Myself and a student coauthor worked hard on our article that is now published in Social Science History. It’s the first modern statistical analysis of the historical deaf population. We bring an economic lens and statistical treatment to a topic that previously included much anecdotal evidence and case study. We hope that future authors can improve on our work in ways that meet and surpass the quantitative methods that we employed.
Our contributions include:
A human capital model of deafness that’s agnostic about its productivity implications and treats deaf individuals as if they made decisions rationally.
A better understanding of school attendance rates and the ages at which they attended.
Deaf children were much more likely to be neither in school nor employed earlier in US history.
The negative impact of state ‘school for the deaf’ availability on subsequent economic outcomes among deaf adults. We speculate that they attended schools due to the social benefits of access to community.
Deaf workers did not avoid occupations where their deafness would be incidentally detectable by trade partners, implying that animus discrimination was not systemically important for economic outcomes.
Tariffs are going up to levels last seen in the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that helped kick off the Great Depression:
Tariffs are taxes- roughly, a national sales tax with an exemption for domestically-produced goods and services. I think the words make a difference here- “raising tariffs on countries who we run a trade deficit with” just sounds abstruse to most people, while “raising taxes on goods bought from firms in net-seller countries” sounds negative, but they are the same thing.
Of course, in this case the plan is to raise taxes to at least 10% on goods from all other countries even if they aren’t net-sellers, and raise taxes up to 49% on those that are. This is not a negotiating tactic. We know this from the math- the new tax formula uses net imports from a country rather than a country’s tariff rates, so a country could cut their tariffs on US goods to zero today and it wouldn’t necessarily reduce our “reciprocal” tariffs at all; at best it would reduce them to 10%. We also know it isn’t about negotiating because the administration says it isn’t. Their goal, obviously, is to reduce trade, not to free it.
They say they are doing this to bring manufacturing back to America and to promote national defense. But American manufacturers don’t seem happy. Even before the latest huge tax increase, trade war was their biggest concern:
The National Association of Manufacturers Q1 2025 Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey reveals growing concerns over trade uncertainties and increased raw material costs. Trade uncertainties surged to the top of manufacturers’ challenges, cited by 76.2% of respondents, jumping 20 percentage points from Q4 2024 and 40 percentage points from Q3 of last year.
The National Association of Manufacturers responded to the latest tax increase with a negative statement; so even the one major group that might have benefitted from tariffs is unhappy. Foreign producers and US consumers will of course be very unhappy. I think Trump is making a huge political blunder alongside the economic one- he got elected largely because Biden allowed inflation to get noticeably high, but now Trump is about to do the same thing.
I also see this as a huge national security blunder. For tariffs on China, I at least see their argument- we should take an economic hit today in order to become less reliant on our peer-competitor and potential adversary. But the tariffs on allies make no sense- they are hitting the very countries that are most valuable as economic and/or military partners in a conflict with China, like Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India, and Taiwan (!!!). One of our biggest advantages vs. China has been that we have many allies and they have few, and we appear to be throwing away this advantage for nothing.
What can you or I do about this? Stock up on durable goods before the price increases hit. Picking investment winners is always hard, but things this makes me consider are gold, stocks in foreign countries that trade little with the US, and companies whose stocks took a big hit today despite not actually being importers. Finally, we can try nudging Congress to do something. The Constitution gives the power to levy taxes to the legislative branch, but in the 20th century they voted to delegate some of this power to the executive. Any time they want, Congress could repeal these tariffs and take back the power to set rates. I have some hope they actually will- just yesterday the Senate voted to repeal some tariffs on Canada, and more votes are planned. The alternative is to risk a recession and a wipeout in the midterms:
How much does the US and our trading partners adhere to the principles of free trade? The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report includes a category that helps to answer this question. Fraser’s measure includes not just tariff rates, but also non-tariff barriers, trade regulations, black market exchange rates, and controls on the movement of capital and people. Each country is assigned a score from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most freedom to trade internationally.
Overall, the US gets a pretty good score, slightly over 8 out of 10, which ranks us as the 53rd most free trading country in the world (data from 2022). That’s pretty good, but clearly not the most open: 52 countries have more trade freedom! Here’s how the US and our 10 largest trading partners look on that measure (I’ve truncated the axis to show roughly the current range of country scores worldwide):
Countries/regions with the highest scores on this measure are Hong Kong and Singapore, and almost every European country scores higher than the US.
