead. This inspired pollsters to see what voters thought, which in turn justified what the pundits and reporters were thinking.

Then there’s the matter of Biden’s age.

READ MORE: Journalist to ‘ageist’ pundits: Stop calling Joe Biden ‘too old’

Joe Biden is the oldest president we’ve had. If he runs and wins again, he’ll be in his eighties. (Some of us remember Ronald Reagan and how he faded while in office in front of our eyes.) So there is a legitimate reason to ask people whether they’d rather see others run in 2024.

It’s no coincidence, however, that pollsters asked around the same time that Biden’s job approval rating was at its nadir. Implicit in the question was a more delicate question: was the president too old to be president? Is age preventing him from getting the job done?

The question of Biden’s age dovetails with a left-wing talking point, which is that the leadership of the Democratic Party is too old.

Biden is 79. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 82. Her lieutenants Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn are 83 and 82, respectively. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is 71. His No. 2, Dick Durbin, is 77.

This “gerontocracy” talking point has been lingering in the air since at least the 2016 Democratic primary, maybe earlier, when the left-wing had its greatest purchase on the popular imagination. It surged back this summer when Biden’s multitrillion dollar agenda seemed dead due to conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (age 74).

Many on the left, even some liberals, took the left-wing talking point more seriously. Maybe a change of party leadership really was in order. We’ll never achieve transformational change, some thought, with a coterie of milquetoast geriatrics too feeble to fight for it.

But just when the left-wing was right, it was wrong.

Lo and behold!

The 117th Congress is nearly evenly split. Even so, it has become, in less than a month, the most productive Congress in recent memory.

It passed, and the president has signed, legislation that supports innovation and competition (the CHIPS Act), that helps sick veterans (the PACT Act) and that puts controls on gun sales for the first time in more than a decade. (There is also promising movement toward codifying gay marriage and reforming the Electoral Count Act.)

Then there’s the whopper – the Inflation Reduction Act. That, along with previous spending measures, amounts to “a nearly $3.5 trillion agenda,” Politico reported. “The scope of the issues addressed is notable: the pandemic and its economic fallout, highways, bridges, broadband, rail, manufacturing, science, prescription drug prices, health insurance, climate change, deficit reduction and tax equity:"
We once noted that the mismatch between the size of Biden’s ambitions and his margins in Congress made it seem like he was trying to pass a rhinoceros through a garden hose. It ended up being more like a pony, but it’s still pretty impressive.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas fell to under $4, which in turn led to 0 percent inflation in July. (It’s 8.5 percent overall.) The jobs market is still running hot – about 528,000 added in July. Biden ordered the assassination of Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 (after Bin Laden), removing some of the stink of the chaotic Afghan withdrawal. The president led the world’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Lo and behold!

Biden’s approval rose three points over 30 days.

Lacking chances to win

Such overwhelming productivity in a Congress that has a dime’s worth of difference between the number of Republicans and Democrats returns us to the question: Does advanced age prevent the president and the Democrats from getting the job done?

Clearly not.

So we probably won’t see much more polling on whether Americans want to see Biden run in two years. His soft numbers were mostly from disillusioned Democrats. Winning changes minds quick.

But we will see more of the “gerontocracy” talking point.

It’s deathless.

It’s an article of faith for some progressives. Advantaged age, their thinking goes, is proportional to poor performance. The older you are, the less effective you are. The less effective you are, the weaker you are ideologically. The weaker you are ideologically, the more you and your party end in defeat – despite all evidence to the contrary.

To be sure, the “gerontocracy” talking point seemed correct when the Democrats were losing. If the olds would just step aside and let a younger progressive generation take over, we’d finally see victory.

But that confuses the one true religion with opportunity.

The Democrats were never lacking in ideological conviction. What they were lacking were chances to win. Fortunately for them, and for the country, that moment finally arrived. The Democrats seized it.

