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.
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!
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?
If you count president Trump, the number of living former presidents is at a historic high of five (Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden). The number of living ex-presidents can increase for three reasons. 1) More people becoming president, 2) ex-presidents having longer lifespans, and 3) presidents leaving office earlier in life. Why do we have so many right now?
The historical maximum number of people who both 1) leave office and 2) live simultaneously with others is five. It first happened in 1861 when Abraham Lincoln (16th) was president for just under a year before John Tyler (10th) died in 1862. Since then, the number of living ex-presidents has been mostly below four if not below 3. The figures below graph the number of people living who have been US president. The left graph uses daily data and the right uses the annual average (weighted by day).
In fact, besides Washington, we’ve had four other periods when there were ZERO ex-presidents living. The first was under Grant (18th). This changes my perspective of that period. Living ex-presidents provide a sense of continuity – that something from the past continues today. They give us hope that our country will continue into the future. Grant presided over part of the reconstruction era. For part of this presidency, there was no one else who knew how he felt and no living person who had been in his position. What a tenuous time!*
The other presidents who, at some point, had no living predecessors were Theodore Roosevelt (26th), Herbert Hoover (31st), and Richard Nixon (37th). But since 1981, we’ve had three or more living presidents. So, most of us feel like that’s “normal”. Imagine if there was just Trump, and that’s it. That’d feel jarring.
1) Are More People Becoming President?
A presidential term is four years and only one president was in office for more than two terms, Franklin Roosevelt (32nd). Let’s take a 24-year trailing average. With 8-year tenures, the least number of presidents is 3. With 4-year tenures, the greatest number of presidents is 6. Assassinations and other deaths of sitting presidents can push the number higher. The graph below is the number of unique people to act as head of state over the prior 24 years (I say ‘unique’ because Cleveland (22nd & 24th) and Trump (45th & 47th) both served two non-consecutive terms).
We can conclude that the number of unique presidents is not exceptionally high at this time. The historical average is about 5.2 unique presidents. We’ve been below that since 1998 owing to a higher proportion of two-term presidents since then. Before Biden (46th), Bush (41st) was the last time that we had a one-term president. So, in terms of executive regimes, the 21st century has been unusually stable. But this stability also places downward pressure on the number of surviving ex-presidents. So, we’ve had many living ex-presidents despite our few regime changes. Reason 1) doesn’t explain why we have so many living ex-presidents now.
My post and chart from last week showed the phenomenal growth of average income in the US since the Founding. Using GDP per capita historical estimates and adjusting for inflation, this figure is about 46 times greater today than right around the time we declared independence.
It will probably not surprise you that some folks were skeptical. Could this really be true? Two major objections were raised to using GDP per capita. First, wouldn’t it be better to use a median income value rather than a mean (simple average)? Second, wouldn’t a measure of wages be better than GDP per capita?
I really would like to show you an annual series of median income data back to 1776, but unfortunately it just doesn’t exist. Good median income data are hard to find much before the 1950s, much less the 1770s. However, while median values are often better for showing levels, the growth rates of median wages and mean wages aren’t that different for periods when we have comparable data. Consider the following chart, which compares median wages (as calculated by EPI using CPS data) and mean wages (from BLS’s series for non-supervisory workers) since 1973. I have stated these in nominal terms, so don’t take this as real growth rates, but rather it is a raw comparison of two series (we could apply the same inflation adjustment to both, but that won’t change the picture, only the numbers).
Median wages increased by 667% and mean wages increased by 657%, almost identical. Again, these aren’t inflation adjusted, but that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is that whether you use mean or median wages, at least since 1973, the growth rates are the same. Was this true if we went back another 200 years? We can’t say for sure. But many people have this same skepticism about mean wages in recent decades. I think it is better to use median values when you have them, but we shouldn’t throw up our hands and claim we know nothing if all we have is mean wages.