What if we just look at tariffs? The US has a slightly higher score at 8.3 out of 10, but our rank on tariffs is slightly lower at 59th most free in the world (this includes not just tariff rates, but also the standard deviation of tariff rates and revenue from the trade sector).
Relative to our largest trading partners, the US does look better on this subcomponent for tariffs, but is still lower than some of our trading partners (note the axis is slightly different than the first chart, to once again roughly show the international range on this measure):
Finally, we might be interested in how much these scores have changed over time. You might sometimes hear that the US has opened up more to trade, while the rest of the world has moved in the opposite direction. This might be true on some margins, but not overall according to the Fraser scores. I use 1990 as the baseline, which is before a lot of the free trade agreements and WTO changes that would happen over the next decade or so (Fraser has no data for Vietnam in 1990, so they are excluded):
Overall, the US and our major European trading partners have reduced the ability of their citizens to trade internationally, while places like China and India have opened up massively to trade. In 1990 China had a mean tariff rate of 40% and India’s was a whopping 79%. Today their tariff rates are still higher than the US: 7.5% in China and 18% in India, compared with 3% in the US. But they are the ones who have massively opened up their economies to international trade, when we consider all aspects of international trade, even if this opening up isn’t as complete as the US. The US ranked as the 12th highest on Fraser’s freedom to trade internationally component in 1990, but is down to 53rd in the most recent data.
While I was in southern Vermont last month, I visited a maple syrup production operation. The actual shed is called a “sugar house”, and the operation is called sugaring, even though the main product is the syrup.
When I was a boy, my dad hung some buckets on taps into the two maple sugar trees in our yard to collect the sap. He boiled the sap in a big old copper tub/kettle set on cinder blocks over a wood fire. You do have to boil and boil, since it takes about 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The other 44 gallons is boiled off by the heat of the burning firewood.
David Franklin’s operation in Guilford, VT (near Brattleboro) is much more efficient than that. The sugar house is set at the base of a long slope. The sap from the taps in the trees goes into tubing that connects into more tubing which goes downhill, so hundreds of trees feed into the long blue tubing shown here, which goes into collection tankage:
The tanks and pumps are arranged to optimize storage and then allow gravity flow into the equipment in the sugar house:
There is a big vat in the shed, around 4 ft wide x 12 ft long, where the sap is boiled by a wood fire kept going in a lower chamber.
The men have been cutting and splitting wood for months, to get ready for the sugaring season. Running this operation takes two or three people. Typically, there is one man keeping his eye fixed on the temperature and other properties of the sap that is being boiled, to make sure that the syrup is drawn off at the right consistency and is not overcooked. The syrup should be drawn off when the temperature reaches 219 degrees F (104 C). Another man keeps a timer set, and every six minutes he opens the door to the fire box and throws in half a dozen pieces of wood to keep the fire burning hot:
There is also filtering and handling of the drawn-off syrup, and checking the tankage outside. As a (retired) chemical engineer, I appreciated an improvement that was added to the boiling operation. Originally, all the steam from the boiling just went into the air of the shed, making it clammy and causing condensation from the roof to drip down onto workers’ heads. The heat of this steam was basically wasted. But they added a fairly high-tech “Steamaway” heat exchanger that sits on top of most of the boiling vat. The steam rises up through channels of incoming sap from the outside. The cool sap is warmed by the rising steam to around 194 F before entering the boiling vat. This preheating means less firewood is needed to make the syrup. Also, much of the steam is condensed into hot water which can be used for washing operations. A bonus is that much less steam ends up in the atmosphere of the shed, so no more dripping onto heads.
The owner, David Franklin, and his family had the vision for this operation. They built the large shed that houses the operation themselves, and invested in the expensive equipment. David is an old-school farmer, of the type skilled in every aspect of workmanship so they can do their own welding and building and equipment repair instead of paying others to do it. Keeping a large farm running smoothly is a complex task that takes more energy and practical know-how than most suburbanites or city dwellers can imagine. The other men running the sugaring operation are all smart and efficient and hard-working, and all retired from responsible, skilled professions. It seems they do the sugaring largely out of the enjoyment of doing a job well alongside worthy companions.
