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Flying Blind: What Happens When Government Data Goes Dark

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

This week’s topic chose itself. I wanted to use this space this week to present a profile of our local population who are eligible for or recipients of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But, when I started looking for data, I was met over and over with blank screens or notices that data were not available due to the ongoing government shutdown.

So, let’s pivot and try to answer some of the questions this brings up about data collection and accessibility. Why does a government shutdown affect availability of data, and why does it matter? Why do we rely on the government to collect and distribute data?

First, why does a shutdown affect availability of data? The short answer is pretty simple. Federal agencies collect enormous amounts of data on U.S. households, firms, programs, and markets.

The U.S. Federal Statistical System consists of 13 Principal Statistical Agencies (PSAs), 3 statistical units within other agencies, and over 100 additional agencies, units, or programs that engage in statistical work. These entities are tasked with collecting and analyzing data and making those data available to stakeholders, often including the general public and little-known economists trying to piece together relevant columns for their local newspaper. When these agencies are shut down, data collection, processing, and/or reporting stops. Even older, existing data may become unavailable if a website goes down and federal IT employees are not at work to fix it.

Why does it matter? The types of data collected by federal agencies are essential for policymaking at the federal, state, and local level and for both public and private organizations. The largest PSA is the US Census Bureau. In addition to fulfilling the Constitutional obligation of counting every U.S. resident every 10 years, the Census Bureau, whose mission is “to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” more frequently collects American demographic and housing data, public and private employment data, and business production data. The Census Bureau’s databases are the first place I would look for information about Coastal Georgia’s SNAP recipients.

Other PSAs whose work is oft cited include the Bureau of Labor Statistics (unemployment, inflation, etc.), the National Center for Education Statistics (school performance and student outcomes), the National Center for Health Statistics (CDC data), and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP).

Without the work of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, lawmakers and enforcement agencies are essentially flying blind. They do not know whom they are serving nor whether their efforts are working to achieve policy goals.

Last, the question every good economist should ask. Why is the government, rather than a private entity, responsible for all this data collection? This answer basically comes down to access and motivation. Wells Fargo economist Nicole Cervi told the economic news show Marketplace that even as large as Wells Fargo is, their organization does not have access to a sample of businesses or consumers that would accurately represent all of America. The Federal Statistical System has access to a larger, more diverse, and ultimately more representative sample of Americans than any private entity does. And absent the profit motive that exists in private sector, government agencies, in theory, are less likely to be tempted to skew findings or distort a narrative for personal gain. The motivation of federally employed scientists, social scientists, and statisticians is simply to uncover and report the truth. Though the impartiality of government data has been called into question from time to time in the presence of partisan pressures, a majority of Americans still say they trust data from the U.S. Federal Statistical System and believe it to be a necessary part of the policymaking process.

As the federal government reopens this week, so too does the flow of data that helps us understand our communities and shape effective policy. In an era of growing political polarization, the recent shutdown serves as a reminder of how vital it is to safeguard the integrity of government data collection, analysis, and dissemination—for the sake of transparency, accountability, and informed decision-making.

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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.

Roscoe Scarborough

Drug Interdiction Efforts Alone Won’t End Overdoses

Written by Roscoe Scarborough on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Roscoe Scarborough.

President Trump authorized military strikes on “narco-terrorist” drug traffickers in the Caribbean because “drugs killed 300,000 Americans last year.” On numerous occasions, Trump has stated that 300,000 or 350,000 Americans are dying each year from drug overdoses. These exaggerated numbers are being used to justify allocating military assets for drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean.

Trump’s figures are about four times higher than official counts of U.S. overdose deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 80,856 reported overdose deaths and 81,711 predicted overdose deaths in 2024. In 2024, there were double-digit declines in all overdose deaths, opioid-involved deaths, synthetic opioid deaths (including fentanyl), deaths from cocaine, and deaths from psychostimulants like methamphetamine. Drug overdose deaths have plummeted since their peak in 2023, long before any strikes in the Caribbean.

Interdiction efforts to prevent or limit illegal drugs from entering the U.S. are the primary strategy of the current administration to address drug overdose deaths. Interdiction efforts are carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and our military. Effective drug interdiction is a daunting task. The U.S. has 12,000 miles of coastline and 7,500 miles of land borders. On an average day in 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported processing 3.8 million international de minimus shipments; 1,150,387 passengers and pedestrians; 88,582 truck, rail, and sea containers; 270,800 incoming privately owned vehicles; $9.2 billion worth of imported products; and 105,103 entries of merchandise. Significant resources are invested to seize a small portion of illegal drugs entering our nation.

