History

Children Don’t Die Like They Used To

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Academics generally agree on the changing patterns of mortality over time. Centuries ago, people died of many things. Most of those deaths were among children and they were often related to water-borne illness. A lot of that was resolved with sanitation infrastructure and water treatment. Then, communicable diseases were next. Vaccines, mostly introduced in the first half of the 20th century, prevented a lot of deaths.

Similarly, food borne illness killed a lot of people before refrigeration was popular. The milkman would deliver milk to a hatch on the side of your house and swap out the empty glass bottles with new ones full of milk. For clarity, it was not a refrigerated cavity. It was just a hole in the wall with a door on both the inside and outside of the house. A lot of babies died from drinking spoiled milk. 

Now, in higher income countries, we die of things that kill old people. These include cancer, falls that lead to infections, and the various diseases related to obesity. We’re able to die of these things because we won the battles against the big threats to children. 

What prompts such a dreary topic?

I was perusing the 1870 Census schedules and I stumbled upon some ‘Schedule 2s’. Most of us are familiar with schedule 1, which asks details about the residents living in a household. But schedule 2 asked about the deaths in the household over the past year.  Below is a scan from St. Paul, Minnesota.

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What is $300,000 from “The Gilded Age” Worth Today?

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE THIRD SEASON OF THE GILDED AGE

In Season 3 of the drama series “The Gilded Age,” one of the servants (Jack, a footman) earns a sum of $300,000 by selling a patent for a clock he invented (the total sum was $600,000, split with his partner, the son of the even wealthier neighbor to the house Jack works in). In the series, both the servants and Jack’s wealthy employers are shocked by this amount. Really shocked. They almost can’t believe it.

How can we put that $300,000 from 1883 in New York City in context so we can understand it today?

A recent WSJ article attempts to do that. They did a good job, but I think more context could help. For example, they say “Jack could buy a small regional bank outside of New York or bankroll a new newspaper.” Probably so, but I don’t think that quite conveys the shock and awe from the other characters in the show (a regional bank? Ho-hum).

First, the WSJ states that the “figure nowadays would be between $9 and $10 million.” That’s just doing a simple inflation adjustment, probably using a calculator such as Measuring Worth (it’s a good tool, and they mention it later in the story). But as the WSJ goes on to note, that probably isn’t the best way to think about that figure.

Here’s my best attempt to contextualize the $300,000 figure: as a footman, Jack probably made $7 to $10 per week. Or let’s call it $1 per day. That means Jack’s fellow servants would have had to work 300,000 days to earn that same amount of income — in other words, assuming 6 days of work per week, they would have had to work for almost 1,000 years to earn that much income. Jack appears, to his co-workers, to have earned that income almost in one fell swoop (though in reality, he spent months of his free time toiling away at the clock).

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Messy Disability Records in the Historical Censuses

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

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.

Summer censuses also sometimes missed deaf students who were traveling to or from a residential school.

Enumerator Discretion

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.

Keeping Receipts

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Online shopping is convenient and even the norm for many items. Going to the store sounds like a time-consuming labor or an exceptional outing. My family, for example, lives in a suburban location that doesn’t have well-priced grocery home delivery. Shipping only works for some non-perishables. So, for many items we order online and do ‘drive-up pick-up’. We don’t even need to go into the store for many items. And reordering the same items repeatedly is a breeze.

We are also accustomed to the ability to return things. If your blender breaks on your first smoothie, then no worries – you can return it. If the chocolate cookies don’t taste like chocolate? Return it – satisfaction guaranteed. You can buy three pairs of shoes in different sizes and then keep the ones you want at the original sale price. Return the others.

For me, besides the time saved and convenience, a major factor in my decision to make purchases online is the documentation. I don’t need to save the receipt in a shoe box, Ziploc, or file drawer – the online retailer keeps an archive of all my purchases. Often this includes the date, amount, and shipping details including delivery date. There’s a super convenient digital paper trail.

If I need to contact a seller in order to exercise a warranty, then I have their contact information. I don’t need to retain the product packaging or investigate the brand at a future inopportune time. For example, I recently bought a Little Tykes water table for my kids. As I was assembling it on Christmas Eve I realized that I was missing a small part. I was able to work around it. But I was also able to immediately contact the manufacturer with a copy of my invoice. I emailed the date of purchase, the product model number, and the instruction manual had conveniently included part numbers. They were able to ship me the parts after a single email. Online shopping, and the resulting trail of evidence, makes the process much more practical than keeping paper records in a likely unorganized fashion.

