economic history

Minor Investment

Zachary Bartsch8 Comments

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.

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What is $100 from the Late Nineteenth Century Worth Today?

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

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?

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It’s Never Good News When Deposit Insurance is in the News

Jeremy Horpedahl3 Comments

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.)

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The Decline of Working Hours, in the Long Run and Recently

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

If you look at the long-run trends in labor markets, one of the most obvious changes is the decline in working hours. The chart from Our World in Data shows the long-run trend for some countries going back to 1870.

Hours of work declined in the US by 43% since 1870. In some countries like Germany, they fell a lot more (59%). But the decline was substantial across the board. One thing to notice in the chart above is that for the very recent years, the US is somewhat of an outlier in two ways. First, there hasn’t been much further decline after about the mid-20th century. Second, average hours of work in the US are quite a bit higher than many of developed countries (though similar to Australia).

But the labor market in the US (and in other countries) is in a very unusual spot at the present moment after the pandemic. So what has happened really recently. Many economists are looking into this question of hours and other questions about the labor market, and a new working paper titled “Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting” presents a lot of fascinating data about the current state of work in the US. The paper is short (just 14 pages) and readable for non-experts, so I encourage you to read it all yourself.

Here is one table and one chart from the paper that I will highlight, which shows that hours of work have been falling, but in a very specific set of workers: those who work lots of hours, and those with high incomes. For workers at the high end of hours worked, the 90th percentile, they have dropped from 50 hours to 45 hours of work per week just from 2019 to 2022. But workers at the median? Unchanged at 40 hours per week. (The data comes from the CPS.)

The figure below is only for male workers, and it shows a similar decline in hours worked for those at the high end of the earnings distribution. For those at the bottom, hours of work at mostly unchanged.

But Who Will Build the Roads? 19th Century Edition

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

In the United States and much of the developed world today, most roads are publicly provided, i.e., they are built and operated by governments. This is not exclusively true, as many private toll roads exist, but the vast majority of roads are owned and operated by governments. Must it be this way?

A recent working paper by Alan Rosevear, Dan Bogart, and Leigh Shaw-Taylor looks at a very important case study: Britain in the 19th century. Britain is important because they were the leading economy in the world at the time, at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. How were roads built and improved in England and Wales at this time? Here’s what the authors have to say in the abstract:

“non-profit organizations, known as turnpike trusts, built more new roads by attracting private investors and capable surveyors. We also show the Government Mail Road had the highest quality. Nevertheless, most turnpike trust roads were good quality, indicating their practical achievements.”

In the conclusion of the paper, they further add:

“Our analysis demonstrates that turnpike trusts were responsible for building 4,000 miles of new, good quality road in England and Wales, much of it between 1810 and 1838. On a directly comparable basis, the not-for-profit trusts built thirty times the mileage than had been built with direct Government funding during the early 1800s.”

To be clear, this paper is not a completely new discovery. It was already well-known that private companies built roads in Britain, as the authors make clear in their literature review. Similarly, there were many private turnpikes and toll roads in the US in the 19th century, as summarized in an encyclopedia entry by Klein and Majewski.

The Rosevear et al. paper adds new important details. First, they document the extent of private road building and improvements in the 19th century. Second, they show that these roads were generally of good quality, or at least they were of good quality for the time. Prior research had not documented these facts, thus making this a very important advance in our understanding of this time period. But perhaps more importantly, we see the possibility that many more roads today could be privately built and funded with user fee, especially considering that we are much, much wealthier today than 19th century Britain, we have more extensive and functional capital markets for raising the funds, etc.

Mom Life and Dad Life

Jeremy Horpedahl8 Comments

Earlier this week my co-blogger Mike had a really great post on work-from-home, and how we might turn former workspaces into new home spaces. It’s a really great idea, and an excellent example of a “second best” solution to the housing shortage.

I’d like to talk about a related but very different topic, which is the things we do in our homes. And for many working couples, that thing is raising children (and generally, keeping up the house).

If you spend much time on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve probably run across the account “Mom Life Comics.” It’s a very popular Instagram account, and lately some of the comics have been shared widely on Twitter (sometimes sympathetically, sometimes mockingly). The running theme of the topic, in short, is that moms carry much more of the “load” than dads do, both the physical load of doing stuff, and what’s sometimes called the “mental load” as well.

There’s a reason the comic is striking a chord with women: just ask any young mom today, especially a young mom that is also working. They have all felt this way at some point, and some of them probably feel this way all the time.

The idea is nothing new, of course. Sociologists have been using the term “invisible work” since at least the 1980s to describe the unseen, unpaid work that women do around the home. But the concept has, of course, been around for much longer. But how has the balance of work changed over time?

