History

Disability: Income, Unemployment, & Education

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Let’s talk about disability. The American Community Survey (ACS) identifies seven broad categories, not including the baseline case of ‘No Disability’. I’ve written before about how disability designations are difficult because many qualifying conditions are a matter of degree. Surely you’ve met a person who is legally blind but can see *some*. How much sight ability can remain while still being considered blind? If a person can identify the sun’s location, but nothing else, then is that person still blind? Similarly, who’s to say whether some physical or cognitive characteristic is disabling? Why not enabling – depending on the task?

Wisely, the ACS side-steps this entire discussion and simply asks respondents whether they have “difficulty”.  We can be agnostic about the cause and degree while still trying to get at the heart of the matter. One downside is that people tend to have more difficulty as they age. Since that’s not relevant for earlier life economic outcomes, I only examine ages 24-45. Difficulty with “self care” is too small of a category in the 2024 ACS for the analysis here. Below are the other six difficulties identified:

  • Hearing Difficulty (n=6,609)
  • Seeing Difficulty (n=8,307)
  • Cognitive Difficulty (n=26,792)
  • Ambulatory Difficulty (physically getting around) (n=4,568)
  • Independent Living Difficulty (n=5,997)
  • No Disability (n=885,302)

We should say early on that many of the people who participate in “Deaf” (capitalized) culture do not consider deafness to be a disability and that any such suggestion is motivated by bias and hearing culture. I won’t engage with that here. But I can say that there is a long tradition going back through the 1800s that rejected alms-giving for deafness and instead supported independent living for deaf people. Historically, this manifested as outlawing panhandling while featuring deafness and rejecting government programs that provide simple transfers due merely to deafness. More recently, the push to reject the ‘disability’ label and its baggage has even been the motivation for some deaf people to oppose cochlear implants being covered by medical insurance. For ease, I’ll be using the colloquial terms for all of the above difficulties. Now that you have the greater context, let’s jump into the data (unweighted).

The baseline income chart is above. Given the above description, it should come as no surprise that deaf people have the highest average income among disability groups, conditional on employment. However, it’s also surprising that most of the above disabilities have incomes that I wouldn’t exactly call destitute. Many people who have a disability look much like everyone else. From an economic point of view, we all have a comparative advantage and it’s perfectly consistent with gainful employment and flourishing otherwise.

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WWII Strategic Initiatives 7. The Man Who Built the T-34 Tank That Helped Save Russia.

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

This is the seventh in a series of occasional blog posts on individual initiatives that made a strategic (not just tactical) difference in the course of the second world war.

History’s most important machines often have a stubborn, slightly obsessive person behind them. For the Soviet T-34 tank, that was Mikhail Koshkin. Koshkin ran the design bureau at the Kharkov tank and locomotive plant. What made him special was that he paid attention to how tanks died. The fighting against the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, along with the lessons of Spanish civil war, showed that Soviet tanks were too thinly armored and caught fire too easily. Koshkin pushed for a diesel engine, thick sloped armor, wide tracks that could handle mud and snow, and a big gun. He didn’t just copy what already existed. He took the lessons of real combat and built a tank around them.

He made it very simple.  For instance, in most tanks, there is a whole interior compartment, holding the tank crewmen, which rotates along with the turret. But with the T-34, only the upper visible turret (with its gun) rotated. That minimalist turret simplified construction, even though it meant the gun loader had to scramble around on the fixed floor to keep up with turret rotation. The T-34 was easy to build in staggering numbers, by workers who were often barely trained, and it cost far less than the elaborate German machines. Stalin supposedly said that quantity has a quality all its own. The Soviets eventually built over 50,000 T-34s. Here are links to an original  (in Russian) T-34 gunnery manual (1942), and a complete maintenance manual (1944) with cutaway views of its construction.

Soviet T-34 Tank (Looks like museum model, not combat-ready)

From 1939 through late 1942, the Germans looked unstoppable. Poland, France, and the Balkans all fell quickly. However, in the opening weeks of their 1941 invasion of the U.S.S.R, Barbarossa, the T-34 proved a nasty surprise for the German Army. German antitank shots bounced off its sloped front armor and its gun could take out most German vehicles.

The Germans were impressed. Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist later called it “the finest tank in the world.” Armor strategist General Guderian said the news was “very worrying” and that German tank superiority had ended for the moment. So, early in the war, the relatively few but potent T-34’s helped to slow down the Nazi onslaught enough to give the Soviets time to recover from their staggering losses. Later in the war, the sheer numbers of T-34’s gave the Soviets resilience and offensive punch. By 1944-45 the Germans were fielding gigantic Pather and Tiger tanks which could easily take out two or three T-34’s, but not a swarm of ten or twenty up-gunned T-34’s which could surround a Tiger and shoot it from the side.