Next, consider the following chart. It begins in 1790, but instead of using GDP per capita, as I did last week, it uses a measure of average wages from economic historian Lawrence Officer. This measure is for “production workers in manufacturing,” and it is a total compensation measure, meaning that it will include the value of fringe benefits as well — though these aren’t noticeable in the data until the 1930s. This is still an average value, but because it is for manufacturing laborers, it won’t be distorted by the wages of managers and owners in that industry, and it won’t be affected by the growth of new industries that might require more years of education (indeed, manufacturing wages are lowering than overall average wages today, so this is taking the hard case). I have also included a second line, which only includes manufacturing wages (not benefits) that I have blended with Officer’s compensation series starting in the 1930s, in case you think including benefits is somehow “cheating.” (Note the log scale again, as in last week’s chart.)
The trends here are very much in the ballpark from the GDP per capita chart I created last week. Using total compensation, wages are 65 times higher than in 1790. Using only wages, they are 49 times higher. Notice that these are both better than the 46 times multiplier using GDP per capita. How is that possible, since I am using the same price deflator in both cases? First, average hours of work have fallen significantly since the 18th century, so incomes haven’t risen quite as much as wages. Second, there was a bit of a decline in GDP per capita during the Revolutionary War, and if we use 1790 as the baseline for GDP per capita, the multiplier is 63. But again, these numbers are all in the ballpark: whether the true figure for a typical American is 46x, 49x, 63x, or 65x, this is a tremendous amount of economic growth.
If you want to look at that chart pessimistically, you will see that there is some reduction in growth rates in the past few decades. That’s true whether we use wages or compensation. This is a well known issue, and has been discussed endlessly in academic papers and on social media. I don’t want to glaze over it here, but I mostly will: the long-run trend of growth in the US is amazing. That’s true whether you use GDP per capita, or wages or compensation for production workers.
So once again, Happy 250th Birthday to the USA and all of you living in the wake of that amazing 250 years of economic growth!
We celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776. That’s the day that we celebrate our country’s birth. So, it’s very American of us to celebrate the day that we merely declared independence (not the day that the revolutionary war ended). We simply said we were independent from the crown. Regardless, we celebrate 250 years as a people. BUT, our government is only 237 years old. The current constitution replaced the articles of confederation in 1789. So there are some caveats to the whole semiquincentennial thing.
An important distinction that is baked into the American pie is that we are not our government. Our government is younger than we are. Our government has a piggy bank called ‘US Treasury’. It can spend and borrow for the US national government. It can also impose tax liabilities on the population in order to service those outlays. Now that it’s the government’s 237th birthday, what’s its basic financial track record?
I like to think in the long run, for better or for worse, and I don’t like to get hysterical. So, let’s look at the full span of the 237 years – well – 235 years. The oldest annual data that we have is from Bicentennial Historical Statistics, which goes back to 1792. Below are the series for Federal Receipts and Outlays (revenue and spending).
The blue line is in nominal dollars and the orange line is the natural log so that we can see the changes in growth rates more easily. These aren’t inflation adjusted numbers, so we should expect to see some inflationary patterns. Long-run inflation was pretty stable prior to the 1913 Federal Reserve act and wee can see that reflected in both series. There was some drift upward in terms of revenue and expenditures. But the primary pattern was one of punctuated rises followed by plateaus. That’s a pretty standard ratcheting leviathan pattern. There’s a bump up for the big events in the first half of our history: the War of 1812, Civil War in 1861, and World War I in 1917.
Then, after the great depression and leaving the gold standard (mostly), in about 1933 a new and positive trend in cash flows began. In fact, it’s amazing how consistent the raw nominal series is. We can see where World War II is in the series, but after that we appear to have traded punctuated increases for steady increases. Even the higher inflation rates of the 1970s look pretty muted and on trend (Btw, the blip in 1976 is a record-keeping artifact. There was a 3 month gap-period when the US government changed its fiscal year start/end). Even the new growth in total cashflows seems to be slightly bending downward and growing a little more slowly.
