Legal trade is a key factor driving fentanyl supply. We assess the empirical relationship between imports and fentanyl overdoses at the state level, with the idea that supply frictions result in overdoses disproportionately occurring near smuggling locations. Specifically, using CDC mortality data and U.S. Census import data for 2008-2020, we show that there is a positive relationship between states’ imports per resident and drug overdose death rates that begins in 2013. The relationship increases over time and accounts for 15,000-20,000 deaths per year over the 2017-2020 period. Results show that states with above-and below-median imports have similar drug overdose trends in the first five years of the sample period (2008-2012). Their drug overdose rates diverge sharply thereafter; by 2017, drug overdose deaths per resident are approximately 40% higher in states with above-median import levels than in other states. These differences, which persist through 2020, are driven by fentanyl overdoses. Summary estimates for the 2017-2020 period imply that a 10% higher value of imports per resident is associated with a 5.5% higher opioid death rate and an 8.1% higher fentanyl death rate.
Related: The Global Network Behind The Fentanyl Crisis and How Fentanyl Changed The Game For Mexico’s Drug Cartels and The Rise in American Pain: The Importance of the Great Recession
We investigate empirically and cross-nationally whether a media treatment featuring a narrative about inequality as the result of a system rigged in favor of the rich increases preferences for redistribution. We administer this “rigged system” treatment to 7,426 online survey respondents in six countries: Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Our experimental treatments include indicators of inequality in the six countries – including the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay and the assets of the wealthiest one percent of the population – nested within a common media frame that emphasizes these facts as indicative of a fundamentally unfair system that favors the rich. We then probe respondents’ views on a variety of redistributive policies, which we combine into a single indicator of redistributive attitudes. Consistent with our pre-registered expectation, we find that the rigged system treatment significantly increases redistributive preferences in five of the countries. In the sixth – the United States – our treatment has no effect.
Related: Does the American Dream Foster Inequality? and Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Why the exceptionalism? I think there are two dynamics at play. The first is what I call the two sides of the American dream. Data show that Americans see themselves as more upwardly mobile than people from other western countries, and are more likely to say hard work is essential for getting ahead in life. The second dynamic is Americans’ distrust of government, and in particular, their belief that government is inefficient. While Americans are the most likely to say income inequality in their country is unfair, fewer than half see this as the government’s responsibility to address. This compares with two-thirds or more in the UK, France and Germany. Where other societies see inequality as something that is done to people and must be tackled by helping them, Americans see it as something that people are responsible for themselves.
Related: ‘The Economy is Rigged’: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries and Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Barclays argues, "Stripping out Evergrande, we estimate that an average 30% haircut of the total interest-bearing debts for the other 26 POE developers may be required to: 1) improve EBITDA coverage ratios to more than 1.5x; and 2) lower debt/EBITDA ratios to 8x or below, assuming 6% average interest costs, 15% EBITDA margin, and normalised contracted sales at the 2022 level. Moreover, if only offshore creditors have to bear the cost of the restructuring (ie, no haircuts on onshore debts), then we estimate the potential debt haircuts would need to increase to around 70% for offshore debts, assuming offshore debt accounts for 50% of interest-bearing debts."
Related: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China and China Begins Nationwide Push to Reveal Hidden Government Debt and China’s Age Of Malaise
Under the headline “Build cultural soft power that is compatible with a world-class military”, Chen Zuosong, director of the political work department for the Southern Theatre Command Air Force outlined the ideological risks facing the PLA and called for a culture of “absolute loyalty” to the ruling Communist Party and a “dare to fight” spirit. “Thoughts and sentiments in our country’s society are becoming increasingly active and complex. The changes in information technology have brought an increasing number of variables and hidden dangers to the ideological field,” Chen wrote. “Hostile forces have increased cognitive penetration and destruction, and various erroneous ideological trends and arguments have … spread into military camps.”