There are other approaches to reduce overdose deaths, including prosecution. President Nixon declared illegal drugs to be our nation’s “public enemy number one” and created the Drug Enforcement Administration. In the following decades, the U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars in the war on drugs. Tens of millions have been charged with drug offenses. Millions received lengthy prison sentences. Incarceration peaked in 2008-2009 with 2.4 million Americans behind bars. Today, only about 1 in 5 of people incarcerated in the U.S. are there for drug offenses. U.S. overdose deaths peaked in 2023, a half century into our nation’s war on drugs.

Rather than punishing those who use drugs, treatment focuses on helping drug users. Treatment could include medication-assisted treatment programs, behavioral therapy, or group therapy. There are several challenges to accessing treatment, including high costs, lack of insurance, having no or limited treatment options in one’s area, stigma associated with seeking care for addiction, and co-occurring health disorders.

Drug education often targets young people through programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education or Keepin’ It Real. Evidence-based curricula that focus on skill development are more effective than programs that rely on scare tactics or personal testimonials. Education can also target adult populations through public service announcements like the This is Your Brain on Drugs campaign from the late 1980s. Education is a proactive policy that aims to prevent people from using drugs, rather than a reactive policy intended to curb existing drug abuse. Education aims to eliminate the demand for drugs, rather than regulating the supply of drugs.

Many states and cities in the U.S. are experimenting with another approach to control drug use—decriminalization. Decriminalization involves reducing or removing strong penalties associated with drug use, especially for personal use. In fact, most Americans support legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use. Attitudes toward other illegal drugs are less favorable. Decriminalization promises a reduced burden on the criminal justice system and better access to care for those with substance abuse disorders. Time will tell if this approach works in the U.S.

Any effort to reduce drug abuse or overdose deaths must employ a range of approaches. Millions of Americans need treatment for addiction, but face insurmountable barriers to getting the help they need. Evidence-based education programs prevent drug use and overdose deaths from ever occurring. Interdiction efforts must be paired with these domestic programs to combat drug abuse and further reduce overdose deaths.

Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.

Don Mathews

Strong Glynn Labor Market Reflects Strong Glynn Economy

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

A labor market is like a reflecting pool: it reflects what’s happening in the economy it’s a part of. Local labor market conditions suggest that the Glynn County economy remains unscathed by developments reflected in the U.S. labor market and, to a lesser degree, the Georgia labor market.

I say “suggest” in the second sentence for two reasons. One is we’ll be in the dark on labor market conditions since August until Congress resolves to turn the federal funding spigot back on. The other is the raw data the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to produce labor market figures routinely dribble in late. When late data are thrown into the hopper, labor market figures can change.

In 2025, from January to August, the number in the U.S. labor force stayed put at 171 million, the number employed fell by half a million, the number unemployed rose by half a million and the unemployment rate rose from 4.0% to 4.3%. 

The changes are not dramatic, but the bump in the unemployment rate and zero labor force growth reflect an economy that has encountered something that is pushing it backward.

Here’s a more dramatic change. In May, 20.4% of unemployed workers had been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. The figure for August is 25.7%. That’s a big jump in only three months.

Labor market watchers describe the current U.S. labor market as stagnant, dormant, frozen. I prefer “hunkered down.” The labor market figures prompting such terms of inertness are figures BLS generates from its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Through JOLTS, BLS tracks job openings, hires, quits, layoffs and other separations by industry and region. 

JOLTS figures for 2025 show that hires and quits have been falling since April. Job openings have been falling since May. The decreases are sharp. Lots of firms and lots of workers are hunkering down. 

To economists, the timing of events is crucial. The initial drops in hires and quits came soon after the administration announced major increases in U.S. tariffs on April 2. Since April 2, the administration has been changing U.S. tariffs impulsively. Further drops in hires, quits and job openings have followed.        

The timeline fits the economics exactly. That’s why economists blame the administration’s tariff policy for the U.S. labor market inertness. Higher U.S. tariffs mean higher costs for U.S. businesses; spasmodic tariff changes mean U.S. businesses cannot trust the ground underneath their feet. Higher costs prompt businesses to retrench hiring plans. Unstable ground prompts businesses to hunker down. When firms hunker down, workers hunker down.

