History

The Declining Cost of Adam Smith

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Last week I had the opportunity to see (and touch!) some first edition copies of Adam Smith’s books, including The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

For an economist, of course this was a very cool experience. The books from the Remnant Trust were still in great condition, despite people like me handling these copies from time-to-time. The books were also beautiful editions, which got me thinking: how much did these cost to purchase when originally published?

According to John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, the original price for The Wealth of Nations was 1 pound, 16 shillings. Average wages per day in England were somewhere around 15 pence per day (1 pence is 1/12 of a shilling), it would take close to 30 days of labor to purchase the book. But that’s assuming you spent all of your wage on books, which of course would have been impossible: a common laborer would have been spending 80-90% of their wages on food, beer, and rent. And that’s assuming no unexpected expenses or sickness. In reality, it might take a common laborer months, years, or maybe his entire life to save up for that book.

Today, of course we can read this book online for free, but what if you want a nice hardcover version? Amazon has several nice hardback versions available for just under $30. These are not quite as beautiful as the 1776 edition, but they would look nice in any library. Given that the average wage in the US today is close to $32, it would take less than one hour of labor to purchase the book. And thankfully the cost of necessities today is much lower than 1776, indeed much lower than 1900, so it would be much easier to set aside that one hour of wages relative to the past, and purchase yourself a little treat like a book written 250 years ago.

Regulatory Burden By Presidential Administration

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

During president Trump’s first term in office, he made a bunch of waves (as he’s wont to do). His more educated supporters said that he engaged in substantial deregulation of telecommunications, which got a lot of press. There was a quiet contingent of educated voters who were relatively silently supportive on Trump’s regulatory policy, even if his character was indefensible or his other policy was less desirable.

But was Trump a great deregulator? Or was it one of those cases when we say that he regulated *less* than his fellow executives? The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center can help shed some light with their data. Specifically, they have calculated the number of ‘economically significant’ regulations passed during each month of each president going back through Ronald Reagan’s term. What counts as ‘economically significant’? The definition has changed over time. But, generally, ‘economically significant’ regulations:

  1. “Have an annual [adverse] effect on the economy of $100 million or more
  2. Or, adversely affect in a material way the economy, a sector of the economy, productivity, competition, jobs, the environment, public health or safety, or State, local, or tribal governments or communities.”

The only exception to this is between April 6, 2023 and January 20, 2025 when the threshold was raised to $200 million.

The Data

The graph below-left shows the number of economically significant regulations for each president since the start of his term, through July of 2025. It’s reproduced from the link above except that I appended Trump’s second term onto his first term. What does the graph tell us? There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between republicans and democrats. Rather, it seems that, generally, the number of economically significant regulations increases over time. Importantly, the below lines are cumulative by president. So each year’s regulations each cost $100m annually and that’s on top of the existing ones already in place. So, regulatory costs generally rise, with the caveat that we don’t see the relief provided by small or rescinded regulations (for that matter, we don’t see small regulatory burdens here either). Something else that the below graph tells us is that presidents tend to accelerate their economically significant regulations prior to leaving office. Reagan was the only exception to this pattern and he *slowed* the number of regulations as the end of his term approached.

Below-right is the same data, but the x-axis is months until leaving office. Every president since Bush-41 has accelerated their burdensome regulations during their final months in office. The timing of the acceleration corresponds to how close the preceding election was and whether the incumbent president lost. Whereas all presidents regulate more in their last 2-3 months in office, the presidents who were less likely to win re-election started regulating more starting around eight months prior to leaving office. Of course, they wouldn’t say that they expected to lose, but they sure regulated like there was no tomorrow.

What about Trump? Trump’s fewer regulations is caused by his single term. He definitely still added to the regulatory burden (among economically significant regulations, anyway). While Trump started with the fewest additional regulations since Reagan, and Biden started with the most ever initial regulations, together they earn the top prizes for most regulations added in their first term.

What if we append these regulations from end-to-end? That’s what the below chart does. We do have to be careful because the series is a measure of gross economically significant regulations and not net economically significant regulations. So, it’s possible that some rescissions dampened the below values, but this is the data that I have for the moment. While each presidential administrations increases regulation more than the prior, the good news is that the rate of change is not exponential. The line of best fit is quadratic. We’re experiencing growing regulations, but at least it’s not compound growth.

The Cost

We can estimate the costs of these economically significant regulations. It’s a rough cut, and definitely a lower bound since rescission is rare and $100 million is itself a lower bound, but we can multiply the number of regulations by $100m to get minimum annual cost. Like I said, the Biden criterion from April 2023 through January 20, 2025 changed, so those regulations get counted as $200 million instead. The change in definition means that the regulation counts underestimate the late-term Biden regulations relative to the other presidencies.