But rest assured, spending has exceeded revenues. Below is the long run deficit. I don’t take the log for this one since there are negative numbers. It’s hard to tell from the line graph, but the first big and persist swing in the deficit arrived after the Fed was established and the onset of WWI. The deficit hit $9 billion in 1918, which was 10x the prior peak of $0.9 billion at the end of the civil war in 1865. Notice that the above government revenues stayed flat or fell after 1920, but the outlays began trending upward before the revenues. The deficit doesn’t really start its long, steady march until 1932. Of course, for the past quarter century, the national government has been in a deficit mess (even if you measure the proportion of GDP).
For America’s 250th birthday, my present to all of you is this chart showing our economic history. Average income in the US has increased dramatically since the country was founded. This chart attempts to provide one, continuous series, using the best available income data and inflation adjustments (well, mostly continuous — before 1790 there are just a few estimates). Sources are listed at the bottom of the chart. The y-axis is a log scale.
Alan Greenspan died this week at age 100. He was the Federal Reserve chair during my entire childhood.
But since I wasn’t really following markets and macro at the time, I don’t think of him in terms of monthly announcements about interest rates. What I find most interesting now is the winding personal and intellectual path he took to become a long-serving Fed chair.
He studied clarinet at Julliard before later getting economics degrees at NYU. He supposedly attended the famous 1944 Bretton Woods conference that organized the post-war international monetary system- but as part of an orchestra, not as a monetary economist. In 1966 he coauthored “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” with Ayn Rand, where he argued against antitrust and consumer protection laws and for the gold standard. This may be why my intro macro professor Bobbie Horn always referred to Greenspan as “Ayn Rand’s boy toy”.
His advocacy for the gold standard is striking given that just two years later he would join the campaign of Richard Nixon, who took the US off the gold standard in 1971. Then Greenspan would go on to chair the Fed in the now-standard discretionary manner while making, as far as I can tell, no attempts to move it back in the direction of a gold standard.
While it’s unclear whether Greenspan’s unusual path improved his ability as a Chair, it was at least possible then to reach the office by his somewhat unusual path. Since his 1987 appointment the path to the highest appointed offices narrowed to include only more conventional candidates. Randy Barnett and Josh Blackman noted this in a 2015 article on the Supreme Court:
earnest, platinum-résumé’d law geeks have their eyes set on “the Big Bench,” so they keep tidy lives because they think they might someday face a confirmation hearing. It is an unfortunate reality today that to be a judge, you cannot hold vehement opinions prior to the nomination and confirmation process.
I see similar forces at work in economics, where the 50 economists who have a shot at being Fed Chair and the 500 who think they do all hold their tongues. But what does that mean for the kind of Fed Chairs we get?
the truth about SCOTUS-wannabes who “trim their sails” and limit their potential based on a fear of a future confirmation hearing: Such persons lack the character a justice needs…. “Courage is a muscle. You develop courage by exercising it. Sitting on the fence is not practice for standing up.” Imagine what it takes to live your whole professional and personal life as a “justice-in waiting.” These SCOTUS-wannabes spend their careers seeking the approval of others, in the hopes that one day they will be nominated because of their friendships across the political spectrum.
Barnett and Blackman argued that this should change, and I think this is now in the process of changing again:
Such willfully “stealth candidates” should be disqualified from consideration for the Supreme Court…. We need jurists who are fearlessly committed to the rule of law, reputation be damned…. Paper trails are an asset, not a disqualification.
The Atlantic has a great article about the history of the Boeing 747 aircraft, which is slowly being retired by airlines. Lots of fun details in the article about the plane itself and about that era. The author is also conscious of the fact that flying was expensive back then, and that a lot more people fly today (though in part, the 747 was a cause of mass flying). Still, the tone of the article is nostalgic for the era, in addition to just being a nice obituary for a marvel of engineering and luxury.
But just how much more expensive was flying when the 747 was introduced? The article doesn’t exactly tell us, though they do give some inflation-adjusted figures on the cost of building the planes. They do give us some hint of how luxurious flying was, even in coach: “on a 1970 Pan Am flight from JFK to Heathrow, a coach-class passenger would have enjoyed filet mignon.”