However, they are all over sixty years old. They can’t keep it up indefinitely since there is a lot of physical labor involved, yet the operation can’t afford to hire young people who would do the work just for money.
It is not clear to me, therefore, what the future of operations like this will be in 15 years, as this current generation of workers ages out. Unlike a lot of production, maple syrup making cannot be simply outsourced to Asia.
Anyway, David Franklin’s syrup is delicious. You can buy some on-line here. Or if you swing by the Franklin Family Farm in Guilford, you can also get some farm fresh eggs and certified organic hamburger, and stew meat.
I’m finally watching the Ken and Sarah Burns documentary on Da Vinci. It is, predictably, excellent. If you are heavily read on Da Vinci then there probably isn’t much that will be new to you, but the visual composition really adds something to what is less a propulsive story and more an attempt to capture the raw capaciousness of this person’s mind. It’s breathtaking, humbling, and inspiring.
There is a temptation to marvel at his dedication, ability to learn, and breadth. To relegate his accomplishments to the realm of outlier genius. Fight that temptation. Instead, take a moment to consider how dedicated he was to being unencumbered. To finding projects and patrons that would service to subsidize his pursuits in totality.
More than anything, observe a brilliant person for whom both the prospect and opportunity of boredom led him to follow his curiousity into whatever intellectual avenues it wanted to pursue, and then turning his imagination into product manifest in text and on canvas.
Boredom is an opportunity we increasingly don’t afford ourselves nearly enough of. We are starved for boredom. Allow for its sustenance.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has announced it is cutting 10,000 of its 82,000 jobs and restructuring:
As part of the restructuring, the department’s 10 regional offices will be cut to five and its 28 divisions consolidated into 15, including a new Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA, which will combine offices that address addiction, toxic substances and occupational safety into one central office.
AHA will include the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
These divisions do many different jobs, but as usual what stands out to me is their data- both because it is what I have found directly useful in the past, and because it is what I still have some control over now. Writing your Representatives or writing an op-ed has a minuscule chance of changing Federal policy, but if you download data, you definitely have that data.
What worries me here is that some of the agencies being consolidated might discontinue some of their data products going forward, or even pull some of what they have already created offline. I don’t think this is farfetched given what has happened so far, and given that even in good times these agencies pull down data they painstakingly prepared. For instance, HRSA only publicly posts the State- and County-level Area Health Resources File back to 2019, even though they have annual data going back to 2001.
Probably all 13 of the reorganizing divisions have data worth looking into, and given the staff cuts, even data products in the other divisions could be at risk. But my plan is to focus on the two reorganizing divisions whose data I have previously found useful- HRSA and SAMHSA. HRSA has a nice data download page with 16 different datasets, including the Area Health Resources File, which offers detailed information on the health care workers and facilities in each US county. SAMHSA offers the National Substance Use and Mental Health Services Survey, the Treatment Episode Data Set, and the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. I have previously cleaned and archived the state-level version of the NSDUH, but not the individual-level version that is for now still available from SAMHSA.
All of these datasets are easy to download now, and some will probably become very hard to access later, so now is a good time to take a few minutes and save whatever you think you might need.
An Al Jazeera talk show called The Steam asked me to join a discussion on fast fashion as the contrarian or as “the economist.” The found me because of the my article “Fast Fashion, Global Trade, and Sustainable Abundance”
Katia Osei – lead researcher and bioengineer, Or Foundation
Joy Buchanan – associate professor, Samford University
I am a small part of the 25-minute show. You can hear me from about minute 9:20 to 11:35 and then at the end from 23:30 to 24:45.
The points I made are that “fast” fashion has a good side for consumers, even though people are worried about the environmental impact of clothing waste. I got a few seconds to talk about my ideas for solutions which include labels about clothing durability and AI help with sorting. At the end I said that, as people become more aware of the downsides of fast fashion, we could stop putting social expectations on each other to wear a new outfit to every party and buy a custom shirt for every club event.
The historical US Census roles of disability among free persons are a mess. Specifically for the 1850-1870 censuses, the census bureau was not professionalized and the pay was low (a permanent office wasn’t founded until 1902). So, the enumerators were temporary employees and weren’t experts of their art. To boot, their handwriting wasn’t always crystal clear. Second, training for disability enumeration was even less complete and enumerators did their best with whom they encountered and how they understood the instructions. Finally, the digitized data in IPUMS doesn’t perfectly match the census reports. What a mess.