Related: Taiwan ‘Most Dangerous’ Issue in China-US Relations, Xi Tells Biden In Meeting and US To Provide Taiwan With Weapons From Its Stockpiles For First Time and US To Link Up With Taiwan and Japan Drone Fleets To Share Real-Time Data
If AI can perform economically valuable cognitive tasks at very little marginal cost, it could similarly open up new horizons for spending and economic activity. In some cases, we will see a “Model T effect”: consumers buying a lot more when the price of a previously unaffordable item is slashed, causing entire new industries to spring up. Lower prices in one sector also often lead to higher spending in unrelated discretionary sectors because people effectively have more to spend elsewhere. A similar phenomenon (though not productivity-driven) happens over shorter time horizons when energy prices fall and consumers shift wallet share toward more discretionary categories of spending. Over longer periods, this dynamic generally leads to rising activity and employment in sectors facing increased demand. When supply in those sectors is inherently limited—such as in real estate—it can also produce inflation, as cost savings in one area are used to bid up the price of truly scarce resources in another. We’ll likely see a mix of the two dynamics as AI lowers production costs: customers will buy more at the new lower price but will also spend some of their savings in other categories.
Related: Will A.I. Transform the Economy, and if So, How? and Integrating the Goldman AI Report Into Our Views and The Outlook for Long-Term Economic Growth
Empirical studies of commodity cost pass-through typically find that pass-through is incomplete: even at long horizons, a 10% increase in costs causes retail prices to rise less than 10%. Using microdata from gasoline and food products, Incomplete pass-through in percentages often disguises complete pass-through in levels: a $1/unit increase in commodity costs leads to $1/unit higher retail prices. Pass-through appears incomplete in percentages due to an additive margin between marginal costs and prices. An implication of complete pass-through in levels is that rising commodity costs lead to higher inflation rates for low-margin products in a category, though absolute price changes are similar across products. This generates cyclical inflation inequality. I find that food-at-home inflation for the lowest income quintile is 10% more sensitive to upstream commodity costs. From 2020–2023, unequal commodity cost pass-through is responsible for two-thirds of the gap in food-at-home inflation rates experienced by low- and high-income households.
Related: Powerful CPI and Fiscal Influences on Inflation in OECD Countries, 2020-2022 and Digesting Inflation
People have been moving to the South over a long period, with the pace accelerating during the pandemic. In recent internal data, covering 2023 Q3, we see a continued strong inflow into southern Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), such as Austin, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Tampa. And, on top of the migration story the South has a higher birth rate than other census regions, too. But GDP growth across the South has not been even. Between 2017 and 2022, seven southern states had a larger increase than the average US rise of 11%. Of these, Florida showed the biggest jump in GDP, by 20%, followed by Texas and Tennessee, growing by 15%. However, over the same period, nine others and D.C. expanded more slowly, with Oklahoma and Louisiana showing negative growth.
Related: A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South and On the Move: Which Cities Have The Biggest Housing Shortage? and What’s the Matter With Miami?
American crude oil production reached a fresh all-time high of 13.2mn barrels a day in September, according to figures released last week, more than any other country and accounting for about one in eight barrels of global output. The added volumes have outpaced official forecasts and called into question claims of a US oil industry constricted by Wall Street or environmental regulations. They are causing difficulties for the OPEC+ oil cartel, which last week agreed to deepen cuts to its members’ own volumes in a bid to prop up faltering prices. The US accounts for 80% of the expansion in global oil supply this year, according to the International Energy Agency. Its production is set to grow by 850,000 b/d, the US Energy Information Administration estimates, well below the pace reached earlier in the shale revolution but much faster than analysts had anticipated.
Related: An Unruly OPEC is Causing Problems for Russia and Saudi Arabia and US Shale: The Marginal Supplier Matures and The Changing Nexus Between Commodity Prices and the Dollar: Causes and Implications
The number of college graduates is expected to reach 11.79 million next year, the Ministry of Education said on Tuesday, up by 210,000 from this year. Beijing has been under pressure to create enough jobs amid an uneven post-Covid recovery, which has been dragged down by the protracted slump in the property market and a weak private sector. China’s college graduates exceeded 10 million for the first time in 2022.
