Articles by: admin

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

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.

A recent article in MIT Technology Review by James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart is one of the latest efforts to do so. Unusually, the authors start from the query level and work upwards to the macro. A simple text query doesn’t make many demands—”about what it takes to ride six feet on an e-bike, or run a microwave for one-tenth of a second,” in O’Donnell and Crownhart’s words. Generating a simple image takes about two to four times that. A reasonably high-definition video five seconds in length requires lots more: the equivalent of “riding 38 miles on an e-bike, or running a microwave for over an hour.”

These numbers add up. The authors offer the example of using AI to launch a charity run, involving querying about how best to fundraise, generating a flyer, and producing a five-second video for posting to Instagram. That would “use about 2.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to ride over 100 miles on an e-bike (or around 10 miles in the average electric vehicle) or run the microwave for over three and a half hours.” And that’s just one person with one modest task.
At the aggregate level, the sums get enormous. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory estimated that in 2024, US data centers of all kinds used enough electricity to power Thailand for a year. AI alone accounted for about a quarter to a third of that total—enough to power more than 7.2 million US homes for a year. Before ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, AI usage was next to nothing.

This AI-driven onset of rapid electricity demand growth follows years of relative flatness. Data centers proliferated, but got more efficient, resulting in little increase in energy demand. That’s changing radically. On current trends, by 2028, AI alone will use enough electricity to power nearly a quarter of US households.

And since the major AI companies are negotiating favorable electricity deals, residential customers may wind up footing a large share of increased construction and generation costs. An investigation by the Virginia legislature reports that residential customers could see their bills rise by as much as $450 a year because of this cost-shifting. Electricity demand in the state, one of the world’s leading data center locations, is likely to double over the next decade because of demand from AI servers. That’s a major change from the previous 15 years, when there was little growth in demand for juice. And while these data centers are hulking and expensive, once constructed, they generate little employment. Building one can generate 1,500 jobs over 12 to 18 months, but after that, a typical facility employs just 50 workers.

Reflecting on these numbers prompted us to look over some stats on electricity. Nationally, as the graph below shows, electricity production, as measured by the Federal Reserve’s industrial production series, was, like Virginia’s, virtually unchanged between 2006 and 2020—and 2024, for that matter. (We’re using five-year intervals in the graphs because yearly numbers are quite volatile.) It’s begun to rise—up around 2% a year since 2023, compare to an average annual rate of 0.1% between 2000 and 2023, and if the projections are to be believed it’s only the beginning.

And costs, graph below, are also starting to rise. Measured by the CPI, electricity prices have risen more rapidly over the last five years than at any time since the early 1980s. Electricity prices also surged between 2006 and 2010, driven by sharp increases in natural gas prices, but not by fresh demand. They eased, along with natural gas prices, as the fracking boom kicked in. They’ve been rising again, up over 10% at an annualized rate in late spring and early summer.

Mention of natural gas brings up the topic of energy sources for electricity generation. These have changed enormously over the last few decades. (Graph below) For much of the 20th century, half or more of our electricity was generated from coal; in 1988, 57% was. From there, coal’s share began a long decline; so far this year, it’s averaged 16%, up a point from last year all-time low. (Coal may be filling some of that AI-increased demand.) Over the same period, natural gas went from 10% to 38%—and renewables (geothermal, solar, wind) went from under 1% to 19% (3 percentage points more than coal).

That growth in renewables is driven by cost, not wokeness. Graphed on p. 7 are the costs of various energy sources as estimated by Lazard. (They present ranges; the graph shows the means of those ranges.) Onshore wind installations are 22% cheaper than gas and 50% cheaper than coal. Individual solar facilities on houses and industrial sites aren’t so cheap, but large-scale installations managed by utilities are 26% cheaper than gas-fired generating facilities and 52% cheaper than coal.

These are not transient developments. In the 2020 edition of its World Energy Outlook the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that solar power “is now the cheapest source of electricity in history.” Wind’s advantage isn’t as dramatic, but it’s real—and utilities are acting on these cost comparisons. Again, according to the IEA, this its Global Energy Review 2025 (which has replaced the World Energy Outlook), renewables “made up almost three-quarters of the overall increase in power generation” in 2024, with solar in the lead. Add nuclear and hydro and you approach four-fifths. Fossil fuels accounted for almost all of the remaining fifth, well below their existing share.

