Deaf

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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Now published: Human capital of the US deaf Population, 1850-1910

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

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.
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Human Capital is Technologically Contingent

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

The seminal paper in the theory of human capital by Paul Romer. In it, he recognizes different types of human capital such as physical skills, educational skills, work experience, etc. Subsequent macro papers in the literature often just clumped together some measures of human capital as if it was a single substance. There were a lot of cross-country RGDP per capita comparison papers that included determinants like ‘years of schooling’, ‘IQ’, and the like.

But more recent papers have been more detailed. For example, the average biological difference between men and women concerning brawn has been shown to be a determinant of occupational choice. If we believe that comparative advantage is true, then occupational sorting by human capital is the theoretical outcome. That’s exactly what we see in the data.

Similarly, my own forthcoming paper on the 19th century US deaf population illustrates that people who had less sensitive or absent ability to hear engaged in fewer management and commercial occupations, or were less commonly in industries that required strong verbal skills (on average).

Clearly, there are different types of human capital and they matter differently for different jobs. Technology also changes what skills are necessary to boot. This post shares some thoughts about how to think about human capital and technology. The easiest way to illustrate the points is with a simplified example.

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Deaf Census Speculations

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

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

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

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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