Related: The Root of China’s Growing Youth Unemployment Crisis and Can China Fix Youth Unemployment Woes With Military Recruitment Drive? and China’s Age Of Malaise
The official poverty measure has hardly changed for more than 50 years, even as social benefit payments to the average household in the bottom 20% of income earners have risen from $9,700 to $45,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars, because most of these payments simply aren’t counted as income to the recipients. When all benefits are counted, the percentage of Americans living in poverty falls to only 2.5%. Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame arrived at a similar figure by comparing the actual goods and services consumed by poor households in 1980 with the actual level of consumption of households that were being counted as poor in 2017. They found that only 2.8% of households in 2017 were consuming at or below the actual poverty consumption level.
Related: Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure and Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996 and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
The venture capital landscape is shifting. There is a rising median time between venture rounds. An increased number of startups terminated due to bankruptcy. There has been a large jump in “down rounds” between 2022 and 2023, and post-money valuations have declined (i.e., the company’s value after a new capital injection), particularly for Series C rounds. For example, from 2022 to 2023, the incidence of down rounds rose from 8% to almost 20%, and when down rounds occurred, in 2023 they entailed post-money valuation declines of more than 50% All of this is consistent with tightening financial conditions and a hangover from easy conditions prevailing in 2020 and 2021.
Related: Private Equity Fundamentals and The Grind Ahead and Market Bipolarity: Exuberance versus Exhaustion
At a high level, while there has been some decline in core profitability, most of the decrease in quality has come from an influx of unprofitable companies, which, after three years, enter the core cohort and contribute to deteriorating quality. In fact, the companies that have gone public since 2013, net of de-listings, currently account for 57% of our small-cap US universe of 2,750 stocks. Given the steep decline in quality since 2013 among new entrants, this significant influx has contributed to a broad deterioration of quality. To make matters worse, the exits from the small-cap universe have tended to be of higher quality than the core cohort. The new entrants to the US small-cap universe, on a market cap-weighted basis, have been heavily concentrated in biotech, financials, and health care. The SPAC boom of 2021 comprised a large portion of the financial entrants, but the biotech and health care overweights are notable.
Related: The Death of Small Cap Equities? and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation
The October CPI in the United States might be the most important in confirming the unlikely immaculate disinflation that central bankers will have dreamt of since the pandemic—certainly, the “market” took the number as a strong signal that the hiking cycle may have come to an end. The October inflation print was consequential for three reasons: First, core was once more supported by negative prints in re-opening related items (used cars and trucks, -0.8% MoM; airfares, -0.9% MoM and hotels, -2.9% MoM) though somewhat offset by a positive print in medical services (+0.3%MoM for the second month running). Second, commodities ex. used cars and trucks was essentially flat—and has averaged -0.04% MoM over the past 5 months. Third, super core services (ex. housing, medical care, hotels, and airfares) slowed meaningfully to +0.39% MoM from +0.52% MoM in Sept, +0.57% MoM in Aug. and 0.71% MoM in July. This is the lowest monthly print since May and only the fourth time this is printed below 0.4% MoM since Dec. 2021. This is the most important signal from the October reading.
Related: The Grind Ahead and Macro Outlook 2024: The Hard Part Is Over and Inching Toward Equilibrium
Legal trade is a key factor driving fentanyl supply. We assess the empirical relationship between imports and fentanyl overdoses at the state level, with the idea that supply frictions result in overdoses disproportionately occurring near smuggling locations. Specifically, using CDC mortality data and U.S. Census import data for 2008-2020, we show that there is a positive relationship between states’ imports per resident and drug overdose death rates that begins in 2013. The relationship increases over time and accounts for 15,000-20,000 deaths per year over the 2017-2020 period. Results show that states with above-and below-median imports have similar drug overdose trends in the first five years of the sample period (2008-2012). Their drug overdose rates diverge sharply thereafter; by 2017, drug overdose deaths per resident are approximately 40% higher in states with above-median import levels than in other states. These differences, which persist through 2020, are driven by fentanyl overdoses. Summary estimates for the 2017-2020 period imply that a 10% higher value of imports per resident is associated with a 5.5% higher opioid death rate and an 8.1% higher fentanyl death rate.