Fossil fuels are on the way out. Over the longer term, the IEA projects that global oil demand growth will slow into a peak in 2030, and begin declining thereafter, and what increase in demand there is likely to be will be for petrochemicals, not energy. (Projections like these have led the Trump administration to threaten to withdraw from the IEA.) Natural gas is another story—demand for it, according to McKinsey, is projected to grow over the next decade, the only fossil fuel to do so after 2030, to a peak around 2037 and then flatline thereafter. While policies could accelerate or retard the post-fossil transition, the relative costs of the energy sources are doing much of the transformative work.

Sadly, US policy is paddling against this current. As we were writing this, news came in that the Trump administration was intensifying its previously declared war on windmills, assembling a joint task force staffed by six cabinet agencies to put an end to what the president sees as an ugly (tastes differ) and expensive (it’s not) energy source. (He also hates solar, but he’s carrying on that war with less intensity for now.) Instead, his administration is encouraging utilities to turn to more expensive options like gas and coal. Even if you’re a skeptic on climate change, this emphasis makes little economic sense.

by admin· · 0 comments · Comments & Context

Erika McEntarfer in, mostly, her own words

The rust belt resonates with labor historians, but we generally don’t use the term. Years ago our friend Kim Hill, then at the Center for Automotive Research, CAR, in Ann Arbor, suggested it denigrates the progress being made in many of those communities, asking if we had visited Ann Arbor recently. We hadn’t, and respect his opinion.

But Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, described the region where she grew up in western New York as the rust belt in a recent talk, sponsored by the Levy Institute, on the importance of official data. Her community was “struggling to find its way economically…with unemployment very high and jobs very scarce.”

She spoke at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium, where she had taken her first economics class as an undergraduate. Economics was not her intended field, and she admitted she had thought it had “something to do with the stock market.”

But that class changed her life, giving her “the tools to understand the things in the world that have really puzzled me…. I honestly didn’t realize…how much economic disparity exists in this country…how some regions were prospering and gaining wealth right alongside places that were struggling.” Instead of a field focused on investment practices, she found economics to be a “discipline focused on questions of prosperity, economic growth and inequality. I was sold. I decided that I would become an economist.”

Originally intent on teaching, she turned down an academic job when she became “fascinated by a startup research lab at Census,” that was working to leverage recent gains in computer power that would allow extant administrative data to be reworked for use in federal statistics. Her advisor may have thought her mad for passing on academia, but she joined Census in 2002 after receiving her PhD from the University of Virginia. There she “found the mission of putting data in the hands of people who can use it to improve their communities and make their lives better, more and more gratifying.” Her team’s research was being used in economic development planning, disaster relief, and placing students in good jobs. “If you want to leave the world a better place than you found it, one path to doing so is serving the American people and trying to make life here better for everyone in big ways and small.”

She spent a year as labor economist at the White’s House’s Council of Economic Advisors. The council was founded in 1947 to provide “objective and non-partisan advice and perspectives to the President and senior White House officials on economic research, policy and the state of the economy.” It’s standard practice for the BLS commissioner to brief the council on the upcoming employment report on the Thursday afternoon preceding its release, and Erika reports during her tenure council members “ate way too much chocolate and pizza [as they] stayed up way too late wordsmithing the blog” that would be posted the next day following the release of the payroll report. “…Ultimately, our job was to give the President a narrative that he could use to inform the American public, and really the world, about what was happening in the US economy.”

When she joined the council in 2022, inflation was peaking, the labor market was still struggling, economic sentiment remained grim, and every newspaper was forecasting a recession. Importantly, the council used the monthly job reports as they are intended to be used, as warnings of a potential cycle change. But instead of the predicted recession, at that time the labor market began to recover.

In 2023, when the term of prior BLS commissioner William Beach was ending, McEntarfer was asked to submit an application. To her surprise she received the nomination. (By the way, Beach, a Trump appointee, is working across party lines. He has been outspoken about McEntarfer’s dismissal, and characterized an economic explanation made by one of Trump’s top advisors on employment revisions as “the strangest thing in the world.” It’s worth a look!)