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Truth: The Strength and Weakness of AI Coding

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

There was a seismic shift in the AI world recently. In case you didn’t know, a Claude Code update was released just before the Christmas break. It could code awesomely and had a bigger context window, which is sort of like memory and attention span. Scott Cunningham wrote a series of posts demonstrating the power of Claude Code in ways that made economists take notice. Then, ChatGPT Codex was updated and released in January as if to say ‘we are still on the frontier’. The battle between Claude Code and Codex is active as we speak.

The differentiation is becoming clearer, depending on who you talk to. Claude Code feels architectural. It designs a project or system and thrives when you hand it the blueprint and say “Design this properly.” It’s your amazingly productive partner. Codex feels like it’s for the specialist. You tell it exactly what you want. No fluff. No ornamental abstraction unless you request it.

Codex flourishes with prompts like “Refactor this function to eliminate recursion”, or “ Take this response data and apply the Bayesian Dawid-Skene method”. It does exactly that. It assumes competence on your part and does not attempt to decorate the output. It assumes that you know what you’re doing. It’s like your RA that can do amazing things if you tell it what task you want completed. Having said all of this, I’ve heard the inverse evaluations too. It probably matters a lot what the programmer brings to the table.

Both Claude Code and Codex are remarkably adept at catching code and syntax errors. That is not mysterious. Code is valid or invalid. The AI writes something, and the environment immediately reveals whether it conforms to the rules. Truth is embedded in the logical structure. When a single error appears, correction is often trivial.

When multiple errors appear, the problem becomes combinatorial. Fix A? Fix B? Change the type? Modify the loop? There are potentially infinite branching possibilities. Even then, the space is constrained. The code must run, or time out. That constraint disciplines the search. The reason these models code so well is that the code itself is the truth. So long as the logic isn’t violated, the axioms lead to the result. The AI anchors on the code to be internally consistent. The model can triangulate because the target is stable and verifiable.

AI struggles when the anchor disappears

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Drawbacks of Long Term Thinking

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

This post is just some thoughts about perspective. I apologize for any lack of organization.

My academic influences include North, Weingast, Coase, Hayek, the field of Public Choice, and others. I’m not an ‘adherent’ to any school of thought. Those guys just provided some insights that I find myself often using.

What lessons did they teach? Plenty. When I see the world of firms, governments, and other institutions, I maintain a sharp distinction between intention and outcome. Any given policy that’s enacted is probably not the welfare maximizing one, but rather must keep special interests relatively happy. So, the presence of special interests is a given and doesn’t get me riled up. When I see an imperfect policy outcome, I think about who had to be enticed to vote for it. We live in a world where ‘first bests’ aren’t usually on the table.

Historically, or in lower income countries, I think about violence. Their rules and laws are not operating in a vacuum of peaceful consent. There is always the threat of violence. Laws are enforced (or not) conditional on whether and what type of violence that may result. All of the ideal legislation is irrelevant if theft and fraud are the lay of the land.

I think about institutional evolution with both internal and external pressures. I’m a bit worried about the persistence of the US republic, or at least worried for its pro-growth policies. I’m not worried about China in the long run. I don’t think they have the institutions that get them to ‘high income’ status. I do think that they are a tactical concern in the short run and that the government does/will have access to great volumes of resources in the medium run. That’s a bit of a concern. But like I said, I’m not super worried in the long run.

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The US Homicide Rate in 2025 May Have Been the Lowest Ever

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

The following chart merges two data sources to create a long-run series on homicides in the US. Based on early estimates for 2025 from Jeff Asher, the homicide rate may be as low as 4.3 murders per 100,000 population. That would be the lowest since at least 1900, and possibly the lowest US homicide rate ever since the best evidence suggests it was even higher pre-1900. The current record low was 4.4 murders per 100,000, which the US saw in 1955, 1957, and 2014.

Is This the End of the Largest Refugee Crisis in the Americas?

James BaileyLeave a comment

Our 2024 post on the Venezuelan election provides context for this week’s dramatic events:

Venezuela held an election this week; President Maduro says he won, while the opposition and independent observers say he lost. Disputed elections like this are fairly common across the world, but where Venezuela really stands out is not how people vote at the ballot box- it is how they vote with their feet.

Reuters notes that “A Maduro win could spur more migration from Venezuela, once the continent’s wealthiest country, which in recent years has seen a third of its population leave.”

