Archives: Reg Murphy Pubs

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.

———–

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!

———-

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.

How GDP Came to Be, Part 1

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

People with a historical bent know that behind things that are often quickly dismissed as boring, tedious or mundane, there’s usually a good story. Consider gross domestic product.

Gross domestic product, which often goes by its initials, GDP, is the big kahuna of economic measures. Defined by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) as “the total market value of the final goods and services produced within a country in a year,” GDP is the most comprehensive measure of a country’s economic activity.

Ask an economist how big the U.S. economy is and you’ll be provided with the most recent estimate of U.S. GDP. Ask how the U.S. economy is doing and you’ll be provided with the most recent one-year percentage change in U.S. GDP.

GDP is not a topic for everyone. But before moving on or dozing off, readers in touch with their inner historian ask, “Who thought of GDP, and why?”

The story of GDP begins in Britain with William Petty (1623-1687): physician, philosopher, economist. Historians of economics credit Petty with the first systematic effort to measure not GDP but national income, GDP’s first cousin. What prompted Petty’s effort? His country was at war.

Discord over trade policies unresolved by the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654) had Britain and Holland at each other’s throats again in the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664-1667). Petty felt confident that Britain had the economic capacity to finance the war from tax revenue and produce sufficient armaments to defeat the Dutch. But he wanted reliable evidence on the size of Britain’s economy to prove it – to himself and his countrymen.

Petty devised a system for estimating national income and wealth using double-entry bookkeeping, then described his system in a work published in 1665. Petty’s use of double-entry bookkeeping established a precedent: the BEA’s National Income and Product Accounts, from which we get estimates of U.S. GDP, is a system of double-entry accounts.

High government officials found Petty’s system impressive but his underlying data, thin. The idea of measuring the size of an economy soon receded from political consideration. Charles Davenant (1656-1714) brought it back with greater effect in a pamphlet published in 1694. The inspiration for Davenant’s pamphlet is clear from its title: “An Essay upon the Ways and Means of Supplying the War,” in this case, the Nine Year’s War with France. Davenant’s purpose for estimating national income was the same as Petty’s: to empirically assess Britain’s capacity to wage and finance a war.

Small subsets of successive generations of economists spent the next 196 years arguing about what should and what shouldn’t be included in national income. Adam Smith (1723-1790) instigated much of the arguing by insisting, in his “Wealth of Nations” (1776), that a nation’s wealth is enhanced only by the production of physical commodities.

Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) ended much of the arguing in 1890 by showing, in his “Principles of Economics,” why Smith was silly to think that services contribute nothing to a nation’s wealth. Economists have found it silly to think about services the way Smith did ever since.

 The German government entered 1914 with $70 million in gold stored away for the sole purpose of financing a future war, should one arise. World War I did that summer. By 1916, a major German offensive would ring up $70 million in expenses in a day and a half. After World War I came the precarious 1920s, the Great Depression and World War II, one right after the other. The quest for GDP grew more urgent with each event. We’ll explore that in my next column.   

ICE Expands Partnerships in Georgia

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

There has been rapid expansion of state and local participation in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program in 2025. ICE’s 287(g) program extends immigration law enforcement authority by delegating it to officers in state and local agencies. The 287(g) program results in more intense immigration enforcement and a higher rate of deportation for unauthorized immigrants in these jurisdictions.

ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations administers three 287(g) program models. The “Jail Enforcement Model” is designed to identify and process removeable aliens with criminal charges or pending criminal charges when these individuals are arrested by state or local law enforcement. The “Warrant Service Officer” program allows ICE to train, certify, and authorize state and local enforcement officers to serve and execute warrants on individuals who are in custody. The “Task Force Model” is a force multiplier for law enforcement agencies to enforce limited immigration authority with ICE oversight. ICE covers the cost of training, but salaries, travel, lodging, and other expenses are paid for by the partnering agency.

Donald Trump made immigration a central issue in his 2024 campaign. On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order—“Protecting the American People Against Invasion”—that charges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to partner with state and local law enforcement to enforce existing immigration laws, including identifying and apprehending undocumented immigrants.

As of June 3, 2025, 40 states have at least one active 287(g) agreement in place. Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont have no active or pending 287(g) agreements in place. California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington have no agreements because these agreements are prohibited by state law.

State and local law enforcement agencies, largely in conservative districts, are expanding participation in the 287(g) program. In March, Governor Kemp announced an expansion of Georgia’s partnership with ICE. The Georgia Department of Corrections has participated in the Jail Enforcement Model since 2020. The Georgia Department of Public Safety is now participating in the Task Force Model. Under the Task Force Model, all 1,100 Georgia Department of Public Safety officers are to be trained by ICE on immigration enforcement and will work collaboratively with ICE to enforce immigration law in the field.