Although McEntarfer dreaded the confirmation process, through her work on a number of committees she was “known among officials of both parties as a non-partisan government economist” and was “confirmed faster than any BLS nominee in recent history.” JD Vance and Marco Rubio were among an unusual thirty-eight Republicans who supported her nomination in the eighty-six to eight confirmation vote.

McEntarfer arrived at the Bureau of Labor Statistics with plans to extend the work she had done at Census to modernize data processes, and, like Erica Groshen, also a former BLS commissioner, was dedicated to getting accurate labor data out more quickly. For example, with proper funding the monthly payroll reports could be benchmarked each quarter, which would narrow the size of the benchmarks and tone down the leadup to the currently annual benchmark. By the way, that chatter is a new thing. We’ve followed the benchmarks since 1997, and only in the last few years have they become such a controversial event.

The public needs to be better educated about the BLS’s priorities. Despite a full page of filing instructions, including electronically, for businesses participating in the monthly employment survey, we have heard from a reliable source that following McEntarfer’s dismissal a national broadcaster reported response forms are still faxed to the BLS. Some small operations may use a fax, but large firms are using “big electronic collection systems.”

These misconceptions about BLS processes, economic narratives really, are fueling the push to replace official BLS data with data scraped from the private sector. When this came up in the Q&A, McEntarfer called private-sector data a great compliment to BLS data, adding that some of the biggest supporters of the established BLS reports are the very people producing private-sector databases. Without a comparative standing series, the reliability of their own work is in question. Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, is persuasive on the complementary nature of the different reports, and Levy’s Pavlina Tchernava, who participated in McEntarfer’s talk, provided additional background.

McEntarfer also noted the private data sector can be very expensive, which of course would exclude smaller institutes.

As we mentioned above, it’s standard practice for BLS staff to go over each upcoming employment report with the current administration’s Council of Economic Advisors on the Thursday afternoon prior to Friday’s release of the data.*

Recounting August 1st, the day of her dismissal, McEntarfer told her audience that when she spoke with the council on Thursday, and with the Secretary of Labor on Friday morning, both prior to the release of the report, they asked “really normal questions,” about the revisions. The revisions are caused by late responders, and one question concerned a possible skew by size of firm as the second and third closings, the BLS term for the process, were collected. Many of us have wondered about that, but apparently it’s a broad trend.

While the size of the revisions were unusual, they were not “without precedent.” In her discussions with the council and secretary, McEntarfer noted revisions can signal a turn in the cycle, such as when the “labor market slows suddenly…at the start of a recession,” but suggested immigration policy and tariff uncertainty may have put pressure on hiring in the spring, so the markdowns to May and June job gains “didn’t necessarily mean” the economy was going into recession.

Saying, “let’s face it, this isn’t the kind of news any administration wants to hear,” she described a room full of “long faces.” But when she asked the council for further questions there were none, so they all “moved on.”

Following those meetings McEntarfer had no sense anyway was wrong. When she received an email from a reporter asking her if it were true Trump had just fired her, her first thought was no. “[This] wasn’t the first time Trump had accused the Bureau Labor Statistics of cooking the books…. I thought it was impossible because firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step… an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability.”

Then she noticed an earlier email she had missed: “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of Labor Statistics is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

The 2,000 BLS employers, down from 2,5000 a few years ago, are civil servants. All except one, that is, the commissioner who is appointed for a fixed four-year term and confirmed by the senate. In a discussion with Steve Odland of the Conference Board, Erica Groshen made it clear that the fixed term distinguishes those serving at the “pleasure of the president,” and advocating for a political agenda, from an appointee with the technical skills needed to administer an agency whose work we all, including Congress, have deemed a necessary public good.

I doubt anyone in the audience expected McEntarfer to be humorous at this point in her talk, but she was, saying just as she saw the email from the presidential personnel office, her phone “exploded.” Of course all the major networks were calling, and so was her mother who had gotten a call from George Stephanopoulos who was trying to reach Erika. In her words, she had always been careful not to bore her family with the details of her wonky job, but now the whole world was talking about it.