Related: The Global Network Behind The Fentanyl Crisis and How Fentanyl Changed The Game For Mexico’s Drug Cartels and The Rise in American Pain: The Importance of the Great Recession
In the first Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results since the coronavirus pandemic, 15-year-olds in the United States scored below students in similar industrialized democracies like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, and well behind students in the highest-performing countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Estonia — continuing an underperformance in math that predated the pandemic. Globally, students lost the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning in math, which was the primary focus of the 2022 test. And only a few countries — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and Australia — maintained high levels of math performance through the pandemic. Countries that kept schools closed longer generally saw bigger declines. Even with its declines in math, the United States lost less ground than some European countries that prioritized opening schools more quickly.
Related: Krugman’s Misleading Scandinavian Comparison and ACT Scores Fell for Class of 2023, Sixth Consecutive Decline and NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics
Why the exceptionalism? I think there are two dynamics at play. The first is what I call the two sides of the American dream. Data show that Americans see themselves as more upwardly mobile than people from other western countries, and are more likely to say hard work is essential for getting ahead in life. The second dynamic is Americans’ distrust of government, and in particular, their belief that government is inefficient. While Americans are the most likely to say income inequality in their country is unfair, fewer than half see this as the government’s responsibility to address. This compares with two-thirds or more in the UK, France and Germany. Where other societies see inequality as something that is done to people and must be tackled by helping them, Americans see it as something that people are responsible for themselves.
Related: ‘The Economy is Rigged’: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries and Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Two different official time series from the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) [show the same dynamic]. There are multiple differences between the two series, but the main one is that SAFE measures FDI on a net basis, i.e., FDI inflows minus FDI outflows, while MOFCOM only measures gross FDI inflows. Both agencies include greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by foreign firms in their FDI data while SAFE also includes several other items. While these additional items were large a few years ago, as explained below, they are now likely quite small. Most of the $113 billion difference between the two numbers in the first three quarters of 2023 must result from the net sale of direct investment assets by foreign investors.
Related: China Suffers Plunging Foreign Direct Investment Amid Geopolitical Tensions and The Rise & Fall of Foreign Direct Investment in China and The Global Economy Enters an Era of Upheaval
While China accounts for 18% of global GDP and only 13% of global consumption, it currently accounts for an extraordinary 31% of global manufacturing. If China maintained annual GDP growth rates of 4–5% while also maintaining the role of manufacturing in its economy, its share of global GDP would rise by less than 3pp in a decade, to 21%, even as its share of global manufacturing would rise by more than 5pp, to 36%. What’s more, if—as a result of the massive shift in investment from the property sector to the manufacturing sector—the GDP share of China’s manufacturing sector rose above its current 28% to, say, 30%, China’s share of global manufacturing would rise to 39%. To accommodate this and prevent a global overproduction crisis, the rest of the world would have to allow its manufacturing share of GDP to drop between 0.5 and 1.0pp.
Related: The Global Constraints To Chinese Growth and EU To Launch Anti-Subsidy Probe into Chinese Electric Vehicles and Managing Economic and Financial Entanglements With China
EU leaders will stress their rising concerns about Chinese industrial overcapacity when they meet President Xi Jinping for a summit in Beijing on Thursday, amid signs China is pumping more funding into manufacturing. The EU is worried China is increasing its industrial capacity, particularly in renewable energy products, at a time when domestic demand is weak and other trading partners such as the US are limiting access to their markets. This leaves Europe as an important target for an overflow of China’s exports. “China’s trade deficit with us is growing. It’s just below $400bn at present. And as you can imagine, the doubling of the trade deficit within a matter of two years is a matter of great concern . . . particularly over its sustainability,” said a senior EU official ahead of the summit.