This makes Venezuela the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Americas, and depending on how you count the partition of India, perhaps the largest refugee crisis in human history that was not triggered by an invasion or civil war.

Instead, it has been triggered by the Maduro regime choosing terrible policies that have needlessly and dramatically impoverished the country

Plus some foreshadowing:

I hope that the Venezuelan government will soon come to represent the will of its people. I’m not sure how that is likely to happen, though I guess positive change is mostly likely to come from Venezuelans themselves (perhaps with help from Colombia and Brazil); when the US tries to play a bigger role we often make things worse. But what has happened in Venezuela for the past 10 years is clearly much worse than the “normal” bad economic policies and even democratic backsliding that we see elsewhere. 

Here’s an update on the chart I shared then, showing that the diaspora has continued to swell:

I hope that Venezuela will soon become the sort of country people don’t want to flee. I don’t necessarily expect that it will, but it’s not now a crazy hope:

2025 In Books

James BaileyLeave a comment

What I read in 2025:

Econ Books I Wrote Full Reviews Of:

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: “John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, wrote a short book in 2006 that explains his investment philosophy. I can sum it up at much less than book length: the best investment advice for almost everyone is to buy and hold a diversified, low-fee fund that tracks an index like the S&P 500.”

The Little Book that Beats the Market: “Greenblatt offers his own twist on value investing that emphasizes just two value metrics- earnings yield (basically P/E) and return on capital (return on assets). The idea is to blend them, finding the cheapest of the high-quality companies…. Greenblatt’s Little Book is a quick and easy way to learn a bit about value investing, but I think Bogle’s Little Book has the better advice.”

When Genius Failed: “Myron Scholes was on top of the world in 1997, having won the Nobel Prize in economics that year for his work in financial economics, work that he had applied in the real world in a wildly successful hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. But just one year later, LTCM was saved from collapse only by a last-minute bailout that wiped out his equity (along with that of the other partners of the fund) and cast doubt on the value of his academic work…. The story is well-told, and the lessons are timeless”

The Art of Spending Money: “Its main point is that people tend to be happier spending money on things they value for their own sake- rather than things they buy to impress others, or piling up money as a yardstick to measure themselves against others (this is repeated with many variations). Overall it is well-written at the level of sentences and paragraphs with well-chosen stories and quotes, but I’m not sure what it all adds up to.”

Non-fiction I didn’t previously mention here:

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, Alexander Mikaberidze: Aims to educate us about the surprisingly major effects of the Napoleonic Wars outside of Europe. Succeeds wildly; I also learned a lot about the main European theatre. Hadn’t realized how poor British Russian relations were in this era, since they defeat Napoleon together in the end. But they were heading for war early on until a czar was assassinated, then actually went to war in the middle over Sweden and trade. Outside Europe, Britain briefly took Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and accidentally (?) captured Iceland, along with all the French and Dutch overseas colonies.

Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, Tyler Cowen and Dan Gross: A business book that works best for someone who hires a lot. How to attract and retain diverse candidates, including but not limited to the most-discussed types of diversity. Tyler says that when he lived in Germany people often thought he was Turkish, and one told him to ‘get out of here, you Turk’.

Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story, Lee Berger and John Hawks: The story of how the authors excavated a cave in South Africa that held many remains from a previously unknown type of early human. Good storytelling, good explanations of what we know about early humans from other discoveries, and surprisingly frank discussions of the academic politics behind getting paleontology research funded.

The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen: The book explains Earth’s 5 previous mass extinctions and the geology / science behind how we found out what we know about them. Written explicitly about what all this means for current global warming; see my full review on that here.

Annals of the Former World, John McPhee: New Yorker writer follows geologists from New York to San Fransisco to learn about the land in between. Published as a series of 4 books (Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California), each one focusing on a different geologist and region. McPhee is known as an excellent stylist but the books are also quite substantive, I feel like I learned a lot.

Fiction

The Works of Dashiell Hammet: My friend Dashiell mentioned that this is who he was named after, and that Red Harvest was a good book of his to start with. He was right, and it lead me to read many others: The Thin Man (you may have heard of Hammet because of the movies adapted from this and The Maltese Falcon), Best Cases of the Continental Op, Honest Gain: Dicey Cases of the Continental Op. Almost every story has a twist more interesting than “the murderer isn’t who you suspected”.

Tress of the Emerald Sea, Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson is one of the most prolific authors of our time, so where do you start with him? He suggests “Mistborn or Tress of the Emerald Sea, depending if they want something more heisty and actiony or something more whimsical.”