Sounds nice! But expensive. In 1970, a roundtrip flight on Pan Am from New York to London was $420. First class was $750. To put those numbers in context, the average wage in 1970 was $3.40, meaning it would have taken 124 hours of work to buy the coach ticket, and 221 hours to buy the first class ticket. The average wage today is $32.31, meaning that the coach ticket is the equivalent of almost $4,000 today, and the first class ticket is over $7,000. Filet mignon is nice, but not $4,000 nice.
Today, you can buy a coach ticket from New York to London for around $800. Of course, there is no one single price today, as there was in 1970 (something that frustrates buyers, to be sure), but I’ve searched multiple websites in different months, and you can generally get a direct flight for around $800 in economy class (often cheaper if you don’t have a direct flight). Today most airlines have multiple upper classes for international flights, not a single first class, but on American Airlines you can generally get a business class ticket to London for around $4,000 and a first class ticket for a bit over $5,000 (both direct flights from NYC).
In other words, for the same amount of work as buying one coach ticket in 1970, you could buy five tickets in 2026. Or, if you desire that luxury, you could also buy one business class ticket today, for roughly the same amount of hours worked as the coach ticket in 1970. Business class seats today take about half the hours of work as a first class seat in 1970, and an international first-class ticket today takes about 75% of the hours worked in 1970 as a first class ticket (American Airlines Flagship First class is a truly luxury experience, probably better than 1970, even though there is no piano bar on the plane).
The decline is much smaller than the decline for coach seats, but it is still a decline. But that is an important point: the biggest gains from deregulation and competition in air travel and the non-rich, who mostly weren’t flying anyway. Is the experience as good as 1970? Of course not, and The Atlantic article stresses this point repeatedly. You won’t get filet mignon, you’ll probably be in a cramped seat, with a frustrated flight attendant. But you can afford it, which for most middle-class families is probably the most important fact.
This is the fifth 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. There were many good generals in WWII, but for the most part they were good just by not being bad. Eisenhower, for instance, did a fine job as the supreme commander in the European theater, but that involved mainly being diplomatic and avoiding dumb mistakes, not strategic brilliance. Also, for the most part, no general was so good or bad that his conduct swayed the ultimate outcome of war.
I see Soviet general Georgy Zhukov as an exception here. The Soviet Union came very close to collapse under the weight of German assault in 1941-42. If the Nazis had won there and consolidated their hold over Russian resources, I doubt whether the Western Allies could have successfully liberated Europe; they barely hung on for the first few weeks of the 1944 Normandy invasion, and that was with most of the German forces off fighting the Russians. Zhukov is seen as the strategic mastermind behind four key Soviet victories in 1939-1942 that allowed the Soviet Union to survive, and then go on the offensive.
The first of these victories was a battle that no one remembers much anymore, but it had enormous strategic ramifications. In 1938-39, the Japanese kept expanding their occupation of territory at the border of China, towards Mongolia (a Soviet satellite). The Japanese had beaten the Russians in 1905, and trounced, massacred and occupied the Chinese all through the 1930s. So, they were pretty cocky. There were several inconclusive battles between Japanese and Soviet forces at the border. Finally, in August 1939, the newly-arrived General Zhukov decided to put an end to it at the Khalgin Gol river, which is otherwise in the middle of nowhere. The usual approach to achieving victory was to mass a huge number of your troops and hurl them at the enemy position. Sure, half your guys would die during the attack, but the rest might break through.
But Zhukov did something very different. Over the course of weeks, he stealthily built up highly mobile forces on the far left and right flanks, hiding the tanks under camouflage. Then he opened the attack with an assault on the middle, aided by enormous artillery and air bombardment, while laying low on the flanks. After the Japanese had pulled their forces in to reinforce the center, he unleashed his armored columns, which raced around behind the Japanese force to cut it off. Since the Japanese declined to surrender, they were annihilated. Such is the power of a well-executed pincers attack, also known as double envelopment.
The magnitude of this defeat led Japan to totally abandon plans to further expand to the north, with two key consequences. First, the cessation of a threat from Japan allowed the Soviets to transfer troops from the Far East just in time to stop the Germans in the west. Also, Japan decided to expand instead to the south, which led to their fateful decision to attack Pearl Harbor in an effort to prevent America from interfering there.