Fortunately, Georgia’s labor market figures show no signs of any hunkering down. Georgia’s unemployment rate in January was 3.6%; in August, 3.4%. Yet, something’s awry. From July 2024 to August 2025, Georgia’s labor force has shrunk by almost 35,000 workers, a 6.4% drop. 

Georgia’s labor force drop has accelerated since January 2025. The administration’s immigration policy is a possible cause. What’s behind the drop in the second half of 2024 is not clear.

Glynn’s labor market figures reflect a local economy that has been a model of strength and consistency since its quick recovery from the pandemic. The Glynn labor force has increased in each of the past four years. It’s still growing as of August 2025. Since September 2021, the unemployment rate in Glynn has ranged between 2.5% and 3.5%. It was 3.0% in the first month of this year; 3.1% in the eighth.

Ryan Moore, President & CEO of the Golden Isles Development Authority, knows the Glynn economy better than anyone. We’ll discuss his insights in my next column.   

What a Map Taught Me About Economic Development

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

Eight years ago this month, The Murphy Center started this weekly column. The first article I wrote for publication in The Brunswick News was titled “Economic development requires involving the community.” A recent international news story reminded me of a personal experience that has deeply shaped my belief in doing development right, which still means the same thing it did 8 years ago— consider and involve as many community stakeholders as possible.

The news story was about the African Union’s endorsement of efforts to stop governments’ and international organizations’ use of the Mercator map of the world.

The Mercator Map, named for the Flemish cartographer who created it in 1569, features parallel lines of longitude, and lines of latitude that are parallel but spaced wider and wider as they diverge from the equator. The Mercator map was popular with early navigators because its design allowed them to preserve angles when plotting a course. The maps’ popularity spread into classrooms and to other uses, and these maps have been some of the most widely used world maps for centuries.

There is no perfect map. It is impossible to represent our round Earth as a flat map without some distortion. But there are different methods of translating round to flat, each with merits and drawbacks.

Unfortunately, when you build a map the way Mercator did, you stretch features near the Earth’s poles and shrink features nearer the Equator. Thus, while the map may be useful for navigation, it is essentially useless for understanding what the Earth really looks like. One alternative, preferred by the African Union, is the Equal Earth Projection map, which better reflects countries’ true sizes.

And it matters. I learned first-hand how much it matters when I was a graduate student interning in West Africa.

I was living in the rural town of Saclepea, Liberia, with a small team conducting research to inform our American organization’s economic development efforts in the area. One of our team members brought with them a load of supplies donated by charitable Americans. Among these supplies were paper maps intended for distribution in Saclepea’s schools.

One of our school-aged Liberian friends found the maps among our things before we distributed them, and as he examined the map of the world, he commented, “No wonder Africa will never be great. Look how much smaller we are than America.”

His words hit hard. I knew this perception was far from the truth. In fact, approximately 30 world countries, including big ones like the U.S., China, and India, could fit inside the continent of Africa. But I had never considered how common maps distorted Earth’s proportions nor how those distortions affected the belief systems of children around the world.

I advocated that my team not distribute these maps. It had become clear to me that they negatively shaped the lens through which children view themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Surely, the good people who donated the maps had been just as ignorant as I about their potential negative effects. Nevertheless, my team leader rebuked me and insisted that we must distribute the maps to honor the Americans who had worked hard to secure them for Liberian schools. It was the wrong move. It was a classic example of what Atlanta minister Bob Lupton would call “toxic charity” or what Development Economists Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert warn against in their book When Helping Hurts.

That experience started my low-key map obsession, and still, it shapes how I think about, teach, and participate in economic development. I have non-Mercator maps in my office and at home as reminders that true and lasting economic development must always put the needs of the communities being served above the desires of those serving.

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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.

More People Delay Kids or Choose Childless Lifestyles

Written by Roscoe Scarborough on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Roscoe Scarborough.

My DINKWAD (dual income, no kids, with a dog) days are numbered. My wife and I welcomed our first child into the world last month. I am 41. She is 34. We completed college, established our careers, relocated for work, adopted a dog from Glynn County Animal Services, bought a house, cohabitated for years, and got married before bringing a child into the world. Our story reflects broader shifts in American society as more people delay having children or forego kids altogether.