Related: What Will It Take for China’s GDP to Grow at 4–5 Percent Over the Next Decade? and EU To Launch Anti-Subsidy Probe into Chinese Electric Vehicles and Pettis On China's Export Strategy
The official poverty measure has hardly changed for more than 50 years, even as social benefit payments to the average household in the bottom 20% of income earners have risen from $9,700 to $45,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars, because most of these payments simply aren’t counted as income to the recipients. When all benefits are counted, the percentage of Americans living in poverty falls to only 2.5%. Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame arrived at a similar figure by comparing the actual goods and services consumed by poor households in 1980 with the actual level of consumption of households that were being counted as poor in 2017. They found that only 2.8% of households in 2017 were consuming at or below the actual poverty consumption level.
Related: Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure and Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996 and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
At a high level, while there has been some decline in core profitability, most of the decrease in quality has come from an influx of unprofitable companies, which, after three years, enter the core cohort and contribute to deteriorating quality. In fact, the companies that have gone public since 2013, net of de-listings, currently account for 57% of our small-cap US universe of 2,750 stocks. Given the steep decline in quality since 2013 among new entrants, this significant influx has contributed to a broad deterioration of quality. To make matters worse, the exits from the small-cap universe have tended to be of higher quality than the core cohort. The new entrants to the US small-cap universe, on a market cap-weighted basis, have been heavily concentrated in biotech, financials, and health care. The SPAC boom of 2021 comprised a large portion of the financial entrants, but the biotech and health care overweights are notable.
Related: The Death of Small Cap Equities? and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Impact Of Underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs and Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation
Mexico has been singled out by investors as one of the countries best placed to economically benefit from geopolitical changes. Referring to Mexico, JPMorgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon told Bloomberg TV this month: “If you had to pick a country this might be the number one opportunity.” Mexico this year became the US’s largest trading partner, ahead of Canada, as it began to win a bigger share of the ground lost by China. Sceptics point out that foreign direct investment, which rose to a record $32.9 billion in the first nine months of this year, mostly reflects reinvestment of profits rather than new projects.
Related: Mexico Seeks to Solidify Rank As Top U.S. Trade Partner, Push Further Past China and Pettis on “Friend-Shoring” and War, AI and Climate Change Shake Up $32 Trillion in Global Trade
By the end of 2018, there was a decrease of 140,000 H-1B approvals (relative to trend) and an unprecedented spike in H-1B denial rates. Denial rates increased from about 6% in 2016 to 16% in 2018. Our event-study estimates imply that a 10 percentage point increase in H-1B denial rates increases Canadian applications by 30%. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that for every four forgone H-1B visas, there is an associated increase of one Canadian application. We find that firms that were relatively more exposed to the immigrant inflow increased sales. Consistent with the increase in production, we find that a firm hired approximately 0.5 additional native workers per new immigrant. We also find that the earnings per native worker at relatively more exposed firms dropped. This result together with the fact that more exposed firms are intensive in occupations that were more impacted by U.S. restrictions, is consistent with earnings per native worker in more affected occupations declining compared to less affected ones.
Related: America’s Got Talent, but Not Nearly Enough and Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty as President Lyndon B. Johnson defined it, which established a 20% baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5% in 1963 to 10.5% in 2019, our absolute full-income poverty measure—which uses a fuller income measure and updates thresholds only for inflation—fell from 19.5% to 1.6%. However, we also show that relative poverty reductions have been modest. Additionally, government dependence increased over this time, with the share of working-age adults receiving under half their income from market sources more than doubling.