In her nationwide travels, Erika had discovered that many have never heard of the BLS, or know that its commissioner is approved by the Senate. In her mind, “That’s really how it should be. You should get to live in a country where you do not have to know who the chief statisticians are, and worry that they are okay.”

McEntarfer’s “best and dearest hope” is that the administration’s interference will end with her firing, and suggested we study what happened in countries like Greece and Turkey when economic reports were manipulated. For example, the Argentinian government went after private sector vendors who tried to replicate missing data. Of course borrowing rates went up; anyone following our deficit knows we cannot afford that.

She called that a list we don’t want to join, and we’ll add there’s another unfortunate crew no one wants to be part of, the presidents who attempted to pressure the BLS to rig their data: The current president’s name is now up there with Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. History may not be kind.

McEntarfer vouched for the “accuracy and independence of the work of the agency up until the moment I was fired, and was unwilling “speculate” about the plans of the current administration. She did tell her listeners that she has worked with acting commissioner William Wiatrowski for eighteen months, calling him among the “finest public servants” she has known.

Despite the uncertainty of the current moment, (list of senior vacancies here) McEntarfer believes the damage to the BLS can be repaired, and knows that “those still within the agency have not stopped working on behalf of the American public.” McEntarfer read from a statement sent to the press around the time of her dismissal by BLS employees anonymously, the only way they can speak out these days. The memo noted that commissioners don’t “cook,” the number – they don’t even see them until they are complete. We’ll add that’s something that, oddly, the Secretary of Labor may not understand.

That memo suggested that the “real goal is to discredit independent statistics, slash budgets and [force] federal workers into silence. But BLS staff will not be intimidated. We will publish reliable data, no matter how inconvenient the results. The numbers will remain accurate and nonpartisan, and if that ever changes, the professionals will tell you.”

Measured, truthful, and confident, Erika spent her youth in the deindustrialized landscape, and made her career plans when she recognized a way to improve outcomes with accurate data. In closing she said she hoped it was clear how much she loved being a public servant, that she has devoted her entire career to helping people make better policy choices through reliable data, and “sincerely wishes” her time at the BLS had not been cut short.

Her career is far from over, and we look forward to her next steps.

* Data point: That’s generally the first Friday of the month, but the formula specifies the third Friday following the end of the survey week, which includes the 12th of the month, so is sometimes pushed back by the calendar.

Photo credit, Elkhart Indiana, a bellwether of manufacturing activity, in the rain. Philippa Dunne

by admin· · 0 comments · Uncategorized

The BLS over time: “A tin can tied to my coat tail”


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!

Since their founding, the BLS has published more than a thousand monthly employment reports, and this is the first time a commissioner has been fired directly after the release of one of those reports.

There have been accusation of data manipulation, some apparently substantiated, and there is one suspect dismissal that was cloaked as a retirement-age requirement.

Leading into the 1932 election, President Herbert Hoover announced that the Great Depression was almost over, based on the fact that the employment rate had grown by 4% in the previous month. Francis Perkins, who was soon to become President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, pointed out that his statement was inaccurate, the jump was caused by seasonal Christmas hiring, not permanent jobs, something she believed Hoover would have understood on his own. And Ethelbert Stewart, then BLS chief, had told Hoover this. Hoover continued to make the claim, as did his Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak, and the press approached Stewart for his opinion. He was direct in his criticism, which Doak tried to refute, and then gave Stewart a public ” tongue-lashing for daring to contradict his chief.”

Although details of Stewart’s departure from the BLS are somewhat unclear, Time reported under the lede, “Last week the Government’s foremost expert on joblessness found himself jobless,” that although Stewart was supposedly forced into retirement by his age, many disputed that. Stewart himself rejected the term “retired,” adding, “Don’t put it that way. I’ve had a tin can tied to the end of my coat tail.”

