Category Archive: Sources

1. Rooftops

   June 30, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Rooftops

   DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL POLICY

   Brazil’s Bolsa Familia is widely credited with lifting more than 20 million people out of extreme poverty, making it a global model for anti-poverty initiatives. Developed as part of a broader theory of equitable development, it serves as the basis for ongoing efforts to expand the social welfare system for the country’s poor and working class.

   In a 2017 book, economist LENA LAVINAS takes a critical approach to Brazilian social policy. Examining the relationship between social policy and financial markets, Levinas argues that, despite its successes, the strategy of “social developmentalism” in Brazil unwittingly entrenched both unequal growth and the stagnation of social protection.

   From the book:

   “The twenty-first century seemed poised to pluck Brazil from its history of underdevelopment. After suffering through two decades (1980–2003) of low growth and considerable macroeconomic instability, Brazil—in step with the rest of Latin America—was ready to begin a series of rosy years. In the new developmental strategy, the missing link on the way to social cohesion, so the argument went, would emerge with the advent of mass consumption. In Brazil, as in the rest of Latin America, the core impediment to the expansion of a mass consumption society resided (above all else) in the absence of mechanisms for boosting consumption in the context of low productivity and the persistent oversupply of labor.

   Performance in terms of the provision of public facilities has not tracked remotely close to the vitality of the market. It does, however, reveal welfare inequities that the market obscures. Through this prism, the upward social mobility observed in Brazil in the years spanning 2003–2014 failed to even come close to promoting a true expansion of the country’s middle classes. Social policy served as collateral to access financial markets through credit. In Brazil, the market has universalized access to color TVs and fridges among those in the lowest income quintile. Treated water, however, to say nothing of adequate sanitation, remains a luxury, the province of few.”

   Link to the publisher’s page.

   • A 2018 by Lavinas details one of the book’s arguments—”the collateralization of social policy.” Link. And a 2013 paper by Lavinas examines the broad adoption of conditional cash transfer schemes throughout Latin America. Link.
   • In a 2014 paper, Michael McCarthy examines union attempts to control pension fund investment. Link. Another paper by Natascha van der Zwan on the financial politics of occupational pensions. Link. See also: McCarthy’s book Dismantling Solidarity, on these same themes. Link.
   • Marie Gottschalk’s book The Shadow Welfare State examines the American “private-sector safety net.” Link. See also: Frank R. Dobbin’s 1992 paper “The Origins of Private Social Insurance: Public Policy and Fringe Benefits in America, 1920-1950.” Link.

   ‡ welfare social_policy political_economy

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Economics of Discrimination

   Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the history of economic expertise, particularly as it relates to categories of discrimination. In a forthcoming article, she analyzes published legal decisions to examine “why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US.”

   From the paper:

   “From the 1970s until the 1980s, multiple regression analysis (MRA) was economists’ primary tool for measuring discrimination. It did so by decomposing the observed differences in mean economic outcomes (wages, promotion rates) between two demographic groups (women and men, minority and majority) into a portion explained by mean differences in human capital characteristics (such as education or experience) and an unexplained residual. This residual was attributed to discriminatory practices. This article describes how the use of MRA was received in U.S. courtrooms and how economists made sense of judges’ and lawyers’ understanding of their practices. More specifically, it seeks to unpack how, over fifteen years, judges’ reactions evolved from blunt dismissal to widespread and largely unchallenged use. By the early 1980s, the use of MRA was considered standard practice in employment discrimination litigation.”

   Link to the pre-print, link to Chassonnery-Zaïgouche’s website.