My own parents were 34 and 32 at the time of my birth, older parents for the eighties. I was an only child. My father was a musician. My mother was an artist. My mother stayed at home with me until I could enroll in kindergarten. Getting by on one income, we spent years without stable housing. When my mother went back to work, we had several years of financial stability. My parents divorced when I was in middle school, resulting in some challenging times for all of us.

We are all shaped by our upbringing. My parents’ creative careers and pursuits inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. My upbringing also shaped my own attitudes toward family. I was cautious about getting married and I delayed starting a family until I was established professionally and financially. I am now a 41-year-old father of a newborn. Where did the years go?

Millennials and Gen Z are often vilified as self-indulgent generations who prioritize travel, leisure, videogaming, their pets, eating out, and career advancement over marriage and children. This is a reductive perspective. There are institutional shifts that have led people to delay having kids or choose a voluntarily childless lifestyle.

Americans are waiting to have children. The mean age at first birth for mothers in the U.S. was 27.5 in 2023, up from 21.4 in 1970. The mean age at birth for all mothers in the U.S. was 29.6 in 2023, according to recent data from the National Vital Statistics System.

Americans delay having children for many reasons, according to a growing body of empirical research on the topic. A steady relationship, financial security, and a stable home are understood to be prerequisites for many prospective parents. More and more Americans are foregoing marriage, choosing to live alone, date, or cohabitate. The cost of housing, education, groceries, and essentials makes financial stability and home ownership elusive for many. Others prioritize personal or professional ambitions over marriage and children.

Many Americans are voluntarily childless. A recent Pew Research Center study examined the perspectives of childless adults. Some of the top reasons why Americans forego children are because they didn’t want kids or their partner didn’t want kids, they wanted to focus on other things, they haven’t found the right partner, they have concerns about the state of the world or environment, they can’t afford to raise a child, they don’t really like children, they had negative experiences with their family growing up, medical reasons, or it just never happened. Other factors lead to voluntary childlessness, including the state of the economy, lack of support from family, declining religiosity, anemic parental leave policies, the cost of childcare, and limited financial support/incentives from the government.

Recent data show that the U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low. In 2024, the fertility rate is 1.6 births per woman. This is down from 2.1 kids per woman in 2006, which is the level that is required to sustain a nation’s population with no immigration and emigration. Half of the world’s nations now have fertility rates below replacement level. Government programs have not been successful at increasing birth rates. Pronatalist policies offer insufficient incentives that do not address the institutional and personal factors that underlie fertility rates.

Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.

How GDP Came to Be, Part Three

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

The story of our most prominent economic statistic, gross domestic product (GDP) – the value of the economy’s annual output – is mostly a war story.

The outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664 prompted William Petty (1623-1687) to wonder if Britain had the capacity to produce enough armaments to defeat Holland and enough income to pay for the war with taxes. Realizing that the answer to each question depended on the “size” of the British economy, Petty devised a measure of it. He called his measure national income.  

Over the next 250 years, wars, curiosity and more data inspired efforts to further develop the concept of national income and ways of estimating it. World War I (1914-1918) moved many in Congress to call for regularly published estimates of national income. The Great Depression moved Congress to allocate money to make it happen. The U.S. Department of Commerce began publishing national income estimates regularly in 1935.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France then declared war on Germany. Across the Atlantic, the Roosevelt administration and the U.S. military began preparing for the possibility that the U.S. would eventually enter the war.

Two questions loomed over war preparation. Could the U.S. produce enough armaments fast enough to win the war? If doing so required converting civilian goods production to armaments production, how much would civilian living standards suffer?

Commerce Department economists recognized that national income was of no use in answering either question. National income measured incomes paid from the production of final products that households or businesses purchased for their own consumption or investment. Many government functions, including national defense, were treated as intermediate products, which did not count toward national income. 

What was needed to answer the two looming questions was a measure of the economy’s output of all final products that also shed light on the economy’s capacity to produce a different output mix. Commerce had one in the works it called gross national product (GNP).

War preparation fast-tracked Commerce’s GNP project. The first GNP estimate came in January 1942. It suggested that the president’s proposed 1943 defense budget of $56 billion (up from $1.6 billion in 1940) could be met by reducing consumer durable goods production by 70 percent, business investment by 80 percent, and basic consumer goods production by 4 percent. The calculation became the basis for the country’s armaments production plans.