In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon ordered the BLS statistician who pointed out that a fall in the unemployment rate from 6.2% to 5.6% was likely caused by a “statistical quirk” be identified, and fired. And in the coming months when the assistant commissioner Harold Goldstein pointed out that one decline in the unemployment rate was “marginally significant,” and another “sort of mixed,” Nixon cancelled the briefings that traditionally followed the release of the monthly jobs report. Rumor has it that Senator William Proxmire, known as a critic of wasteful government spending, requested that the Bureau report directly to the Joint Economic Committee on which he served so they could have discussions free of political spin.

Nixon also believed the BLS included a “Jewish Cabal” out to get him, which led to the “Nixon Jew count,” where H.R. Haldeman supervised an investigation into BLS employees with “Jewish-sounding names.” In what Timothy Noah once described as the “last known act of official anti-Semitism conducted by the United States government,” thirteen employees identified as Jewish were moved into positions that did not involve compiling the politically sensitive employment reports.

It’s easy to think BLS staff, and Dr. McEntarfer herself, were exhibiting the fearlessness Wright was committed to, but releasing and correcting data is just what the BLS does. Years ago, an economist there told us it is indeed painful to release unusually large benchmarks, but “we do it anyway.”

Looking back to the early days of the BLS, there’s a good bit of colorful language. Amid the ongoing debate concerning founding a bureau that concentrated only on the world of work, one senator argued, “A great deal of public attention in and out of Congress has been given to the American hog and the American steer. I submit, Mr. Chairman, that it is time to give more attention to the American man.”

Perhaps that should have been man and woman, and within its first three years the BLS published a study of woman working in “manufactories” in big cities.

Commissioner Wright’s first annual report provided information on the character and potential causes of industrial depressions in a global context.

Here’s a timeline of the development of the many data sets, and we’ve put together some highlights.

Publications in the 1880s included the first consumer expenditure survey, and in the next decade the BLS looked into the effect of tariffs on wages and prices, and investigated the effects of machinery on employment, production and productivity in Hand and Machine Labor.

Later BLS added producer and consumer price indexes, industrial accidents, and in 1915 began their monthly surveys of employment and payrolls, now the Current Employment Statistics program. The first Monthly Labor Review was published that year, and the BLS signed cooperative information agreements with the states the following year.

BLS’s expertise is long-standing. By the 1940s they were training international economists and statisticians, and in 1959 they set up the Household Survey, now officially known as the Current Population Survey. Soon after they conducted comparative studies of international unemployment rates, and of federal and private-sector compensation.

In the 1960s, BLS began recording occupational injuries and illness, and the first job openings reports were produced. The full JOLTS report would be later.

Data on workers with disabilities appeared in 2009, on green jobs in 2012, and that same year BLS Tweeted for the first time!

During the covid pandemic BLS added questions about job-site respiratory illnesses, and began tracking much-needed data on indigenous populations in 2022. That was long in the making. BLS is now using QCEW data to identify populations facing violent weather events.

True to their mission of accurate impartial investigations of labor conditions, BLS established the Business Research Advisory Council and the Labor Research Advisory Board in 1947. In 2000 the BLS, together with the Bureau of Economic Analysis, founded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, in 2007 the long-standing labor advisory board was renamed the Data Users Advisory Council, and in 2010 the BLS put together the Technical Advisory Committee.

All of these committees, made up of experienced and unpaid professionals in economics and related fields, were disbanded by President Trump in late March.

The boards were established to monitor data quality, evaluate BLS methodologies, and suggest improvements. This work was intended to be ongoing—technology changes, and pressure from administrations varies—which made the statement that members had “fulfilled their mission,” as advisors to the BEA were told, downright humorous.

At the time, former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen commented that given the Committees’ mandate, “I would say that if an administration wanted to try to manipulate data, then they would not want these advisory committees to be around.”

The monthly payroll reports the BLS has published since their founding covered the Great Depression, all manner of lesser recessions, wars, and the effects of inflation spikes. Many of those reports were far worse than the limpid July report that caused Erika McEntarfer to lose her job. President Barack Obama had to accept huge monthly declines, and a -0.9% benchmark revision, multiples of average at the time. President Joe Biden was accused of having cooked the books when the unusually large benchmark revision to 2024 payrolls came out late last August, just two months before the election. (Of course, he was no longer the candidate, but if the BLS were tampering with the records to favor the Democrats, they were doing a lousy job.)