   ‡ economics history new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • “Market power in higher education is an important and under-studied phenomenon. Concentration is increasing, and so are prices. The one may have something to do with the other.” Brand new research led by JFI’s Laura Beamer and Marshall Steinbaum, with Francis Tseng and Eddie Nilaj. Link to the analysis, link to the mapping tool.
   • This week, Robert Smith announced the launch of the Student Freedom Initiative (SFI), a multi-billion dollar nonprofit fund to finance the educations of students at HBCUs. JFI is providing program design, analytics, and research for the new initiative. See our website and press release for more information, and Time Magazine for an announcement of the initiative.
   • In the NYT, coverage of a new study by Zach Parolin, Megan Curran and Chris Wimer, on the CARES Act and poverty. Link to the article, link to a Twitter thread on the findings. Stay tuned to the Phenomenal World for further elaboration next week.
   • “We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity.” From 2018, Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I. Steins on US inequality from 1949-2016. Link.
   • The social safety net in the wake of Covid-19.” By Hillary Hoynes et al. Link.
   • “In an historically unprecedented configuration, this emerging asset manager capitalism is dominated by shareholders that are fully diversified ‘universal owners,’ while lacking direct economic interest in the performance of portfolio companies.” Benjamin Braun maps changes in the investment chain and their implications for theories of corporate governance. Link.
   • “A large issuance of SDRs is an easy and effective way to provide a major infusion of financial support to the countries that most need it.” Alexander Main, Mark Weisbrot, and Didier Jacobs with a new report on IMF Special Drawing Rights. Link.
   • Zhiwei Zhao, David Walters, and Desai Shan draw on 157 interviews with seafarers and managers in Chinese ship crewing agencies to examine “Impediments to free movement of Chinese seafarers in the maritime labour market.” Link.
   • At Berkeley’s Labor Center, Adam Seth Litwin analyzes technological change in healthcare delivery: “The choices we make now can lead us in one of two directions: either the benefits of technological change will be shared among patients, providers, and health care workers alike, or, technology will be deployed primarily to increase returns for atomized actors, and to reduce staffing and increase micromanagement of workers.” Link.
   • Ariell Zimran studies “the impact of transportation on health in the rural United States, 1820–1847,” finding: “transportation affected health by increasing population density, leading to a worse epidemiological environment.” Link.
   • “We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are used primarily as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized sixty-five years of archival records on prisons from 1920 to 1995 and provide new estimates on the value of prison labor and the effects of labor demand shocks on incarceration. We find that prison labor was economically valuable to the colonial regime, making up a significant share of colonial public works expenditure. Positive economic shocks increased incarceration rates over the colonial period. This result is reversed in the postcolonial period, where prison labor is not a notable feature of state public finance. We document a significant reduction in contemporary trust in legal institutions, like police, in areas with high historic exposure to colonial imprisonment. The resulting reduction in trust is specific to legal institutions today.” Belinda Archibong and Nonso Obikili, “The Price of Prisons and the Lasting Effects of Incarceration.” Link.

2. Running Horse

   June 24, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Running Horse

   LABOR IN CHINA

   In her 2007 book, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, sociologist CHING KWAN LEE paints an intricate portrait of the two segments of the Chinese working class that have most acutely experienced the country’s changing political economy: laid-off and retired workers in China’s industrial rustbelt, and young migrant factory workers in the export-oriented sunbelt.

   From the preface:

   “Although unemployment and exploitation can be found in many places and at different times, peculiarities of China’s postsocialist conditions have engendered features of labor politics that defy conventional categorization. First, the law, fledgling legal institutions, and the rhetoric of legal rights are central to labor protests throughout China, even though very few workers actually believe in the effectiveness of the regime’s ideology of law-based government. Second, leading to the formation of neither a national labor movement nor representative organizations, the several thousand worker protests that erupted every year throughout the 1990s took the prevailing form of localized, workplace-based cellular activism. With workers blocking traffic in the streets, lying on railroads, or staging sit ins in front of government buildings, these demonstrations presented a palpable threat to social stability, at least in the eyes of the national leadership. What must be emphasized, however, is that workers’ cellular activism has thus far rarely escalated into large-scale, coordinated, cross-regional unrest.

   What, then, is the nature of working-class agitation in this period of marketization and globalization? Above all, I have found that the communist regime’s strategy of accumulation, in the form of what I term ‘decentralized legal authoritarianism,’ both generates the impetus for and places limits on working-class protests in this period of market reform. This larger political economic context of reform shapes not only collective mobilization by workers but also popular rebellion in general, and therefore is a key to understanding the institutional foundations of China’s economic dynamism and sociopolitical tensions.”

   Link to the publisher’s page.

