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.
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Human Capital is Socially Contingent
The Deaf community is interesting.
Before I did research, I thought that deaf people simply could not hear. After seeing the Spiderman episodes that featured Daredevil, I believed that it was plausible and likely that deaf people had some sort of cognitive or sensory compensatory skill.
But it wasn’t until recently that I learned of the Deaf Studies field. There is an entire field that’s dedicated to studying deaf people. It’s related to, but not the same as Disability Studies. In fact, there are some sharp divisions between the two fields.
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Economist Writing Every Day 