There are other benefits to the paper trail. Back before widespread online shopping, retailers would often offer rebates as a sales strategy. In the year 2004, I bought a computer hard drive for $120 before a $40 mail-in rebate. The retailer (or manufacturer, I can’t remember) was hoping that people saw the post-rebate price and then failed to redeem it. And that often happened.  You needed to fill out a rebate form on an index card, cut the UPC bar code of the product packaging, and then mail them with your receipt to the company rebate department in a stamped envelope. If you dragged your feet, then you’d probably lose an important piece of the crucial combination and lose out on your $40 rebate. If the items were lost in the mail, then you were shucks-out-of-luck. Now, rebates have gone the way of the dodo since receipts are automatically retained and retrievable.

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Apropos of everything

mdmakowsky3 Comments

Robert Nozick and John Rawls were intellectual rivals, friendly colleagues, and even members of the same reading group. Their conversations, at least the ones we were privy to through their iterations of published work, were dedicated to reconciling the role of the state in manifesting the best possible world. Nozick, it can be said in a gratuituous oversimplification, favored a minimal government while Rawls, similarly oversimplified, favored a larger, wider reaching set of government institutions. Both were well aware of the risks and rewards of concentrating power within government institutions, they simply arrived at different conclusions based on risks each wanted to minimize versus those they were willing to incur.

My mental model of the evolution of government (influenced heavily by Nozick and refined towards the end by Rawls) goes something like this:

  1. 100,000 years ago roving bands of humans grow to thrive in their environment by solving collective action problems, largely through familial relations. Larger groups have more success hunting, foraging, and protecting themselves from predators.
  2. Eventually some groups get so good at collective action that they begin to prey on other smaller groups. These “bandits” gain more through resources taken by force than they would strictly producing resources through hunting and foraging.
  3. This creates an arms race in group size, with bigger groups having the advantage while facing the diminishing marginal returns imposed by difficultings in maintaining the integrity of collective action in the face of individual incentives to free ride i.e. its hard to get people to pull their weight when their parents aren’t watching.
  4. Some groups mitigate these difficulties, growing larger still. At some threshold of group size, the rewards to mobilitity are overtaken by the rewards to maintaining institutions and resources (freshwater, shelter, opportunities for agriculture), leading to stationary groups.
  5. These stationary groups begin to act as “stationary bandits”, extracting resources from both outsiders for the benefit of their group and from their members for the benefit of their highest status members.
  6. Differing institutions evolve across groups, varying the actions prescribed and proscribed for leaders, members (citizens), and non-members. Some groups are highly restrictive, others less so. Some groups are more extractive, funneling resources to a select minority. Some groups redistribute more , others less.
  7. Democracy evolves specifically as an institution to replace hereditary lines, a deviation from the familial lines that sat the origin of the state all the way back at step 1. Its correlation with other institutions is less certain, though it does seem to move hand-in-hand with personal property rights and market-based economies. Democracies begin to differentiate themselves based on the internal, subsidiary institutions they favor and instantiate.

A lot of my political leanings can be found not in favoring Nozick or Rawls, but in the risk immediately preceding their point of divergence. When I look at well-functioning modern democracies, I see an exception to the historical rule. I see thousands of years of stationary bandits voraciously extracting resources while high status members taking desperate action to maintain power in a world where property rights are weak and collective action is tenuous. Rawls saw a growing state as a opportunity to create justice through fairer, more equitable outcomes. Nozick saw a growing state as a further concentration of power that, no matter how potentially benevolent today, would eventually attract the most selfish and venial, leading to corruption and return to the purest stationary bandit, only now with the newfound scale.

Both strike as me as perfectly reasonable concerns about very real risks. Which do I believe the greater risk? Depends on the news and what I had for breakfast that day. In the current political context, both in the US and several other democracies, I am of the growing opinion they would be in broad agreement that the biggest risk is not the perversion of democracy from suboptimal policies and subsidiary institutions (step 7), but rather a disastrous reversion to the pre-democratic institutions (step 6).

The most underrated aspect of democracy may very well be its fragility. While historical rarity may not be undeniable evidence of inherent fragility, but it would certainly suggest that once achieved it is worth the overwhelming dedication of resources, including the sacrifice of welfare optimality, to ensure its perserverance.

It cost a lot to get here. A lot. Sacrifices that are hard to even conceive of, let alone empathize with, while living within the profound luxury of modern life. I have no doubt that many of us will find ourselves underwhelmed with the policy platforms of the full menu of viable candidates made available to voters at every level of national and local office in a few weeks. So take this little scribbling for exactly what it is: an argument to vote against candidates that reduce the probability of our constitutional republic remaining intact. By comparison, all the other differences add up to a historical rounding error.