Guilty by Association
Disabled people and their families often misreported their status out of embarrassment or shame. Given that enumerators had quotas to fill, they were generally not inclined to investigate claimed statuses strenuously. Furthermore, disabled people were humans and not angels. Sometimes they themselves didn’t want to be associated with other types of disabled people. In particular, the disability designation in question (13) on the 1850 census questionnaire asked “Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict”. Saying “yes” may put you in company that you don’t prefer to keep.
The enumerator’s job was to write the disability that applied. What counts as deaf and dumb? That’s largely at the enumerator’s discretion. Some enumerators wrote ‘deaf’ even though that wasn’t an option. Was that shorthand for ‘Deaf and Dumb’? Or were they specifying that the person was deaf only and not dumb? We don’t know. But we do know that they didn’t follow the instructions. What if a person was both insane and blind? Then what should be written? “Blind/Insane” or “Blind and Insane” or “In-B” and any number of combinations were written. Some of them are easier to read than others.
Data Reading Errors
IPUMS is the major resource for using census data. The historical data was entered by foreign data-entry workers who didn’t always speak English. So, the records aren’t perfect. Some of the records are corroborated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but the historical script is sometimes hard to read. Finally, the fine folks at familysearch.org and Brigham Young University have used Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) volunteers to proof data entries. Regardless, we know that the IPUMS data isn’t perfect and that the disability data is far from perfect. Usually, reports don’t dwell on it. They simply say that the data is incomplete.
The disability data is incomplete for a lot of reasons related to the respondent, the enumerator, the instructions, and the digital data creation. What a mess.
Certificate of Need laws require many types of health care providers to obtain the permission of a state board before they are allowed to open or expand in many US states. But there is a lot of variation from state to state in which types of providers are covered by these laws. I put together this map to show the 15 states that require new home health care agencies to obtain a Certificate of Need:
CON states see reduced competition, which tends to be bad news for patients and new entrants, but good for existing providers and the private equity firms consideringbuying them.
But some CON states like Rhode Island have proposed reforms that would exempt home health agencies from the CON process, putting them in line with the majority of states that put new entrants on an even footing with incumbent providers.
For your upcoming summer road trips, even with a family, I recommend you check out the Acquired podcast. Each episode is the history (or partial history) of one business, told in a way that is entertaining and informative on many levels.
I was first introduced to the podcast when someone recommended the episode on Costco. It’s 3 hours long. I thought to myself “Really? I’m interested in Costco, but isn’t 3 hours a bit much?” But I had a long road trip, so I gave it a try. I was floored by how much I learned about Costco, the history of retail in the US, and the connections to other businesses. For example, Sam’s Club, which I thought was just kinda doing the same thing as Costco in different geographic areas, but no — Sam Walton copied Costco, as well as many other ideas from Sol Price (what a great name for a retailer!), the man behind the companies that would eventually become Costco today.
If you are at all interested in the history of business (especially mid-to-late Twentieth century businesses, though they do have one on Standard Oil), you will love this podcast. But I have found that the podcast is also great for children — well, at least if you have a roughly eleven-year-old boy. They will have many questions, so you may stop the podcast often, but that’s OK with me.
I think the reason some of the episodes appeal to children is because many of the stories focus on a single entrepreneur that started a business, and the hosts always spend a little bit of time on the childhood of those entrepreneurs. Often, they were entrepreneurial or innovative in some way as a child. For example, Warren Buffett in the first Berkshire Hathaway episode (there are 3 episodes on BH, totaling over 9 hours!), selling sticks of gum and cans of Coke door-to-door. Or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA, told in a 3-hour episode) selling matchboxes and fountain pens. Or the young Bill Gates being privileged enough in middle school to have access to computers, but also turning this into a business in high school (told in the first of two episodes on Microsoft, totaling once again over 9 hours).
As I mentioned in the above paragraph, if you thought that 3 hours on Costco was a lot, just wait until you listen to some of the others. You probably can’t imagine yourself listening to 9 hours on the history of a single company, much less your kids following along too. But I highly recommend that you give it a shot.
Economist Writing Every Day 