In her history of the BLS, Janet Norwood notes that many of the problems faced in the early days of the BLS are “unresolved to this day.” A major problem then and now is low and late response rates. As early as 1885 a state commissioner argued with appealing candor, “If questions are asked of five hundred men indiscriminately, and two hundred …give answer, those two hundred will not be average representatives of the whole five hundred. They will, on average, have more brains than the other three hundred. The very fact that they answer, while others do not, shows this.”

The revisions that sent President Trump to a place no has ever been before, firing an experienced commissioner because a report was not flattering to the current economy, are caused in large part by such late responses. Response rates have been declining for some time, and former Commissioner Groshen believes some of that decline has been driven by a loss of confidence in public data, and a growing disregard for public research. An inadequate budget also gets a nod. With the BLS’s current, nominal, budget slashed by eight-percent, BLS staff will probably be unable to follow up on particularly pesky sectors, like public education, as they once did.

Bureau of Labor Statistics employees have long argued that with proper funding they could update their data series in order to make them more timely and accurate. For example, the Department of Labor designed the weekly unemployment claims series as a administrative tool, which is why it can sometimes be misleading in gauging unemployment. The series includes a wealth of regional and demographic data that could be restructured as an economic indicator, a kind of early warning system, that would give policy makers notice on developing weakness they could then address, and those who want the 411 on national employment for market reasons would have more timely data as well.

The other is funding an update of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. As we often mention, QCEW covers 97% of the employment universe as defined in the establishment survey, but is released with a lag. We won’t have data for the first quarter of 2025 until early September. And recent budget cuts just pushed that forward from late August.

The decision to cut the BLS budget, and staff, was made by the current administration. When the administration disrupted the carefully crafted structure, including remote work, the BLS had put together to deal with the fact they were moving into a space 40% smaller than the one they had occupied, and budget cuts were announced, many analysts raised red flags suggesting these disruptions could lead to larger revisions in upcoming releases.

Correlation, of course, does not imply causation—we could be seeing big downward revisions because the labor market, driven by all the unknowns and supply disruptions, is weakening more than we knew. That would make the birth/death model too additive, as often happens in downturns, which the BLS took into account during the pandemic, hence the very small benchmarks in 2020 and 2021.

But that possibility doesn’t erase the question. How quickly will the administration’s actions cut into the quality of the BLS’s data, respected around the world as the gold standard, and crucial to our creditors?

by admin· · 0 comments · Comments & Context

How to Diversify Ecological Science

Karina A. Sanchez, Amanda J. Bevan Zientek, and Emily A. Holt just released their study of college students’ awareness of institutional, structural, and cultural racism and sexism in the field of ecology. The team, all part of the University of Northern Colorado’s department of biological sciences when the study was conducted, first had students fill out a five-question survey on their own perceptions of racism and sexism in the ecological sciences. The students then collected and analyzed data to evaluate patterns in different publications and data, identifying those that might be problematic, and considered how racism/sexism affected the field. Following this intervention, the students were resurveyed.

All fields of science are now addressing legacies of injustice that can shape who participates in a given field, research projects, and policy outcomes, but many focus on research labs, or are top-down administrative changes. The authors identified college classrooms as centers of social change around the world. Starting there, they intend their work to help fill the research gap on how inequities are being addressed in colleges and universities.

The lack of diversity in ecological science has long been a matter of concern. Some years ago, npj Biodiversity, a journal within Science, posted an editorial identifying biodiversity research as a science of crisis. Over the millennia that crisis has been driven by unsustainable exploitation, and changes made to our landscapes, both directly and via human-assisted migration of nonnative species that may become invasive. The editors detailed how overemphasis on the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and terrestrial ecosystems to the detriment of marine and freshwater ecosystems, drylands and other extreme habitats, all limit our understanding of interrelated forces, which in turn hampers our ability to improve outcomes. The editors also highlight the lasting impact of Darwin’s emphasis on competition among species. To them that has had a “tremendous, and to a considerable extent spurious,” effect on our understanding of evolutionary processes, perhaps especially our understanding of species co-exiting in diverse habitats. The “painfully consistent biases,” built into the ecological sciences also devalue the work of women, underrepresented minorities and indigenous peoples, as well as researchers from the Global South, all of whom have “unique knowledge” and views on how to proceed in our current crisis.