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, Brandon Sanderson: Sanderson doing his best impression of Terry Pratchett rewriting Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with shades of Scott Meyer’s Off to Be the Wizard.

Janissaries, Jerry Pournelle: What if instead of going to a more primitive world alone, you got sent there with an army?

The Narrow Road Between Desires, Patrick Rothfuss: Enough of an expansion of The Lightning Tree to be worth reading, but at this point anything Rothfuss does other than finally finish Doors of Stone can’t help but be disappointing.

Beguilement, Lois McMaster Bujold: Her Sci Fi works are great so I looked forward to her take on the Fantasy genre, but this turns out to be her take on the Romance genre.

Meta

This year I realized that Hoopla has a lot of books that Libby doesn’t, it is worth checking both apps for a book if you have access to libraries that offer both

Do Tariffs Decrease Prices?

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Much of what economics has to say about tariffs comes from microeconomic theory. But it’s mostly sectoral in nature. Trade theory has some insights. But the effects on the whole of an economy are either small, specific to undiversified economies, or make representative agent assumptions that avoid much detail. Given that the economics profession has repeatedly said that the Trump tariffs would contribute to inflation, it seems like we should look at the historical evidence.

Lay of the Land

Economists say things like ‘competition drives prices closer to marginal cost’. Whether the competitor lives abroad is irrelevant. More foreign competition means lower prices at home. But that’s a partial equilibrium story. It’s true for a particular type of good or sector. What happens to prices in the larger economy in seemingly unrelated industries? The vanilla thinking that it depends on various elasticities.

I think that the typical economist has a fuzzy idea that the general price level will be higher relative to personal incomes in some sort of real-wages and economic growth mental model. I don’t think that they’re wrong. But that model is a long-run model. As we’ve discovered, people want to know about inflation this month and this year, not the impact on real wages over a five-year period.

Part of the answer is technical. If domestic import prices go up, then we’ll sensibly see lower quantities purchased. The magnitude depends on the availability of substitutes. But what should happen to total import spending? Rarely do we talk about the expenditure elasticity of prices. Rarely do we get a simple ‘price shock’ in a subsector. It’s unclear that total spending on imports, such as on coffee, would rise or fall – not to mention the explicit tax increase. It’s possible that consumers spend more on imports due to higher prices, or less due to newly attractive substitutes. The reason that spending matters is that it drives prices in other parts of the economy.

For example, I argued previously that tariffs reduce dollars sent abroad (regardless of domestic consumer spending inclusive of tariffs) and that fewer dollars will return as asset purchases. I further argued that uncertainty makes our assets less attractive. That puts downward pressure on our asset prices. However, assets don’t show up in the CPI.

According to the above discussion, it’s unclear whether tariffs have a supply or demand impact on the economy. The microeconomics says that it’s a supply-side shock. But the domestic spending implications are a big question mark.

What is a Tariff Shock?

That’s the title of a recent working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. It’s a fun paper and I won’t review the entirety. They start by summarizing historical documents and interpreting the motivation of tariffs going back to 1870. They argue that tariffs are generally not endogenous to good or bad moments in a business cycle and they’re usually perceived as permanent. The authors create an index  to measure tariff rates.

Here’s the fun part. They run an annual VAR of unemployment, inflation, and their measure of tariffs. Unemployment in negatively correlated with output and reflects the real side of the economy. Along with inflation, we have the axes of the Aggregate Supply & Aggregate Demand model. Tariffs provide the shock – but to supply or demand?.  Below are the IRF results:

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The Growth of Family Income Isn’t Primarily Explained by the Rise of Dual-Income Families

Jeremy Horpedahl6 Comments

Alex Tabarrok was kind enough to share a chart of mine showing that one-third of families in the US have incomes greater than $150,000. This is a massive increase since the 1960s, or even since the 1980s.

In addition to questions about inflation adjustments and general disbelief, one of the more common questions about this data is how much of it is driven by rising dual-income families, where both the husband and wife work (for purposes of this post, I will look only at opposite-sex couples, since going back to the 1960s this is the only way we can really make consistent comparisons).

In short: most of the growth of high-income families can not be explained by the rise of dual-income families. The basic reason is that the growth in dual-income families had mostly already occurred by the 1980s or 1990s (depending on the measure). So the tremendous growth since about 1990, when just about 15 percent of families were above $150,000 (in 2024 dollars), is better explained by rising prosperity, not a trick of more earners.

You can see this in a number of ways. First, here is the share of married couples where both spouses are working. I have presented the data including all married couples (blue line), as well as only married couples with some earners (gold line), since the aging of the population is biasing the blue-line downwards over time.

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