READ MORE: Joe Biden in 2024? More evidence of regime change

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

A Young Jewish Girl Protected Books with Her Life at Auschwitz. Today, an Anne Frank Book Is in Limbo at a Texas School District

August 18, 2022 by Dorian de Wind 

I believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both. —Ellie Wiesel in his memoir, “Night.”

I am hoping to share with our readers my thoughts on Antonio Iturbe’s remarkable story of an incredibly brave, young Jewish girl who risked her life at Auschwitz “to keep alive the magic of books during the Holocaust.”

In “The Librarian of Auschwitz,” Dita Kraus – then only fourteen – imprisoned with her father and mother at the Auschwitz death camp, becomes the secret custodian, “librarian,” for eight precious books that have been clandestinely smuggled into the camp at great risk to the prisoners.

But first I want to finish reading the memoir of that young girl, Dita Kraus, now a young 93.

In her memoir, “A Delayed Life,” Kraus briefly recalls her stint as “the librarian of the smallest library in the world,” which, according to Kraus’ memory, constituted of “twelve or so books.”

Whether eight or twelve, those books – some with missing pages, some held together by a few threads, most of them badly worn and stained — were a source of hope, diversion, enlightenment, even fleeting happiness for the children of the Kinderblock (children’s block), most of whom were destined to be murdered in the gas chambers a few months later.

One of the books in the Auschwitz library is “(The Adventures of) the Good Soldier Švejk” which Blockältester (head of the Kinderblock) Alfred Hirsch feels is inappropriate to be in the library because “it contained scandalous opinions about politics and religion, and more than dubious moral situations.”

At Dita Kraus’ insistence, Hirsch relents, and the book becomes part of the library.

In his first chapter, Iturbe makes the following foreboding observation about the tiny library:

These items, so dangerous that their mere possession is a death sentence, cannot be fired, nor do they have a sharp point, a blade or a heavy end. These items, which the relentless guards of the Reich fear so much, are nothing more than books: old, unbound, with missing pages and in tatters. The Nazis ban them, hunt them down.

Iturbe continues in a historical and yet prescient way:

Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants and oppressors, whatever their ideology – whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law – have had one thing in common: The vicious persecution of the written word.

“Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think,” he writes.

While book purges and the banning of books from schools and libraries, even book burnings, are making an increasingly ominous appearance in the U.S, two recent “incidents” made this writer think of Iturbe’s book.

I must, however, emphasize that this piece is in no way intended to draw any parallels to the horrors of the Holocaust. Nothing that has occurred since then can even approach the unfathomable atrocities of that period. If anything, it should illustrate how some men and women at a Nazi deathcamp were willing to risk their lives to protect the written word while, today, some are trying to banish the words they don’t agree with.

Hopefully the reader will understand why the following two incidents made me reflect on “The Librarian of Auschwitz.”

At a July 19 meeting of the Louisiana Livingston Parish Library Board of Control, members were asked to look into books with “inappropriate” content.

The list of eight books (emphasis mine) with such alleged content includes “It Feels Good To Be Yourself,” a children’s picture book about a trans girl.

More recently, the Times of Israel reported that a suburban Fort Worth school district “has ordered its librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year.”

The Times notes that this is “the latest in a string of book removals being implemented at schools at the behest of conservative activist parents and school board members who are challenging a slew of texts on grounds ranging from their LGBT-friendly content to their supposed connections to ‘critical race theory.'” “Some of these challenges have included books with Jewish themes,” the Times of Israel adds.

Forty-two books in total were removed from school shelves. Three or four times the total number of books at the Kinderblock library.

The 2019 graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s famous diary was called by the New York Times “so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the ‘Diary’ in classrooms and among younger readers.”

Ellie Wiesel is right, “Some [books] invite sorrow, others joy, some both.”

However, it is a disturbing sign of the times that, increasingly, books seem to also invite intolerance and small-mindedness.