In their opening paragraphs, Sanchez, Bevan Zienek, and Holt note that efforts to reform medical sciences have intensified in part because social inequities in the field are so visible, and are now the focus extensive research. Ecological science has not had the benefits of this kind of intense scrutiny, and although the share of women has grown in higher education overall, in the ecological sciences, their focus here, there are persistent publication biases, as well as citation and funding imbalances, between men and women.

The authors note that “systems of oppression,” can affect study outcomes. For example, natural history museums tend to collect species with a slight overall bias to males among birds and mammals that can lead to significant disparities at the species level. In some cases just 27% of specimens are female, obviously a research issue. Further, habitats in underserved communities, as well as war-torn areas, are chronically under-sampled. The authors believe that systemic racism, gender bias, and colonialism have not only transformed ecosystems throughout the world, they continue to exacerbate unequal access to natural areas among marginalized communities.

We touch on much of this as reports come out. Two examples: biases toward the temperate north led to the short-sighted belief that only male birds sing, recently corrected by a team of female ornithologists who studied common ancestors of our migrating birds in Australasia where males and females were signing away.

A recent study by the venerable American Forests showed one can determine redlining practices used in the 1930s by forest canopies in our cities. The average canopy is 39%, running from 23% in formerly redlined communities, to 43% in primarily US-born white communities.

Sanchez and her team believe that although hiring of diversity officers and other administrative changes hold promise, they may get stuck in rhetoric with “minimal” long-term effects, and administrations are of course slow to change. Colleges have a long history of advancing civil rights, with women’s study programs advancing gender equality, and efforts to decolonize curricula and pedagogy picking up steam in the humanities and social sciences. But, again, science has lagged. The authors suggest that may be the fault of the narrative that tells us science is objective and value-neutral, and hence outside the realm of social justice.

The study included thirty-eight upper division undergraduates, primarily white, 68%, and female, 79%, with 16% Latino, 8% Asian, 5% multiracial, and 3% African-American participants. About 60% were continuing generation students, meaning at least one parent attended college. In the twelfth week of the sixteen-week semester, the students filled out a five-question open response survey, anonymously and without pay: who does ecology, are they aware of one prominent ecologist to whom they can personally relate, is the field racist, is it sexist, did European colonialism affect the field, and does it still? Two weeks later, the team introduced their intervention, designed to outline social justice issues in ecology, and identify demographic representation of field ecologists. Students worked in groups to identify under-representation and inequality in ecological data, including the nationalities of “parachute” scientists, those who drop into a developing country and complete data collection and analysis with no input from local scientists or the community. For example, in Indonesia forty percent of published studies of coral reefs included no local scientists.

Students were given plenty of time to research their topics, to discuss them fully, and to look for patterns, and decide if the patterns they discovered represented problems. When the intervention was completed, students were resurveyed using the same five questions.

And the responses had indeed changed. The share who believed anyone with interest could participate in the field dropped by 16%, and shares agreeing that ecology was influenced by sexist or racist rose. In this day and age we need to point out that the idea was not to force beliefs on the students, but to discover how exposure to different data changed their thinking. In fact, the authors were unsure if some students had wondered about racism and sexism in ecology, but didn’t feel safe sharing those feelings until the study project was complete. They also stressed that some students expressed an interest in promoting diversity in their own careers after the intervention, and explored possible routes in study groups. And to us their statements included greater nuance in the second survey.

Fun fact: For generations, Draw-a-Scientist studies produced a stereotypical white man in a lab coat from K-12 students, despite ongoing changes in science. Other interventions cited in Sanchez, Bevan Zientek, and Holt’s study helped students move beyond this stereotype. Instead of scientists being defined as “people who do experiments,” descriptions focused instead on traits like curiosity and specific interests. Sanchez et al. suggest this may help potential ecologists both relate to scientists and to see themselves as scientists. And incorporating topics like discrimination and oppression helps “disrupt the façade of neutrality in science,” helping students understand that ecology is “imbedded in humanism with all its biases.”