Sadly, Koshkin never saw the vindication of his design. In early 1940, he insisted on proving his prototypes by driving them himself 500 miles from Kharkov (in today’s Ukraine) to Moscow, through cold and mud, to show the brass what they could do. The tanks made it. Koshkin didn’t. He caught a bad cold that turned into pneumonia and died in September 1940, at just 42, nine months before the Germans invaded. The man who gave the Red Army its best weapon spent himself on the proof that it worked.

“The Grim Old Days” in Charts

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

I’ve just started reading Chelsea Follett’s new book The Grim Old Days, which shows just how bad things were in the past. It’s a great book, and I encourage everyone to buy it. If you want a sample of what’s in the book, check out her series of blog posts on “contemporary accounts of daily life in the past” or read her blog post summarizing some of the topics in the book.

As an economist when I think about the past, in my head I see charts. Lots of charts, full of data! Follett’s book is mostly narrative history, and it is not filled with charts and data. That’s OK, I still am very much enjoying the book. But what charts would I select to show how grim the old days were, if I wanted to take that approach to the topic?

Here are four good ones from Our World in Data.

Child mortality in the past was horrible, with only about half of children surviving to adulthood (goes along with Chapters 2 and 3 of her book):

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Family Income Continues to Grow in 2025 Data

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

Yesterday the Census Bureau released their annual treasure trove of data from the Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Loads of new data are now available for 2025 on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. This new data allows me to update one of my favorite charts, showing the distribution of family income in the U.S. since 1967. Census releases this data by grouping families into nine different income groups, which I have collapsed into three groups, each being as close to one-third of the total as I can get using the publicly available data.

Figure 1

See also a similar chart from Mark Perry which uses household income (rather than family income) over the same time period.

Figure 1 shows that, adjusted for inflation, the proportion of families with income over $150,000 has grown almost seven-fold since 1967. There has been a roughly constant one-third of the population between $75,000 and $150,000, and the ranks of those under $75,000 has been cut in half since 1967. Again, these dollar figures all adjusted for inflation, using the preferred deflator of the Census Bureau.

What’s even more astonishing is when we look at the number of families at various thresholds, rather than just the share, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2

In 1967 there were fewer than 3 million families with incomes over $150,000 (in 2025 inflation-adjusted dollars). By 2025, that had grown to over 31 million families. If we look at the highest income threshold in this Census data — over $200,000 — the number of families has grown from just 1 million in 1967 to over 20 million in 2025. And there are fewer lower-income families too: the number of families under $75,000 shrunk, not just as a proportion of the total as seen in Figure 1, but even in absolute terms by almost 3 million families from 1967 to 2025.

Of course, some of these families do have more earners than in 1967, though we shouldn’t overstate that too much. Using other data from Census, we can see that the share of families with multiple earners hasn’t increased much since 1967, and especially hasn’t since the mid-1990s.

Table 1

As seen in Table 1, as far back as 1967 the majority of families in the U.S. had multiple earners. Now it’s true these were not all married couples with both spouses working full-time, and hours of work in the household have risen over time — but not much since the 1990s. This data is somewhat skewed by the aging of the population, as evidenced by the rising number of families with no earners. But even if we drop those families with no earners, multiple-income families haven’t grown much: from 58% of the total in 1967 to 63% in 2025.

Women Have Always Worked, Often in the Formal Labor Force

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

In a February 2025 blog post, I created a chart showing male and female work patterns both inside and outside the home, going back to 1900. The data was for the United States, and the general trends were more female work in the paid labor force, more male work in the household (rather than paid labor force), but overall total hours of work being roughly constant from 1900 to 2023 (on average, of course).

Despite women always working, 1900 did look a lot different: adult working-age women in the US spent about 50 hours per week working in their own household, and a little under 10 hours per week in the formal paid labor force. Men were almost a mirror image of this (though working a few hours less per week in total).

So the gradual change over the 20th century was a huge shift in gender roles, and by 2023 women on average spent about the same number of hours in household and paid work. But the US is something of an anomaly here. Female labor force participation was higher — in some cases much higher — in other developed countries around 1900. Using data collected by Claudia Olivetti, here are female labor force participation rates for working age women (generally ages 15-64) around 1890-1900 (I average across years if there are multiple estimates):

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WWII Strategic Initiatives 6. Fort Commander’s Lonely Decision Saves Norwegian Government from Capture by Germans

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

At 4:21 a.m. on April 9, 1940, a 64-year-old Norwegian colonel six months from retirement had about ninety seconds to decide whether to start a war.