An early objective of the Germans when they invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941 was Leningrad, the second-largest Soviet city. The city was nearly surrounded by Axis forces by the time Zhukov arrived to take over in September. Zhukov restored discipline (threatening execution for unauthorized withdrawal), fortified defenses, and launched counter-attacks that stabilized the front lines, preventing an immediate German assault. He oversaw the evacuation of 1.5 million civilians, the relocation of critical industry, and opening a critical lifeline for supplies. This allowed Leningrad to hang on by a thread for some 900 days of siege, and kept a significant number of German soldiers tied up there.
The Germans then refocused on taking Moscow, far to the east of Leningrad. They almost succeeded, getting to within 10 miles of the Kremlin. Zhukov was rushed to Moscow in October, 1941 to organize the defense there, which he did with his characteristic energy. He mobilized some 250,000 women and teenagers to dig three rings of defensive fortifications. After months of costly back and forth fighting, in the depth the coldest winter of the twentieth century, Zhukov unleashed a pincers counterattack, which forced the Germans back over 100 miles to avoid encirclement. One result of this victorious counterattack was that Moscow was saved. The other result was also extremely important – – in the wake of this major German defeat, Hitler dismissed the top German general and assumed direct operational command over the German army. This was a complete disaster. The centralization of command negated the German army’s greatest strengths: its flexible command structure and the professional competence of its General Staff. Hitler’s refusal to allow tactical withdrawals led to the encirclement and destruction of entire Axis armies
The Germans in 1942 decided to focus their efforts in southern Russia, to seize control of vital oil fields in the Caucasus region. The city of Stalingrad, with its considerable industrial and armaments industry and its prestigious name lay along the way, so the Germans aimed to occupy it. The Soviets kept up a desperate defense in the city ruins, but the elite German Sixth Army kept advancing until they had taken some 90% of the city. But their almost-victory was turned into a stunning defeat. Zhukov, now in charge of the defense of Stalingrad, stealthily built up enormous forces on the far flanks of the Stalingrad front, where the Axis lines were thinly held by poorly-equipped Romanian and Hungarian troops. In a reprise of his Khalgin Gol maneuver, Zhukov sent his two flanking forces smashing through these lines, and meeting to seal off the 330,000 Axis troops in or near Stalingrad. The Germans tried to relieve this pocket, but the Russian winter and resources were against them. Soviet victory was complete, an entire German army was eliminated (killed/captured), and the initiative on the Eastern Front passed to the Soviets for the rest of the war.
A Few Caveats
What I wrote above was been gleaned from various tertiary sources, including Wikipedia, which reflect the common consensus in the West. In the interest of accuracy, however, I note that some of this brilliant, heroic story is a self-serving myth promulgated by the Soviets as a morale booster, and by Zhukov himself in his not-quite-truthful memoir. There is good reason to believe that he takes credit for what was actually the work of others, especially in the planning of the Stalingrad counter-offensive.
Zhukov was mainly responsible for the planning and execution of the disastrous 1942-43 Rzhev offensive, where he threw division after division into fruitless attacks. This exercise cost the Red Army some 1 million casualties, while accomplishing almost nothing. This campaign was largely written out of Soviet history, and Zhukov carefully downplayed his role in it. That campaign highlighted Zhukov’s famous utter disregard for human lives. Another window into that disregard comes from Dwight Eisenhower’s memoirs. Eisenhower records his surprise during a conversation with Zhukov, when the Soviet general explained matter-of-factly how he sometimes cleared a path through a minefield by making some of his soldiers run through the minefield in a line to get the pesky mines blown up. Soviet soldiers faced a 100% chance of being executed for disobeying orders, versus some small chance of making it through the minefield without getting their legs blown off. As Stalin once quipped, “It does not take much courage to be a hero in the Soviet army.”
Finally, the regime Zhukov defended was arguably as horrible as the regime he fought against. Nevertheless, I suspect the world that would have resulted had Georgy Zhukov failed would have been worse than the actual world of say 1945.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov at a post-war parade in Moscow. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons)
