It’s teen girls who care about what they wear, and rough military men do not even think about it. Right? Wrong.
Up Front is a book depicting WWII soldiers by cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Around page 135, Mauldin describes how men dressed who were close to the front lines but not actually in combat. Mauldin coined the term garritrooper (a portmanteau of garrison and paratrooper). I thank Prof. Mike Munger for the pointer.
The garritroopers are able to look like combat men or like the rear soldiers, depending on the current fashion trend. When the infantry was unpublicized and the Air Forces were receiving much attention, the emphasis was on beauty… [The garritroopers] would not wear ordinary GI trousers and shoes, but went in for sun glasses, civilian oxfords, and officers’ forest-green clothing. This burned up many decidedly unglamorous airplane mechanics who worked for a living and didn’t look at all like the Air Force men the garritrooper saw in the magazines.
We are all trying to look like the celebrities in magazines, even if we don’t all agree on who is a celebrity and which magazine to read.
Look at that smirk, found on the Wikipedia page. Bill Mauldin is temporarily my new favorite writer.
Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate in economics, applied economic reasoning to social circumstances and particularly to families. He argued that children are a normal consumption good, and people consume more children with higher incomes. However, he also emphasized a quantity-quality trade-off. More children in a family means fewer resources and attention for each child. Higher-income couples may opt to invest in classes, training, and spend more time with a unitary child rather than increasing the number of children.
However, goods have multiple attributes and children do not merely provide a stream of consumption value while in the household. They offer access to future resources when they become employed themselves. Having more children or higher-quality children increases the economic benefits that older parents can enjoy, such as more help with household activities and the ability to travel with their adult children. Old-age benefits such as social security now serve the function of insulating people from their prior investments in future consumption.
You might have seen this chart recently. It comes from a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2022. The data comes directly from the CDC. It shows the leading causes of death for children in the US. You will notice that firearm-related deaths have been rising for much of the past decade, and in 2020 eclipsed car accidents as the leading cause.
Many are sharing this chart in response to the recent elementary school shooting in Nashville. It’s natural to want to study these problems more in the wake of tragedies. After the Uvalde shooting last year, I tried to read as much as I could about the history of homicide and gun violence in the US, and to look at the research on what might work to reduce gun violence, which is summarized in a post I wrote last June.
That being said, I don’t think the chart above accurately characterizes the problem of elementary school shootings. It might accurately describe some broader problem, but it’s misleading with respect to the shooting we all just witnessed. The most important reason is that the definition of “children” here extends to 18- and 19-year-olds. Much of the gun-related homicides for “children” shown here are gang-related violence, not random school shootings at elementary schools. It’s not that we shouldn’t care about these deaths too — we very much should care — but the causes and solutions are entirely different from elementary school mass shootings.
Between 1850 and 1910, most US censuses asked whether an individual was deaf. There were four alternative descriptions among the combinations of deafness and dumbness. Seems straightforward enough. The problem is that these aren’t discrete categories, they’re continuous. That is, one’s ability to hear can be zero, very good, bad, or just middling. What constitutes the threshold for deafness? In practice, it was the discretion of the enumerator. Understandably, there was a lot of variation in judgement from one enumerator to another. A lot of older people were categorized as deaf, even if they had some hearing loss.
Recently I was watching a lecture by historian Marcus Witcher which addressed the treatment of African Americans in the Jim Crow era. Witcher mentioned the “pig laws,” which were severe legal punishments given to Blacks in the South for what used to be petty crimes. Such as stealing a pig. He mentioned that the fines could be anywhere from $100 to $500, and then he asked me directly: how much is $100 adjusted for inflation today?
My initial, immediate answer was about $3,000. That turns out to be almost exactly correct for around 1880. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. We were trying to put $100 from a distant past year in context to understand how much of a burden this was for African Americans at the time. Does knowing that adjusted for inflation it’s about $3,000 give us much context?
It covers the years 1990 to 2019 for every US state, and has life expectancy at birth, age 25, and age 65. It includes breakdowns by sex and by race and ethnicity, though the race and ethnicity breakdowns aren’t available for every state and year.
This is one of those things that you’d think would be easy to find elsewhere, but isn’t. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics publishes state life expectancy data, but only makes it easily available back to 2018. The United States Mortality DataBase has state life expectancy data back to 1959, but makes it quite hard to use: it requires creating an account, uses opaque variable names, and puts the data for each state into a different spreadsheet, requiring users who want a state panel to merge 50 sheets. It also bans re-sharing the data, which is why the dataset I present here is based on IHME’s data instead.
The IHME data is much more user-friendly than the CDC or USMDB, but still has major issues. By including lots of extraneous information and arranging the data in an odd way, it has over 600,000 rows of data; covering 50 states over 30 years should only take about 1,500 rows, which is what I’ve cleaned and rearranged it to. IHME also never actually gives the most basic variable: life expectancy at birth by state. They only ever give separate life expectancies for men and women. I created overall life expectancy by state by averaging life expectancy for men and women. This gives people any easy number to use, but a simple average is not the ideal way to do this, since state populations aren’t exactly 50/50, particularly for 65 year olds. If you’re doing serious work on 65yo life expectancy you probably want to find a better way to do this, or just use the separate male/female variables. You might also consider sticking with the original IHME data (if its important to have population and all cause mortality by age, which I deleted as extraneous) or the United States Mortality DataBase (if you want pre-1990 data).