Birger Eriksen, who entered Norwegian military service way back in 1893, commanded Oscarsborg, a sleepy coastal fortress on a rocky island in the Oslofjord, armed with three 28cm (11 inch) Krupp guns dating to the 1890s – – plus a secret weapon the Germans didn’t know about: torpedo tubes from 1901. His garrison was mostly reservists conscripted a week earlier. Out of the pre-dawn dark came six unlit, unidentified warships steaming toward Oslo.  Norway had assumed that its diligently neutral stance would avert any foreign attack, and so was lax about maintaining coastal surveillance. The ships could have been British. Firing on the wrong flag meant international catastrophe; not firing, if they were German, meant the capital fell before breakfast.

Colonel Birger Eriksen, the commander of Oscarsborg on 9 April 1940.

Eriksen had no orders from Oslo and no time to ask. He gave the command anyway, reportedly saying: “Either I will be decorated, or I will be court-martialed. Fire!”

The lead ship was the Blücher, a brand-new 16,000-ton heavy cruiser packed with troops, Gestapo officers, and administrators meant to seize the king, the government, and Norway’s gold reserves in one stroke. Two shells from the fort tore into her at point-blank range, followed by torpedoes into her flank. Within ninety minutes she rolled over and sank, taking hundreds of men down with her. The German attack on Oslo was not completely averted, but it was significantly delayed and hampered.

German Heavy Cruiser Blücher (Image by Bundesarchiv)

That single decision to attack the invading fleet bought Norway’s government just enough hours to flee Oslo by train with King Haakon VII — and to load 53 tons of gold bullion onto trucks barely ahead of the advancing German columns. The gold made it out to Britain via a harrowing overland and sea relay; the government reached London and kept functioning as a legitimate exile authority, which gave the Norwegian resistance something to fight for rather than just against. Also, Norway had an enormous (~1000 ships) merchant marine fleet, and the intact, legitimate Norwegian government in exile ordered it into the service of the Allies, right when Britain desperately needed ships and sailors to transport cargo to stay in the war.

The strategic hangover lasted five years. Hitler, rattled by the loss of the king and by ongoing Allied fake Scandinavian invasion plans, garrisoned Norway with somewhere around 300,000–400,000 troops for the rest of the war. This was a staggering commitment, sitting largely idle when they could have made a decisive impact elsewhere. One old colonel, one hunch, one order — which tied down a whole German army guarding a country it barely needed.

This is the sixth in a series of occasional blog posts on individual initiatives that made a strategic (not just tactical) difference in the course of the second world war, an event that gave us the world of the second half of the twentieth century. Here are previous posts:

WW II Key Initiatives 1: FDR Prodded the Navy to Convert Cruisers to Carriers, Just in Time

WW II Key Initiatives 2: “Thatch Weave” Tactic to Counter More-Agile Japanese Fighter Planes

WW II Key Initiatives 3: Kurt Tank Gives Germany a Superior Fighter Plane, the Focke-Wulf 190

WW II Key Initiatives 4: Building Hundreds of Small, Slow, But Cheap Ships to Counter the U-Boat Threat

WWII Key Initiatives 5: General Zhukov Helped Save USSR By Mastering the Pincers Counterattack

Predicting Social Media from 1997

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

At a rummage sale, I picked up a book by cartoonist Scott Adams called The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century published in 1997. I thought I might find a clever prediction about the future, which we can now verify from the standpoint of 2026.

The text of the book is mostly dumb. I get the impression that Scott Adams was making easy money with a guaranteed humor book contract. I don’t recommend the book to anyone.

HOWEVER, with my paper copy I kept skimming ahead to see if any of his predictions about the future were impressive. Finally, on page 200 I found something.

Recall, the internet only became publicly available in the early 90’s. Respectable newspapers might have started to lose out to cable news in the mid-90’s. Blogs did not start until after Adams’ book was published. Social media proper (marked by the launch of Facebook) started in 2004. (Let millennials quietly walk away from Xanga journals and pretend that never happened.)  So, my interest in this passage hinges on the fact that this book has a publication date of 1997.

The following is copied from Adams’ humor book.

I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they’ll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren’t “news” in the traditional sense.

This will limit the reporting to a few stories per year about famous people who are killing other famous people. And if there are not enough of those stories to sell advertising slots, the media will…

Prediction 51: In the future, the media will k*** famous people to generate news that people will care about.