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If I Had 2 Million Dollars

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

In July of 1992, the Barenaked Ladies released their debut studio album Gordon, which included one of their most popular songs: “If I Had $1000000.” Considering all the inflation we’ve had recently, you know that $1 million doesn’t buy as much as it did in 1992, but how much less? As measured by the Consumer Price Index in the US, prices have roughly doubled since 1992, meaning you would need about $2 million to buy the same amount of stuff as in 1992.

(Note: the Barenaked Ladies are Canadian, and prices in Canada haven’t quite doubled since 1992, but this song was included on early demo tapes in 1988 and 1989 released in Canada, and prices have roughly doubled there since then.)

So the value of a dollar that you held since 1992 has lost roughly half of its purchasing power. That’s bad. But how bad is it? What’s the normal US experience for how long it takes for prices to double?

It turns out that even with the recent huge run-up in inflation, we just lived through the lowest period of inflation for anyone alive today.

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Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies

Vincent GelosoLeave a comment

There is a new paper available at Cliometrica. It is co-authored by Mathieu Lefebvre, Pierre Pestieau and Gregory Ponthiere and it deals with how the poor were counted in the past. More precisely, if the poor had “a survival disadvantage” they would die. As the authors make clear “poor individuals, facing worse survival conditions than non-poor ones, are under-represented in the studied populations, which
pushes poverty measures downwards.” However, any good economist would agree that people who died in a year X (say 1688) ought to have their living standards considered before they died in that same year (Amartya Sen made the same point about missing women). If not, you will undercount the poor and misestimate their actual material misery.

So what do Lefebvre et al. do deal with this? They adapt what looks like a population transition matrix (which is generally used to study in-,out-migration alongside natural changes in population — see example 10.15 in this favorite mathematical economics textbook of mine) to correctly estimate what the poor population would have been in a given years. Obviously, some assumptions have to be used regarding fertility and mortality differentials with the rich — but ranges can allow for differing estimates to get a “rough idea” of the problem’s size. What is particularly neat — and something I had never thought of — is that the author recognize that “it is not necessarily the case that a higher evolutionary advantage for the non-poor over the poor pushes measured poverty down”. Indeed, they point out that “when downward social mobility is high”, poverty measures can be artificially increased upward by “a stronger evolutionary advantage for the non-poor”. Indeed, if the rich can become poor, then the bias could work in the opposite direction (overstating rather than understating poverty). This is further added to their “transition matrix” (I do not have a better term and I am using the term I use in classes).

What is their results? Under assumptions of low downward mobility, pre-industrial poverty in England is understated by 10 to 50 percentage points (that is huge — as it means that 75% of England at worse was poor circa 1688 — I am very skeptical about this proportion at the high-end but I can buy a 35-40% figure without a sweat). What is interesting though is that they find that higher downward mobility would bring down the proportion by 5 percentage points. The authors do not speculate much as to how likely was downward mobility but I am going to assume that it was low and their results would be more relevant if the methodology was applied to 19th century America (which was highly mobile up and down — a fact that many fail to appreciate).

This Time was Way Different

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

The financial crisis recession that started in late 2007 was very different from the 2020 pandemic recession. Even now, 15 years later, we don’t all agree on the causes of the 2007 recession. Maybe it was due to the housing crisis, maybe due to the policy of allowing NGDP to fall, or maybe due to financial contagion. I watched Vernon Smith give a lecture in 2012 in which he explained that it was a housing crisis. Scott Sumner believes that a housing sectoral decline would have occurred, and that the economy-wide deep recession and subsequent slow recovery was caused by poor monetary policy.

Everyone agrees, however, that the 2007 recession was fundamentally different from the 2020 recession. The latter, many believe, reflected a supply shock or a technology shock. Performing social activities, including work, in close proximity to others became much less safe. As a result, we traded off productivity for safety.

The policy responses to each of the two were also different. In 2020, monetary policy was far more targeted in its interventions and the fiscal stimulus was much bigger. I’ll save the policy response differences for another post. In this post, I want to display a few graphs that broadly reflect the speed and magnitude of the recoveries. Because the recessions had different causes, I use broad measures that are applicable to both.

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Mises’s Bureaucracy, a Recap

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

My favorite two economists are Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman. They might consider one another from very different schools of thought, though there is reason to think that they are not so different. As an undergraduate student, I liked them both, but I became more empirics-minded in graduate school and as a young assistant professor.

As I progressed through graduate school and conducted empirical research, my opinions and policy prescriptions changed and were refined from what they once were. In graduate school, I didn’t study Austrian Economics, though it was certainly in the water at George Mason University. Recently, as an assistant professor with a few years under my belt, I picked up Bureaucracy (1944) and read it as a matter of leisure.

One word:

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