Economists Milton Gilbert, Simon Kuznets and Robert Nathan were largely responsible for developing the GNP measure. Along with economist Stacy May, Kuznets and Nathan were also largely responsible for the timing of D-Day.

By March 1942, President Roosevelt and U.S. military leaders wanted a major allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France no later than July 1943. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned that the invasion required overwhelming force; failure would add years to the war. In April, the military delivered the inventory of armaments for the invasion to the economists at the War Production Board – Kuznets, Nathan and May – who were to estimate when a fully-supplied invasion would be feasible.

June 6, 1944 was D-Day. Planning for a late-spring 1944 invasion began in November 1942, three months of heated debate after Kuznet’s study showed that the U.S. economy could not feasibly produce the armaments for the invasion before March 1944.

GNP includes output produced by U.S. companies abroad and excludes output produced by foreign companies in the U.S. GDP measures output produced on U.S. soil. As the better measure of domestic economic activity, GDP has become indispensable in conducting monetary and fiscal policy, investing, business planning, and assessing the trajectory of the U.S. economy.

Good teachers make a difference. But what makes a good teacher?

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

One week ago in Glynn County, across all our public schools and many of our private ones, K-12 students returned for a new year of learning, laughing, and growing in wisdom and in stature. As a parent, an educator, and a life-long learner, I love this time of year. As a caregiver to children with disabilities and traumatic pasts, I also have a lot of anxiety around this day. For many children, learning and laughing are hard, and school is not a place of joy or felt safety.

Our schools’ teachers, counselors, and administrators are gifted daily opportunities to meet students where they are academically, socially, and emotionally and, through meaningful and intentional relationships, to move struggling students toward success for today and hope for the future.

And, as most of us know anecdotally, good teachers do, indeed, make all the difference. On a personal note, I am immensely grateful for the Glynn County educators who have been difference-makers for the children in my care.

Research from the field of Education Economics provides evidence, more generally, that our anecdotes and gut feelings about teachers are true.

Researchers for decades have studied variations in student achievement and have attempted to uncover causes behind these variations. Across nearly all of these studies, teachers always emerge as the single most influential factor in determining student achievement. Teachers matter more than any other political talking point, including class size, funding, geography, or student and family demographics.

Studies show that identical students who start a school year at identical achievement levels can emerge an entire year apart in terms of achievement gains due solely to the teacher to whom they are assigned. And these variations matter, not just in terms of test scores and student achievement, but also in terms of future earnings. One study found that if we calculate the average effectiveness of a teacher, a teacher one standard deviation above that mean who teaches a class of 20 students adds over $400,000 per year in present value of student future earnings. Over a decades-long career, this certainly adds up!

The same study showed that improving effectiveness of the bottom 5-8 percent of U.S. teachers to make them average, through professional development or replacement, would add increase our annual GDP growth rate by over 1%, in perpetuity.

Clearly, teachers matter. What makes a good teacher is a question harder to answer. Even with hundreds of studies validating the importance of effective teachers in determining student success, there is little scientific consensus on how specific attributes or practices of teachers contribute to their effectiveness.

A recent article combining results of 40 studies on how teacher characteristics affect teacher effectiveness found over 200 different conclusions. The authors did attempt to synthesize the results, dividing teacher characteristics into three categories: 1) sociodemographic (fixed attributes), acquired (training and experience), and psychological (personality and self-efficacy). They concluded that psychological characteristics have the greatest influence on student success, and the most impactful of these characteristics is a reflective attitude—the willingness and ability of the teacher to think about past experiences in order to learn from them and grow for the future. Teacher training and experience alone, separate of the reflective process, have almost no effect on student success.

The good news is psychological attributes often also can be acquired. Educators—and I’m looking at me, too, not just my K-12 friends—need to practice pause, keep open minds and hearts, be curious, and be willing to shift and change to meet the needs before us. When we do, we can make a multi-million dollar difference!

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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.

Murder Rates Are Nearing a Historic Low

Written by Roscoe Scarborough on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Roscoe Scarborough.

If you watch the nightly news or listen to the rhetoric of politicians, you might think that the United States is experiencing an epidemic of violent crime. The reality is that violent crime rates are way down from historic highs in the nineties and a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my July column on media’s influence on perceptions of crime, I noted that the U.S. appears on track to record the lowest number of per-capita killings ever in 2025. More recently, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonpartisan think tank, released their “Crime Trends in U.S. Cities Mid-Year 2025 Update.” Preliminary CCJ data show that U.S. murder rate remains on track to approach historic lows.