And, as you might guess, the authors sign off with an acknowledgement that this is one step, which they classify as a transformational approach, and many more are needed to build curricula focused on solutions, and to increase opportunities that will support a diverse scientific community.

The New York Botanical Garden has long included diverse scientists in their programming, including indigenous scientists who are guiding restoration efforts with their own practices.

If of interest, you can watch some webinars here.

Photographs: Field science projects are a great way to involved diverse students. Eel populations are in severe decline, and Bard College students, along students from the region, help catch, count and release the glass eels caught in the fyke net to monitor their levels. The glass eels you see in the second photograph just spent the last year drifting up on the currents from the Sargasso Sea.
Credit: Philippa Dunne

by admin· · 0 comments · Comments & Context

Lost Pages: Eroding our confidence in public data

The effects of a recent executive order purging advisory boards working with federal agencies include dismantling the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Technical Advisory Council, and Data Users Advisory Committee. Boards advising Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis were also dismissed.

These advisors are experts in their fields, with broad understanding of the BLS’s different series, and their strengths and idiosyncrasies. They have significant experience in sample design, modeling, analysis and interpretation of large structured and unstructured data sets, formulating survey questions, and accessibility. In addition, they advise on technicalities, and on changes in what data users need, and on new series that would be more relevant in our changing economy, and less relevant series that could be trimmed, especially important as the BLS is chronically underfunded. The TAC specifically excludes anyone subject to federal registration requirements covering lobbyists. Terms generally last two years, and board members provide their expertise and guidance for free.

We cribbed some of that text from the BLS’s page on the committees yesterday. Today that page is gone.

Of course, accurate data is critical both to policy makers striving for rational outcomes in our disjointed economy, and to investors. Neil Dutta recently highlighted the importance of our federal data, calling it the gold standard, and wondering what a glitch in one of our major economic reports would do to global markets. He’s far from the first analyst to do so.

In an interview with Politico’s Weekly Shift, former BLS commissioner Erica Groshen points out that if senior BLS leadership were to be suddenly serving at the “pleasure of the president,” that might make BLS statisticians afraid to point out data points they consider statistically unsound. And we’ll add that if it became known that the BLS had been politicized, that itself might rattle confidence, built as it is on a fragile structure.

There are always complaints, especially when the actual release throws egg on your forecast’s face. (Don’t tell anyone, but we’ll admit to guiltily checking the birth/death model on such mornings.) In the last decades the tenor of those complaints has become increasingly alarming, including accusations of outright fraud. When asked if the public would have a way of knowing if there were erroneous data, Dr. Groshen, with her usual candor, responded that in addition to ensuring that “every tax dollar is well spent,” by advising on most appropriate technologies, and allowing data users themselves to have a voice, the advisory boards provide transparency. “…if there were attempts to manipulate BLS in some way that was unprecedented, illegal [or] something inappropriate, it would be more obvious in the context of the give and take of an advisory committee than in many other ways.”

Over the years, to address legitimate complaints, say about lagged data, Dr. Groshen has promoted ways to restructure our statistical sources to provide more timely and granular data. Her widely supported suggestions include funding the Department of Labor to reframe the weekly UI claims reports to function as an economic indicator instead of the administrative record those reports were built to be, and to publish the full data set based on UI data, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, with a shorter lag. Despite the complaints, apparently there’s no money for that.

According to Dr. Groshen, in disbanding the TAC, we “lose one more means to counteract baseless accusations…one more means to communicate exactly what you did and why,” and to clarify questions. “I would say that if an administration wanted to try to manipulate data, then they would not want to have these advisory committees around.”

Business owners in the Capitol region are hiring uprooted federal workers, and offering perks, like free yoga classes, discounted degree programs, and medical care for their pets, acknowledging that the “federal workforce is a wildly important part of our economy.”

There will be no free yoga classes or any other form of enlightened self-interest that will offset the damage caused by the degradation of our public data sources. Come to think of it, on the first Friday of the month, instead of fielding calls from clients who suspect the employment report has been manipulated, we may all be wondering about that ourselves.

by admin· · 0 comments · Red Flags