Several county-level agencies, including Glynn County Sheriff’s Office, have active or pending applications with ICE. Glynn County Sheriff’s Office is participating in the Warrant Service Officer program as of May 13, 2025, according to ICE’s website. Across the Peach State, there are 29 active agreements and 4 pending agreements.

Georgia’s participation in ICE’s 287(g) programs had been declining with Cobb and Gwinnett discontinuing their participation in the program several years ago. There were no new agreements signed during the Biden administration.

According to June 3, 2025 data on ICE’s website, 500 of 635 active agreements to participate in ICE’s 287(g) programs have been approved since January 2025. There are 88 pending agreements.

Americans’ attitudes on immigration enforcement are polarized. Enforcing immigration law is a top policy priority for a majority of Republicans, but a low priority for Democrats, according to the Pew Research Center’s Annual Policy Priorities Survey. Environmental issues are the only policy priorities with a larger divide between Republicans and Democrats.

It’s a safe bet that opinions on state and local agencies partnering with ICE through 287(g) program are split along party lines. Proponents of the program assert that enforcing immigration law should be a priority, often fueled by concerns about crime among immigrants. Detractors of the program raise concerns that the 287(g) program results in family separations, potential rifts between immigrant communities and law enforcement, and concerns about local tax dollars being squandered to support a federal program.

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.

Examining the productive potential of Americans with disabilities

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

There has been a lot of spotlight and controversy around the current U.S. administration’s rhetoric regarding Americans with disabilities. The rhetoric has not been kind, and there have been exaggerated claims about the causes and effects of developmental disabilities, particularly autism.

Actual policymaking has been a bit more nuanced.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this month a new partnership between National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to collect and analyze health data with the goal of better understanding causes and effects of autism. As an academic, I am always in favor of more data and more scientific discovery.

Also this month, HHS committed to funding $1.1 billion in grants to provide services to older adults and persons with disabilities through the Administration for Community Living (ACL). This is welcome news for affected groups after last month’s announcement of staff reductions and a major restructuring of ACL.

In March, disability advocates spoke out against the Justice Department’s withdrawal of 11 pieces of guidance on implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In the Department’s defense, though, 5 of the 11 were specific to the COVID-19 pandemic, and withdrawal of administrative guidance does not negate the statute itself. In fact, in the same breath, the Justice Department encouraged compliance with ADA, reminding businesses of tax incentives available to cover costs of improving access for employees and customers with disabilities.

I want to pause on the point of businesses accommodating employees with disabilities. First, the numbers.

Currently, 8% of non-institutionalized American civilians between the ages of 16 and 64 are living with a disability. However, only 4.3% of the labor force—those working or looking for work– within that age range are individuals with disabilities. The percent of working-age Americans with disabilities who are either employed or seeking employment is 41%, whereas the rate for non-disabled working-age Americans is 78%. And within the labor force of working-age Americans, 8.8% of participants with disabilities are unemployed (i.e. actively looking for work), while only 3.7% of non-disabled participants are unemployed.

A July 2021 supplement to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey allowed respondents who reported having disabilities to give more details on their labor market participation decisions. Those who were working age and either not in the labor force or unemployed reported several barriers to employment besides their own disability: lack of education or training, lack of job counseling, lack of transportation, loss of government assistance, need for special features at the job, and employer or coworker attitudes.

It is striking to me how many of those barriers could easily be removed by employers or communities if we more highly valued not only the humanity of our neighbors with disabilities but also their willingness and ability to contribute as employees.

They want to work. More than a quarter of unemployed working age Americans with a disability report having taken advantage of at least one career assistance program.

They can work. Among employed individuals of working age and with disabilities, 42.6% report no difficulty completing their work duties, and only 7.2% report severe difficulty.

Their work benefits us all. The AbilityOne Program is a federal program funding the employment of individuals who are blind or have significant disabilities. A 2023 study on the economic impact of AbilityOne found that every dollar spent on the program resulted in a $2.66 return to society. And, as icing on that cake, being employed cuts by more than half the likelihood that a working age American with disabilities will use financial assistance programs.

In my From the Murphy Center column in February, I wrote about the necessary and effective work of accommodating students with disabilities in America’s public schools. Especially when we do that work well, many individuals with disabilities are a promising source of untapped productive potential in the labor market. We can change that by removing barriers to their employment.

———–

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.