Building on significant reductions in the U.S. murder rate in 2023 and 2024, preliminary CCJ data show that the number of murders was down by 17% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. CCJ data from 2025 show declines in all forms of crime that were tracked compared to the same period in 2024, except for drug use (no change) and reported motor vehicle theft (increasing). Looking back to before the pandemic, murder rates in the first half of 2025 are 14% lower than in the first half of 2019. These data are preliminary. However, we can cautiously infer that we are headed in the right direction.

Murders and violent crime peaked in the mid-nineties. There was an increase in violent crimes, including murders, in the pandemic. In 2020, young people, especially young men who are particularly at risk of committing or getting victimized by crime, were out of school, out of work, without vital support systems, and unbridled by many traditional social controls. Gun sales hit a historic high in 2020. Violent crime spiked. Post-pandemic, violent crime and murder rates have now fallen to below pre-pandemic levels. Returning to pre-pandemic routines and their associated social supports has mitigated many of the social conditions that are conducive to violent crime.

Legislators often campaign on “tough on crime” policies that are intended to deter lawbreaking. Increased funding for criminal justice agencies promises to increase their crime prevention capacity. If 2025 does see the lowest murder rate on record, President Trump and his allies will likely attribute this to border policies, ICE’s enforcement of immigration law, and deportation of “criminal illegals.” These initiatives might impact crime rates moving forward, but murder rates were already plummeting under the Biden administration. 

It is a common assumption that the criminal justice system prevents crime. It is likely that elevated rates of murder during COVID were, in part, the result of how policing occurred amid the pandemic and “de-policing” in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The number of police officers in the U.S. is smaller today than it was before the pandemic according to Police Executive Research Forum. Despite fewer police officers on the job, murder rates have fallen for three years in a row.

Local and state authorities in many parts of the country implemented community violence intervention initiatives in response to the pandemic-era surge in murders. These crime-reduction interventions task law enforcement and partnering agencies to deal with gun violence and address the risk conditions in historically disadvantaged communities. These initiatives likely contributed to the multi-year drop in violent crime.

Declining murder rates are encouraging, but the U.S. still has a serious murder problem. Compared to most other developed nations, the U.S. is plagued by extremely high murder rates. Violent crime in the U.S. has declined since the nineties, but violent crime has become increasingly lethal. CCJ data show that the share of violence that results in death was about 3.6 times higher in 2020 than in 1994. Additionally, there are significant racial disparities among offenders and victims of murder in the U.S. There is much work that still needs to be done to both improve our crime data infrastructure and implement evidence-based practices to control and prevent crime in our nation.

Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.

How GDP Came to Be, Part 2

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

The history of our most prominent economic statistic, gross domestic product (GDP), is mostly a war story.

As noted in our previous discussion, the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664-1667) prompted British economist William Petty (1623-1687) to wonder: is Britain capable of producing sufficient armaments to defeat Holland and sufficient income to pay for the war with tax revenues? Though many recognized that the answer to both questions depended on the “size” of the British economy, Petty wrote an essay describing how to measure it. Historians of economics consider Petty’s 1665 essay as the first systematic effort to measure national income, which is the first cousin of gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of an economy’s size used today.

The first systematic estimates of national income in the U.S were produced by individual researchers after 1850. Curiosity and data availability, not war, prompted the work. The best work took practical advantage of the detail on American industries provided by the country’s decennial censuses. The researcher used census detail to estimate the value added (the market value of output less input costs) by each U.S. industry, then added up all the value added estimates to get an estimate of national income. 

Interest among U.S. economists, statisticians and politicians in developing national income and other economic statistics increased considerably in the years that brought rapid industrialization and violent business cycles (roughly 1880-1914). But it took World War I to make it happen.

The U.S. officially entered the war in April 1917 with no idea of the amount of resources it would need to fight the war. By the end of November, it had an idea of the amount it would need: an incredibly huge amount. Noting that the U.S. had no official estimates of national income, economist and member of the Federal Reserve Board (1914-1936) Adolph C. Miller constructed estimates of his own to determine the “surplus over necessary consumption and maintenance of capital that could be devoted to the war effort.” When the war ended, Miller’s estimates did, too.

The first federal government agency to estimate national income was the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). FTC published national income and value added estimates for the years 1918-1923 in a 1926 report. Congress refused to fund FTC research the following year. 