Almost Observable Human Capital

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

I’ve written about IPUMS before. It’s great. Among individual details are their occupations and industry of their occupation. That’s convenient because we can observe how technology spread across America by observing employment in those industries. We can also identify whether demographic subgroups differed or not by occupation. There’s plenty of ways to slice the data: sex, race, age, nativity, etc.

But what do we know about historical occupations and what they entailed? At first blush, we just have our intuition. But it turns out that we have more. There is a super boring 1949 report published by the Department of Labor called the “Dictionary of Occupational Titles”. The title says it all. But, the DOL published another report in 1956 that’s conceptually more interesting called “Estimates of Worker Trait Requirements for 4,000 Jobs as Defined in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles: An Alphabetical Index”.  The report lists thousands of occupations and identifies typical worker aptitudes, worker temperaments, worker interests, worker physical capacities, and working conditions. Below is a sample of the how the table is organized:

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Accounting Appears Before Literature

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

For a current research project on institutions, I skimmed The Dawn of Everything (2021).

I liked this passage about an archaeological site in Syria. The following items were found in a destroyed village where people are estimated to have lived 8,000 years ago:

These devices included economic archives, which were miniature precursors to the temple archives at Uruk and other later Mesopotamian cities.

These were not written archives: writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years. What did exist were geometric tokens made of clay, of a sort that appear to have been used in many similar Neolithic villages, most likely to keep track of the allocation of particular resources.

In chunks, the book has fascinating stuff like the quote above. However, D-o-E is the second book I have read this year that tries to do too much. A book on “everything” sounds incredibly fun to write, and I’m the type who would try, so I take these as a warning.

What is more intriguing than history? Emily Wilson said it well, concerning some of the oldest records we have of human words:

I think we should stop selling classics as, “These are the societies that formed modern America, or that formed the Western canon” — which is a really bogus kind of argument — and instead start saying, “We should learn about ancient societies because they’re different from modern societies.” That means that we can learn things by learning about alterity. We can learn about what would it be to be just as human as we are, and yet be living in a very, very different society.

Prohibition Reversals

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

We have all heard of the prohibition era. Popularly, it refers to the period from 1920-1933 during which it was illegal to sell, transport, and import alcohol in the US. National prohibition was enacted by the 18th amendment and repealed by the 21st amendment. That’s the basic picture.

But did you know that there were state alcohol prohibitions prior to the national one? In fact, there were 3 major waves of state alcohol prohibitions. The first was in the 1850s, the 2nd was in the 1880s, and then the 3rd preceded the 18th amendment. The image below illustrates the number of states that had statewide dry policies. You can see the first two waves and then the tsunami just prior to 1920.

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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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US Households Have a Lot More Income Than 1967, and It’s Probably Not Just Because of the Rise of Dual-Income Households

Jeremy Horpedahl6 Comments

We are going through some tough economic times right now: high rates of inflation (generally exceeding wage growth) with the strong possibility of a recession in the near future. In times like this, I think it is useful to also consider the historical perspective. The US economy has gone through challenging times in the past, but the long-run track record is impressive.

Here is one way to show the data. It comes from the Census Bureau, and shows the total money income of households in the US. The data is, of course, adjusted for inflation, and not just with the regular CPI-U: they use the superior CPI-U-RS, which attempts to maintain a consistent methodology for how prices are measured (BLS is constantly improving the CPI, but that sometimes makes historical comparisons challenging). I present the data both as a percent of the total number of households, and the absolute numbers.

I’ve shaded the chart to suggest that over $100,000 of annual income is high income, and under $35,000 is low income, with everything else considered “middle class.” By these definitions, the number of high-income households in the US increased dramatically from 6.6 million (10.9% of the total) in 1967 to 43.7 million (33.6% of the total) in 2020. The number of low-income households also rose, unfortunately, from 21.4 million in 1967 to 34 million in 2020, but the portion of the total fell (from 35.2% to 26.2%) since it increased slower than the overall growth of the number of households. Today, there are more high-income households (43.7 million) than low-income households (34 million) in the US.

But even if you don’t like those definitions, I’ve provided as much detail in the chart as Census makes available publicly. For example, let’s say you think $200,000 is what makes you high income. There were fewer than 1 million of these households in 1967 (1.3% of the total). Today, there are over 13 million of them (10.3% of the total). However we slice the data, there are a lot more high-income households in the US than in the past. (Remember remember, this is all adjusted for inflation.)

Many people found this data interesting when I posted it to Twitter, including the world’s richest person. But among the many objections raised is that this is driven by the rise of female employment and dual-income households. And indeed, that is a factor. But how much of a factor?

Let’s dig into the data.

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