CODA: While the headline of the Times of Israel piece reads, “Adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary banned by Texas school district,” other sources, such as Snopes, report that such is not totally accurate.

Snopes quotes a statement by the Superintendent of the Keller Independent School District which states in part:

All of the books on the list were challenged by parents and community members for various reasons, and District officials considered these concerns through the previous review process. With a new policy and new guidelines in place, these titles will simply once again be reviewed through the lens of this new policy.
::
If the books pass the new standards, as determined by reviews conducted in coordination with campus administration and librarians, the books will be promptly returned to shelves…We anticipate that books like the Bible, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, and other titles will be on shelves very soon. (Please note that more than 50 copies of the Diary of Anne Frank have remained in circulation; only the graphic novel edition was previously challenged, and is, thus, under review again.) It is important to be clear about this point – regardless of headlines or social media stories, none of the books under re-evaluation were banned.

Dorian de Wind

The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.

themoderatevoice.com

Why are bigger animals more energy-efficient? A new answer to a centuries-old biological puzzle
The Conversation
August 20, 2022

An African elephant in Botswana (Shutterstock.com)

If you think about “unravelling the mysteries of the universe”, you probably think of physics: astronomers peering through telescopes at distant galaxies, or experimenters smashing particles to smithereens at the Large Hadron Collider.

When biologists try to unravel deep mysteries of life, we too tend to reach for physics. But our new research, published in Science, shows physics may not always have the answers to questions of biology.

For centuries scientists have asked why, kilo for kilo, large animals burn less energy and require less food than small ones. Why does a tiny shrew need to consume as much as three times its body weight in food each day, while an enormous baleen whale can get by on a daily diet of just 5-30% of its body weight in krill?

While previous efforts to explain this relationship have relied on physics and geometry, we believe the real answer is evolutionary. This relationship is what maximizes an animal’s ability to produce offspring.

How much do physical constraints shape life?

The earliest explanation for the disproportionate relationship between metabolism and size was proposed nearly 200 years ago.

In 1837, French scientists Pierre Sarrus and Jean-François Rameaux argued energy metabolism should scale with surface area, rather than body mass or volume. This is because metabolism produces heat, and the amount of heat an animal can dissipate depends on its surface area.

In the 185 years since Sarrus and Rameaux’s presentation, numerous alternative explanations for the observed scaling of metabolism have been proposed.

Arguably the most famous of these was published by US researchers Geoff West, Jim Brown and Brian Enquist in 1997. They proposed a model describing the physical transport of essential materials through networks of branching tubes, like the circulatory system.

They argued their model offers “a theoretical, mechanistic basis for understanding the central role of body size in all aspects of biology”.

These two models are philosophically similar. Like numerous other approaches put forward over the past century, they try to explain biological patterns by invoking physical and geometric constraints.

Evolution finds a way

Living organisms cannot defy the laws of physics. Yet evolution has proven to be remarkably good at finding ways to overcome physical and geometric constraints.

In our new research, we decided to see what happened to the relationship between metabolic rate and size if we ignored physical and geometric constraints like these.

So we developed a mathematical model of how animals use energy over their lifetimes. In our model, animals devote energy to growth early in their lives and then in adulthood devote increasing amounts of energy to reproduction.


Animals allocate more energy to reproduction after they reach maturity.
Craig White

We used the model to determine what characteristics of animals result in the greatest amount of reproduction over their lifetimes – after all, from an evolutionary point of view reproduction is the main game.

We found that the animals that are predicted to be most successful at reproducing are those that exhibit precisely the kind of disproportionate scaling of metabolism with size that we see in real life!

This finding suggests disproportionate metabolic scaling is not an inevitable consequence of physical or geometric constraints. Instead, natural selection produces this scaling because it is advantageous for lifetime reproduction.

The unexplored wilderness

In the famous words of Russian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution”.

Our finding that disproportionate scaling of metabolism can arise even without physical constraints suggests we have been looking in the wrong place for explanations.