Related: Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996 and The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Here is my take: In the US in 1982, the top of the first Forbes 400 list was Daniel Ludwig with nominal $2 billion. That was 85,000 times the then-median nominal family income of $23,430. In 2023, the top of the Forbes 400 was Elon Musk with nominal $251 billion. That was 2,500,000 times the now-median nominal family income of $98,705. Now: ($251B/$99K)/($2B/$23K) = 29.8 How the f*** is the ratio of the top to the median to explode by a factor of 30 while the Auten/Splinter measures show “little change in after-tax top income shares”? Until someone comes up with an explanation for how this could be—how a 30x multiplication since 1982 of the ratio of the top of the Forbes 400 to median household income is consistent with “top income shares are lower and have increased less since 1980 than other studies… increasing government transfers and tax progressivity have resulted in… little change in after-tax top income shares…”—I am going to presume the chances are 99% that there are big things wrong in the numbers in Auten/Splinter.
Related: Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
[In the official reports] both the goods surplus, which is much smaller in the balance of payments than in the customs data, and balance on investment income, which remains in deficit even with the rise in U.S. interest rates, are suspicious. With reasonable adjustments, China's “true” current account surplus might be $300 billion larger than China officially reports. That's real money, even for China. The model implies China's overall income balance should now be back in a surplus of around $70 billion thanks to the rise in U.S. short-term interest rates. So without the unexplained deficit in investment income and the discrepancy between customs goods and balance of payments goods, and China’s current account surplus would now be around $800 billion, over 4 percent of its GDP.
Related: Managing Economic and Financial Entanglements With China and Can China Reduce Its Internal Balances Without Renewed External Imbalances? and Can China Reduce Its Internal Balances Without Renewed External Imbalances?
Hyperglobalization refers to the exceptional period between 1992 and 2008 during which global exports grew at close to 10% a year in nominal terms while GDP increased by only 6% a year. As a result, the share of exports in national economies grew from less than 20% to more than 30% in a little bit more than 15 years. The hyper in hyperglobalization does not come from the level of trade relative to GDP, which remains high, or from levels compared with the theoretical potential of trade, which are low. Rather it comes from the change in the level of trade, which was positive before the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and stagnant or slightly negative thereafter. After the GFC, a puzzling wedge emerged. China’s trade-to-GDP ratio plummeted by more than 30pp, from 71% to a trough of about 35%. But its global export market share continued to rise at the same heady pace, reaching nearly 15% of total exports and 22% of manufactured exports by 2022.
Related: China's Current Account Surplus Is Likely Much Bigger Than Reported and Managing Economic and Financial Entanglements With China and Pettis On China's Export Strategy
This paper’s main message is that historical mobility was lower than previously estimated in linked data. To show why, I account for two measurement issues: unrepresentative samples and measurement error. First, I account for unrepresentative samples by adding Black families, who historical studies routinely drop. Second, I address measurement error by using multiple father observations to more accurately capture his permanent economic status. Using linked census data from 1850 to 1940, I show that accounting for race and measurement error can double estimates of intergenerational persistence. Updated estimates imply that there is greater equality of opportunity today than in the past, mostly because opportunity was never that equal.
Related: Chetty and Saez Debunk the Claim That Income Mobility is Declining in the U.S. and The Inheritance Of Social Status: England, 1600 to 2022 and The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies
Some 75% of our planet is covered with water, but less than 1% is usable, and even this is depleting quickly. Why? Water demand is up approximately 40% over the past 40 years and is estimated to increase another 25% by 2050, yet supply has more than halved since 1970. Water supply is declining in both quality and quantity. Some 80% of global sewage is dumped into the sea without adequate treatment and microplastics have been found in 83% of tap water. Well over half (57%) of global freshwater aquifers are beyond the tipping point, and even poor infrastructure limits supply as one-third of all fresh water running through pipes globally is lost to leakage. For every +1°C increase in global temperatures, there is a 20% drop in renewable water sources. To put this in context, the average global temperature has increased by at least 1.1°C since 1880, and July 2023 was the hottest month on record.
Related: Texas Farmers Are Worried One of the State’s Most Precious Water Resources is Running Dry. You Should Be, Too and Arizona Is Running Out of Cheap Water. Investors Saw It Coming and America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow