It’s been a while since we looked at net investment in the US, and we weren’t surprised to learn that the basic story hasn’t changed. Private investment is only a bit ahead of depreciation, and public investment even less so. So far in 2022, net fixed investment by the private sector has been 2.1% of GDP, which is also its average so far for the decade. As the graph on below shows, that’s about half what it was from the 1960s through the 1980s and is only slightly above what it was in the 1940s, the decade when civilian investment was squeezed to supply war needs:

Low levels of net private investment aren’t driven by declines in gross investment, which has been pretty stable. Instead, the major reasons for the decline are a shift towards shorter-lived equipment and the immateriality of intellectual property (IP) and a shift away from buildings. From 1950–1999, net fixed private investment averaged 32% of gross; since 2000, it’s averaged 20%—and 16% since 2020. Every asset category has seen that shift. Net equipment investment went from 24% of gross from 1950–1999 to 15% since 2020. Even nonresidential structures aren’t being built for the ages; they went from 49% of gross to 16%. (Are they just building self-storage units these days?) And IP isn’t what it used to be either; its net went from 23% of gross in the earlier period to 16% in the most recent.

Residential net investment isn’t doing too great either: it went from an average of 2.8% of GDP from 1950 to 1999 to 1.7% in the 2020s. Unlike the mid-2000s housing bubble, which took net residential investment up to 3.8%, the highest since the post-World War II decade, the latest bubble took net housing investment up to just 1.9% of GDP last year. It’s fallen back to 1.4% in 2022. That’s not the way to meet a housing deficit estimated by Freddie Mac at 3.8 million units.

For the public sector, the decline in net investment has been more dramatic, falling from around 2% of GDP in the early decades on the graph to 0.4% since 2020. (It’s 0.3% so far in 2022.) Like the private sector, we’ve seen a shift towards shorter-lived assets, but unlike the private sector, we’ve also seen a decline in gross investment, which fell by almost half between the 1960s and 2020s. Net federal civilian investment is just 0.1% of GDP so far this decade, a third its 1950–1999 average. State and local investment has fallen harder, down by almost three quarters from that 50-year average to 0.5% in the 2020s (0.3% so far this year).

The graphs below give a yearly view since 1950. They tell the same story: steady decline, with cyclical oscillations around the trend. The burst of net private investment in the late 1990s gave us a major productivity acceleration, but it was not to last. And the burst in civilian public investment from the early 1950s through the late 1960s gave us interstate highways, schools, and state university systems. The long declines in net investment, both private and public, have given us stagnant productivity growth and a collapsing infrastructure.

The tundra swans that breed in the western arctic migrate thousands of miles to our west coast, gracing the skies and waters of California and scattered inland regions of Montana, Idaho and Utah. Close to two hundred of them were counted gliding on the Bear River wetlands near the Great Salt Lake last week. Other times, counts are in the thousands. The populations that breed in the eastern arctic travel to the Great Lakes and, mostly, the midAtlantic coast, some stopping over at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Park in Maryland these days, and are iconic on the Chesapeake Bay.

Our other native swan, the larger trumpeter, far more local, was brought back from the brink of extinction beginning in the early 1900s, when, after three centuries of overhunting, only a few dozen remained. Damage to muskrat and beaver populations also affected swan populations who nest on their dams and dens, and as these industrious rodents recovered, swan habitats improved as well.

There is another swan in the United States, the mute swan, introduced in the late 1800s largely as an ornament on wealthy estates. With few natural predators, and impressive survival agility, mute swan populations have grown, and in some coastal regions nesting species may have reached carrying capacity. Hudsonia, the small ecological research institute I work with, recently put together a round-up of current knowledge to help inform the ongoing debate on how to handle this charismatic, but potentially problematic, species, excerpted here.

As is often the case with introduced species, impacts of mute swans may be assumed rather than documented, raising the possibility that these birds are the subject of an ecological narrative, to borrow Robert Shiller’s well detailed economic narratives, those partial truths we repeat sometimes without much of a fact check. Sometimes those narratives are amusing, sometimes annoying, but in fact they drive policy decisions often with poor outcomes. Managing swan populations either by addling eggs or culling the birds themselves is an expensive long-term commitment, with no guarantee of success. Our conservation resources are limited.

Mute swans are accused of harassing other nesting waterbirds, depleting aquatic vegetation, attacking humans, and polluting bodies of water. Sometimes they are guilty as charged. And they aggressively defend their nests, as do our native swans who fend off many predators, including foxes. In the popular press, a mute swan defending his nest may come across as aggressive, a tundra swan, valiant.

And, like most birds, they eat a lot. Some ecologists and hunters are concerned that their habit of uprooting more than they eat could deplete submergent aquatic vegetation (SAV), the nursery grounds of fish and crustaceans, thereby reducing duck populations. And on their loafing sites, funny concept, apparently they have inadvertently trampled the nests of rare shorebirds. However, to Hudsonia’s knowledge there have been no species-specific studies of other birds’ nesting success in the presence of mute swans, and most aggression is directed toward also burgeoning year-round populations of Canada geese. Other than isolated accounts, there is “no evidence to support nesting disruption of marsh-nesting birds.”

The primary factor in the widespread declines in SAV beds, documented in coastal, estuarine and lacustrine habitats around the world, is reduced water clarity caused by inorganic sediment, nutrient additions, and eutrophication. For example, sediment that comes into the Hudson River during heavy rains persists for years and even decades, resuspended by recurrent rain storms. Exposed agricultural soils, point sources like treatment plants, and impermeable urban and residential surfaces all contribute, their effects tending to be exacerbated by the warming effects of climate change. There is evidence that animal herbivory is more damaging in areas already over-stressed by those effects.

We already have developed methods to improve water quality ready at hand, identified by the science as the driving factor in restoring and preserving SAV beds, and such projects create entry-level jobs in science and conservation work, sectors that look weak in Bureau of Labor Statistics’ projections. Managing runoff would potentially be of greater value than managing mute swans on many levels.

Focusing on one introduced species, here mute swans, also detracts attention from coming up with integrated solutions that treat the many stressors, including alien species, as part of a web to be rewoven as best we can.

Photograph of mute swans in New York, P. Dunne

Details on establishment formation from yesterday’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages show an acceleration beginning in 2020Q3, accompanied by a drop-off in the number of employees per establishment. As the graphs below show, between 2017 and 2019 average establishment growth ran at 1.7%, and from 2020Q3 onward at 3.8%, while the number of employees per establishment slipped from 14.5 to 13.2.

And a new term is born: the solopreneur.

Another take on this comes from applications for new businesses. Census statistics show they stumbled in March and April of 2020, and quickly recovered, rising from 3.5 million in 2019, to 4.4 million in 2020, and 5.4 million in 2021, a 54% increase over two years.

Venture Forward, a collaboration among GoDaddy and several universities to learn more about new business formations, estimates there are 45 million microbusinesses in the US, of which 90% have fewer than 10 employees. Many of these have been formed out of necessity, and 63% of those formed since March 2020 required less than $5,000.00 in funding.

The Kauffman Foundation reports that in 2020 the share of opportunity entrepreneurs, those who were not unemployed when they started a new business, fell from 87% in 2019 to 70% in 2020, and then rose to 81% in 2021, so that clouds the picture a bit. But small and growing businesses are drivers of employment, and it’s very good news that new businesses formed by blacks rose from 15% before March 2020, to 26% through July 2021, by women from 48% to 57%, and by those without a college degree from 36% to 44%. The share started by whites slipping from 70% to 60%.

National Bureau of Economic Research found that zip codes with higher numbers of black residents, especially with higher median incomes, were associated with higher startup rates. UC Santa Cruz’s Robert Farlie reported that between 2020Q1 and 2021Q3 black male business ownership rose by 33%, the largest by demographic, followed by a 22% increase among black female entrepreneurs.

The Harvard Business Review recently reported that 17% of black women were in the process of starting a business, compared to 10% of white women, and 15% of white men.

Who knew that over 140 million acres of American forests grow in cities and towns, and trees occupying that 3.6% of the land in the lower 48 are responsible for close to one-fifth of the nation’s carbon capture? That popped out of recent study on projected growth of urban forests and climate change mitigation at the county level from the venerable American Forests, a not-for-profit working for better outcomes since 1875.

Linden flowers at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Yet those urban forests grow inequitably. In their introduction, American Forests’ scientists note that with a few exceptions, canopy cover in urban areas functions well as a map of urban inequality. Average canopy coverage in urban areas is about 39%. Within that, a recent study found that in formerly redlined neighborhoods canopies cover 23% of the space, whereas neighborhoods given high ratings, characterized by US-born white populations, had close to twice the canopy, 43%. In the authors’ own words, the “ranking system used by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s parallels the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today.” Quite the factoid.

Urban forests will expand with expansion of urban areas, but American Forests projects canopy coverage to decline to 33% by 2060, losing out largely to impervious cover. At the same time acres of rural tree cover will fall to construction equipment.

Under a Chicago River bridge

American Forests calculates that to offset loss of ecological services provided by urban forests if tree loss continues at the current rate, we would need to plant 23 million trees a year, one new tree a year for every 3 acres of urban land, which could be accomplished if each urban resident planted one tree every 12 years. An unlikely scenario.

But to do the full job, which would both balance their Tree Equity Index, and ameliorate the air pollution and heat-related illnesses that concentrate in poorer neighborhoods, we would need to plant and maintain 31.4 million trees a year, which would increase average canopy coverage to 43%. (And yes, it would be more efficient to do a better job protecting canopies, but that’s unlikely too.)

Green versus fossil fuel job projections are politicized, of course, and American Forests forecasts the full reforestation project would support 228,000 jobs annually, jobs that can’t be outsourced. American Forests’ efforts are targeted to people of color, and would provide outdoor work that might allay ongoing fears of covid infection and bring people back into the labor force. Nowhere near enough, but a start, and three times the jobs currently in shale extraction, despite much larger gains theorized by industry-funded research as the so-called Shale Gale was gaining steam a decade ago. (For reference, natural gas extraction, broken out in Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages but not in the Current Employment Statistics, was 30,000 in March of 2021. Toss in a representative share of support activities, and you’re at 75,000.)

And talk about bottlenecks. As many as aware, home gardening encouraged by covid has created shortages in fruit trees, but seedling production itself has been in long decline, exacerbated by the Great Recession. American Forests suggests we need to double seedling production to meet our reforestation goals, and, since nursery and reforestation jobs tend to be in economically depressed rural areas, unlikely to grow on their own these days, there’s an offset to our rural/urban inequality here as well. And it could break up worrisome concentrations of, say, poultry processing in the rural south.

Seedlings along the Chicago River

In addition to those jobs, American Forests’ project, currently underway, would, as the trees mature, absorb 9.3 million tons of carbon, remove 57 tons of particulate pollution, and save the country $5 billion in combined air, water and climate services annually. That $5 billion alone is over half the cost.

American Forests’ tree equity tool, a targeted resource, covers 150,000 neighborhoods and 486 municipalities that constitute 70% of the US population, including socioeconomic status, population density, and current canopy cover. You can evaluate your own community as well as compare your own community to others here.

Large cities with the most to gain include Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, and Portland.

Innovation Coda
Ben Christensen & Marisa Repka of Cambium Carbon, based in DC but operating nationwide, just won the JM Kaplan Fund’s innovation award. Thirty-six million trees fall in US cities each year, and their outfit, Cambium Carbon, creates a regenerative economy by salvaging those 46 million tons of wood, and using the proceeds to fund new tree planting, as well as keep usable material out of the waste stream. Might as well get with the terminology, so upcycling that wood into valuable, and scarce these days, durable goods brings local residents, many of whom face barriers to traditional employment, into the force where they learn technical skills across the tree life cycle, from tree care to carpentry.

Christensen and Repka had the idea when working with the World Resources Institute, observing that the kind of projects coming into the climate space from the financial sector, from private industry, and from the government, were all weak in terms of scalable projects. In their words, by transcending scale, their operation will bridge the “giant gap between supporting communities with the grace and specificity required to build effective local solutions…and the ability to scale those solutions into national climate initiatives.”

Their tagline? “Our wood does good.”

Purple Martins nesting along Lake Michigan