In 1932, the Senate passed a resolution assigning the Economic Research Division of the Department of Commerce with the task of estimating U.S. national income for the years 1929-1932. The U.S. was three years into the Great Depression. For lack of national income estimates, no one knew how far the economy had sunk.

Simon Kuznets, “on loan” from the private National Bureau of Economic Research, took charge of the project in January 1933. Kuznets and his small team submitted their estimates to the Senate on January 4, 1934. The estimates indicated that U.S. price-adjusted national income fell by 30 percent between 1929 and 1932.

Commerce began publishing national income estimates on a regular basis in 1935. It shifted to publishing gross national product (GNP) estimates in 1942. World War II prompted the shift.

As 1942 began, the U.S. faced two pressing questions. Does the U.S. economy have the capacity to produce armaments in the amounts and in the time deemed necessary to win the war? If so, at what cost to the civilian standard of living? 

The development of GNP enabled the U.S., Great Britain and Canada to answer those pressing questions with remarkable accuracy, which turned out to be crucial to the Allied victory. We’ll discuss that in Part 3.

Media Influences Perceptions of Crime

Written by Roscoe Scarborough on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Roscoe Scarborough.

Almost a quarter century ago, I was enrolled in my first undergraduate course on victimization as a criminal justice major. At the time, the recent Columbine High School mass shooting loomed large in the minds of many Americans. Talking heads on cable news speculated that first-person shooter video games, violence in movies, or even music caused the shooters’ violent behavior. Fear of school shootings haunts many Americans to this day.

How does media shape perceptions of crime in the U.S.? Does exposure to violence in media cause violent crime?

Since the 1980s, 24-hour news channels have broadcast continuous news coverage into our homes. In pursuit of profit, mass media news features violent crimes and crimes involving high-profile people ad nauseum until the next major story emerges. Uncommon violent crimes, like mass shootings, receive disproportionate coverage. The result is exaggerated perceptions of violent crime.

Similarly, social media disproportionately highlights violent crimes. Social media offers immediate information and misinformation on crimes, but this news is light on details, offers limited context, and is typically not fact checked. Social media is now the primary news source for many Americans.

Criminologists find that mass and social media coverage of crime, especially violent crimes between strangers, entrenches the perception that rampant societal violence is endemic to the U.S. As a result, Americans have distorted perceptions of crime and elevated fear of crime.

The media we consume colors our understandings of the criminal justice system, what we deem to be appropriate responses to crime, and the crime legislation that we endorse. One’s preferred cable news network shapes whether you support “defunding the police” or “deporting criminal illegals.”

Media coverage of crime shapes our laws, especially if these events align with the political currents of the day. Politicians have long sought to gain favor with voters by “getting tough on crime.” Certain crimes receive a lot of media coverage, including the tragic murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Laken Riley. These were uncommon, outlier crimes that got a lot of media coverage and resulted in legislation. Arbery’s murder became a catalyst for Georgia’s hate crime laws. Riley’s murder resulted in the Laken Riley Act, mandating detention of non-U.S. nationals for certain crimes.

Is media criminogenic? Does exposure to violence in media or news coverage of crime cause criminal behavior? Criminological research finds that there is no clear-cut relationship between exposure to violence in media and committing crime. However, there is a correlation between exposure to media violence and violent behavior. Some individuals copy crimes that they see in media. It is possible that the same social influences, motivations, or personality attributes that lead one to commit crime also lead one to seek out violent media. There are many intervening variables that shape criminality. In sum, there is no clear causal relationship between media and crime.

Media coverage of crime, including news of local events and sensationalized cases, shapes our perception of crime rates and fear of crime. News coverage can lead to moral panics and excessive or reactive responses from the public and government.

Individuals can be mindful of how mass media and social media exposure shapes our own perceptions of crime, the criminal justice system, and appropriate legislation. Confronting facts about crime allow us to temper exaggerated fears of crime and advocate for effective public policy. Both violent and property crime rates in the U.S. are way down since peaking in the 1990s. Murder rates in the U.S. have plummeted for three years in a row and the U.S. might record the lowest number of per-capita killings on record in 2025. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, have lower rates of arrest and incarceration compared to native-born citizens. Unfortunately, hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. in recent years. Criminal justice agencies and our elected officials should develop crime policy that is informed by empirical facts—not media-induced fear of crime or moral panics.

Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.