Overall though, my state life expectancy panel should provide a quick and easy option that works well for most people.
Here’s an example of what can be done with the data:
If states are on the red line, their life expectancy didn’t change from 1990 to 2019. If a state were below the red line, it would mean their life expectancy fell, which done did (some state names spill over the line, but the true data point is at the start of the name). The higher above the line a state is, the more the life expectancy increased from 1990 to 2019. So Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Dakota barely improved, gaining less than 1.5 years. On the other extreme Alaska, California, New York improved by more than 5 years; the biggest improvement was in DC, which gained a whopping 9.1 years of life expectancy over 30 years. My initial thought was that this was mainly driven by the changing racial composition of DC, but in fact it appears that the gains were broad based: black life expectancy rose from 65 to 72, while white life expectancy rose from 77 to 87.
As you may have heard, there have been a few bank failures in the US in the past week. This has led ordinary people to start refreshing their memory about exactly what “deposit insurance” is and what it means for them. It has also led regulators, politicians, and economists to start refreshing their memory about the social purpose of deposit insurance, which is to stabilize the banking system. There are lots of aspects of the bank failures and deposit insurance to consider, but I think we can all agree that when ordinary people are thinking about this topic, bad things are going on.
While I can’t find a systematic survey of economists on this topic, my guess is that most economists would agree with the statement “on balance, deposit insurance promotes stability in the financial system.”
But there is a minority view, and one with (in my opinion) considerable historical support. Deposit insurance could potentially be destabilizing, since it has the potential (like any form of insurance) to create moral hazard. By lowering the cost of making mistakes, we would expect more mistakes. The cost need not be lowered all the way to zero for moral hazard to be a problem (bank owners still have some skin in the game), but the cost is certainly lower. These problems may be even more of a threat to the financial system than other areas of life covered by insurance.
That’s the theory. What’s the evidence?
My favorite paper on this topic is a 1990 article by Charles Calomiris called “Is Deposit Insurance Necessary? A Historical Perspective.” Not only does it conclude that deposit insurance isn’t necessary, but even more: it may be destabilizing. (You can also read a version of the article intended for a more general audience that Calomiris wrote for the Chicago Fed.)
It’s time to revisit American Girl Dolls and the Saturn V rocket. The trending topic among millennials is the new “historical” American Girl doll who lives in the year 1999.
Previously, I blogged about the historical Courtney doll from 1986 in “Complacency and American Girl Dolls.” I used Courtney’s accessories to illustrate stagnation in the physical environment (within rich countries) of recent decades. Courtney has a Walkman for playing cassette tapes and she has an arcade-style Pac-Man game to entertain herself. I pointed out that ’80’s Courtney had to be given the World War II doll Molly just to keep life interesting.
What do Isabel and Nicki have a decade later in 1999?
They have a personal CD player and floppy disks. It’s cute and the toys will sell. However, it does not seem like innovation has introduced many new capabilities. Isabel can listen to music through her headphones and be entertained on screens, just like Courtney could.
Isabel eats Pizza Hut and has dial-up internet access. There is no sense of sacrifice or expanding the frontier. The world was settled, and history had ended.
What counts for adventure in 1999? Shopping vintage clothing. Just like Courtney, Isabel revisits the past to get a sense of purpose or excitement.
This is Isabel’s diary. Having nothing to do besides look at clothes from past decades, she obsesses over status. Presumably “Kat” complimented her hat in person. Facebook didn’t start until 2004, so Isabel is not worried about “Likes” in social media.
So, what did I do with my kids for their school break on Presidents’ Day? We went to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to see the Saturn V rocket.
Andrew Ruapp reached out to me about a possible error in my post. He presented some evidence that the term STEM has been used prior to 2001. Casually Googling the topic did not bring me to a reputable source for the claim I had made last week. “SMET” is comically bad. So, I did start to wonder if it had never been officially used at the NSF and was just a funny story getting repeated online.
To solve this problem, I reached out directly to the person who was credited with making the transition. Dr. Judith Ramaley is currently President Emerita and Distinguished Professor of Public Service at Portland State University.
Having her permission to share, here is our email correspondence:
Encouraged by her reply, I looked online and found a public NSF document from 1998 that clearly uses SMET.
Lastly, I asked her several questions, in a mini email interview:
Are you surprised by how widespread the STEM term has become?
Ramaley: I wasn’t surprised because once NSF adopted the new acronym, I expected it would catch on.
2. Do you feel that the “STEM” brand has been successful?
Ramaley: STEM isn’t really a brand. It is simply an acronym. It works better than SMET I think because engineering and technology are framed by science and mathematics rather than trailing along behind as if less important. I am fascinated by the growing pressure to add other elements to STEM, making it STEAM, for instance.
3. My son in 2nd grade goes to a STEM activity class once a week. (They just call it “STEM.”) This week he tells me they are working on a pollination project. Would you recommend anything different than the current system for encouraging American students to pursue technology fields?
Ramaley: Your third question is a sweeping one. It would help to know what a STEM activity means each week in your son’s second grade class. I am drawn to ways of learning STEM that encourage students to approach these issues in an inquiry-based way that lets them explore what it means to ask interesting questions and work out ways to try to answer them. Young people are very curious about how the world works. I doubt that I need to tell you that since I bet your son sometimes drives you nuts with WHY and HOW questions. Questions like that are beautiful questions.
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