Physical constraints may be the principal drivers of biological patterns less often than has been thought. The possibilities available to evolution are broader than we appreciate.

Why have we historically been so willing to invoke physical constraints to explain biology? Perhaps because we are more comfortable in the safe refuge of seemingly universal physical explanations than in the relatively unexplored biological wilderness of evolutionary explanations.

Craig White, Professor and Head, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University and Dustin Marshall, Professor, Marine Evolutionary Ecology, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

FLORIDA
Manatee death toll in past dozen years equals current population

2022/8/21 
© Orlando Sentinel

Manatees face mounting threats from starvation, red tide, boat strikes and others. 

- Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/TNS

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida’s 7,444 recorded manatees deaths in the last dozen years nearly matches the number thought to be surviving today.

In 2010, state officials tallied 766 mortalities, topping 500 in a year for the first time since records began nearly 50 years ago. Since then, most years have seen counts above 500, including last year’s record 1,101.

So far this year, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission has reported 661 deaths, which already marks the fourth deadliest year on record.

Patrick Rose, Save the Manatee Club executive director, said the acceleration of mortality statistics is disturbing in light of the manatee’s deadly foes that remain far from solved: cold vulnerability, lethal red tides, boat strikes and starvation.

While governments are stepping up to restore environments that manatees depend on, Florida’s growth promises to undo gains, Rose said.

“We are going to see more and more adverse consequences to our aquatic ecosystems,’ he said. “They are all coming together.”

Having not done a hard count for many years, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission currently estimates the state’s manatee population is a minimum of 7,520 animals.

The most watched indicator now for the species’ well-being is the extent of seagrass growth, which is most vigorous from May through this month.

The St. Johns River Water Management District, a regional state agency that regulates and monitors water resources of Central and North Florida, recently finished its summer mapping of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon along the state’s east coast.

Encompassing a complex of water bodies from Volusia to Martin counties, the Central Florida portion has experienced a prolonged biological collapse from pollution, resulting in an extermination of once-lush seagrass that manatees depend on as a primary food source.

That depletion of vegetation triggered mass deaths in Brevard County and an emergency response by the state’s wildlife agency, feeding 100 tons of lettuce to manatees.

Data from the mapping, which examines established locations year after year, is not yet finalized, said Chuck Jacoby, a lead scientist at the water district.

Preliminary results suggest some glimmers of hope for recovery of seagrass beds, Jacoby said, especially in shallow waters where more sunlight can penetrate to nourish growth.

Jacoby said that just as it took years of degradation to bring about the lagoon’s current condition, reviving the coastal system will require sustained effort.

He said the recent, modest signs of seagrass rebound may be linked in part to the lagoon’s relatively clear waters this summer. The water district measures the footprint of where seagrass is present and the density or cover within the footprint.

“I think with multiple years of good water clarity, we would potentially see a step up in the footprint and the cover, Jacoby said. “One year is not going to get you there. Two years is helpful. Three to five would maybe give us some confidence to say this is a substantial change.”

While waiting years for significant improvement in manatee habitat, the status quo for the species is grimmer than “the bare numbers” reveal, said Elise Pautler Bennett, Florida director and senior attorney for the Center For Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

“The true impact on the manatee population is likely even greater than the shocking death toll we’re seeing,” Bennett said. “For every recorded death, there are an unknown number of manatees who are sick or have died and simply not been found. This includes breeding-aged females who have died or had reduced reproductive capacity, and also orphaned manatees.”

Rose said the state is ramping up environmental restoration and abilities to respond to stricken manatees, but the overall effort is a fraction of what’s needed.

“They are all helping to make some difference to help make us feel better,” Rose said. “The real true hope is we have to improve the water quality.”

To pull that off, he said, will require a commitment on par with what the nation has undertaken to review the Everglades and Chesapeake Bay.

“Otherwise , we are going to have to keep hoping and praying,” Rose said.