The end of traditional news outlets will not limit people’s access to information. Thanks to the ubiquity of video cameras and the Internet, every citizen will be a reporter. If something happens in your neighborhood, you’ll tape it, stick it on the Internet with your own commentary and make it available to the world… The weather reports will be computer-generated and constantly available by computer, pager, voice-mail… All news gathering will be disaggregated.

Prediction 52: In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.

People will have access to software that constantly combs the internet for “small” news that is relevant to them.

…

your software will be able to do a sort of “credibility credit check” on any person who posts information to the Internet… This won’t be foolproof, but nothing is.

This new model depends on people being willing to take the time to put information on the Net without the benefits of payment. Why will people do that? They will do it because that’s our most basic human nature: People like to talk more than they like to listen.

Joy again: Not bad as predictions go. Notice the quaint terminology, such as “tape it” and pagers. (Pagers use radio networks instead of cell towers.) Attention is scarce, and writing is not (even pre-LLM). Adams predicted what I call poastmodernism.

Announcing the Disability Records Project

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Did you know that we have access to digital copies of the historical US census rolls? You can also find the digitized data at IPUMS. However, the data for people with disabilities is not great. It depends on the year, but those data have error rates on the order of 20% or higher.  We have the digital census rolls, the data just doesn’t match them.

So, I created a non-install windows computer application that lets people identify disabled people on those digital census rolls. Complemented with machine learning, my goal is to improve the accuracy of historical records about people with disabilities. Historical and quantitative research about disabled populations is relatively thin. We can do better. If you have students who would benefit from this research experience, then do please let me know! I can approve your institution’s email domain and we can get started.

The application is really straightforward with basically two user-facing features.

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Seven-Year Grocery Inflation is Running High

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

A recent poll tells us that 66 percent of Americans think groceries are unaffordable. Is this a reasonable position? Let’s add some context.

Figure 1 is one way to look at the problem. It shows the cumulative 7-year inflation rate for groceries, going back almost 100 years. 7 years is an arbitrary time period, but I think it makes sense: it can reasonably be described as “recent memory”; right now it encapsulates the period going back about 6 months before the pandemic; and it has a few time periods of around 100% grocery inflation and a few with close to 0%.

Figure 1

First things first: grocery price deflation over a 7-year time horizon is highly unusual. The only time it happened was the 1930s, a time when you had general price deflation and groceries followed that pattern. It was also a pretty bad time for the economy and society. I’m not saying you can’t have general food price deflation with a major depression, but it doesn’t show up in the historical record going back over 100 years.

Now to the present: the most recent 7 years look pretty bad. In absolute terms, 33 percent grocery inflation is above the long-run average of 25 percent, and definitely above the average of the last 40 years of 21 percent (for most adults, the past 40 years is as far back as their memory goes in terms of being acutely aware of grocery prices). Yes, there have been a few time periods with higher grocery inflation, notably the two World Wars and the 1970s.

But the really important context is the 7 years prior to the pandemic, when grocery inflation was so low (4-5 percent every 7 years) that it probably felt like 0% to most people. That was the recent experience people had become accustomed to before the pandemic. The only other time since the Great Depression it was that low was the late 1950s through the 1960s — though that 15-year window is bookended by two periods of around 100% grocery inflation!

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So Many Prime Ministers

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

There has been a lot of shade thrown at the United Kingdom recently from economists and political scientists. Economic growth has gone down the tubes and there have been six prime ministers over the past decade. As an American, I didn’t really know if that was a lot. The social media says that we’ve had a lot of turnover recently. Is six prime ministers in ten years a lot in the UK’s parliamentary system? I grew up watching Tony Blair on TV for a ten-year stretch. But I had no context for the historical norm or whether there is any precedent. Here I look at the data.

Right now, there are a record number of former prime ministers still living (PM). Prior to the recent spike, the maximum number of living people who had left office was five. Right now in 2026, there that number is nine! And if the current PM, Andy Burnham, follows the recent trend of short stints in office, then they’ll hit ten. As an American, it’s hard for me to imagine having 10 living former presidents. According to the below charts, the British are probably a bit jarred too!

Why So Many?

In last week’s post I noted that we’re tied for the most living former presidents. But truly, the UK’s numbers are what inspired me to look at this topic in the first place. To recap, the number of living ex-executives can be caused by 1) Longer lifespans, 2) Leaving office at a younger age, and 3) More unique executives. In the US, being currently tied for the record is overwhelmingly driven by longer lifespans. What about the UK?

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