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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Population Predicts Regulation
Texas is one of the most regulated states in the country.
This is one of the surprises that emerged from the State RegData project, which quantifies the number of regulatory restrictions in force in each state. It turns out that a state’s population size, rather than political ideology or any thing else, is the best predictor of its regulations.
This is what I found, with my coauthors James Broughel and Patrick McLaughlin, when we set out to test whether a previous paper (Mulligan and Shliefer 2005) that showed a regulation-population link held up when we used the better data that is now available. We found that across states, a doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 percent increase in regulation.
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