   • “Labour strikes in China are always launched by unorganized workers rather than by trade unions.” Feng Chen on China’s quadripartite wage setting system. Link.
   • “This chapter investigates the role of social networks during China’s most dynamic period of urban protest (1919–1927) in Shanghai.” A 2007 book chapter by Elizabeth Perry. Link. See also: Perry’s groundbreaking 1993 book on Chinese labor politics in the early 20th century, and her 1980 analysis of peasant rebellions in Huaipei from 1845–1945. Link and link. ht Julian G.
   • Meg Rithmire reviews regional approaches to Chinese political economy, asking: “How have local governments differently interpreted and implemented national reform policies? What explains different decision-making regarding investments and growth strategies? And how have different local growth strategies beget different socioeconomic consequences?” Link.

   ‡ labor china political_economy

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   The Great Migration and Northern Backlash

   Re-upping a remarkable working paper (shared here last year) by soon-to-be Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Berkeley ELLORA DERENONCOURT, that examines the effects of the Great Migration on the distributional politics of northern cities.

   From the paper:

   “Northern cities’ responses to the Great Migration ultimately reduced the gains from growing up in destination locations. Those growing up in former Great Migration destinations today have lower adult income than those from similarly resourced families but in locations less affected by the Migration. In response to black migrant arrivals in the mid-century, white families withdrew from shared urban neighborhoods and public schools. sing data I assembled on destinations from 1920–2015, I show the Migration led to persistent segregation and higher police spending, crime, and incarceration from the 1960s onwards. Today, roughly 27% of the gap in upward mobility between black and white families in the urban North can be attributed to changes induced by the Great Migration.”

   Link to the most recent version of the paper, link to Derenoncourt’s website.

   ‡ race history new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • In the latest entry in our Phenomenal Works series, Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks, recommends four books that “analyze the complex interconnections between politics, statecraft, and the economy.” Link to the post.
   • In a new paper, JFI Senior Fellow Johannes Haushofer and co-authors Darin Christensen, Oeindrila Dube, Bilal Siddiqi, and Maareten Voors, measure the impact of interventions in health care delivery in Sierra Leone—in “normal” conditions, and during the Ebola outbreak. Link.
   • A remarkable paper by Lisa Cook, Maggie Jones, David Rosé, and Trevon Logan digitizes the Green Books—travel guides meant to provide navigation information about segregation to African Americans traveling in the pre–Civil Rights Act US. Link.
   • “Voting along class lines is more likely to occur where states can tax the income and assets of the wealthy.” New research on policy and voting by Kimuli Kasara and Pavithra Suryanarayan. Link.
   • “During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war. These investments had large effects on the direction and location of U.S. invention and high-tech industrial employment, setting in motion agglomeration forces which shaped the technology clusters of the postwar era.” Link.
   • New from Dani Rodrik: “What are the mechanisms through which globalization fuels populism?” Link.
   • Lance Taylor on how “Profits from Job Losses Will Finance Government Borrowing for COVID-19 Bailouts.” Link.
   • From the BIS, an excellent report on the international role of the US dollar. Link. See also: Dominik Leusder and Yakov Feygin’s recent essay on the Phenomenal World.
   • Roger Gould uses network analysis to look at National Guard enlistment, informal networks, and mobilization patterns in the Paris Commune of 1871. Link.
   • A new paper by Gernot Wagner and Cristian Proistosescu on uncertainties and the social cost of carbon emissions. Link.
   • W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Link.
   • “How do economic structures shape political behavior in contexts marred by intergroup animus? In this paper, we explore this question in the context of the U.S. South using the arrival of the boll weevil cotton pest as an exogenous shock to a coercive economy. Using a panel difference-in-difference, we find that the boll weevil reduces both tangible and symbolic coercion in terms of anti-black lynchings and Confederate monument construction. Our cross-sectional analysis indicated long-run effects on other outcomes as well: counties more exposed to the boll weevil have higher rates of black voter registration and suggestively lower rates of membership in the Ku Klux Klan.” James Feigenbaum, Soumyajit Mazumder, and Cory Smith on the boll weevil infestation and the political economy of the US South. Link.

3. Green Stripe

   June 15, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Green Stripe

   GUARD LABOR

   As debate and discussion continues over reforms to US policing, attention has been drawn to the share of municipal and state budgets dedicated to police departments. While a useful proxy of governmental priorities, these budgets only tell part of the complex story of the role and function of police in society.

   In a their 2008 book chapter titled “The Enforcement-Equality Trade Off,” ARJUN JAYADEV and SAMUEL elaborate the role of what they term “guard labor”—the labor units “devoted to the maintenance of order.”

   From the chapter:

   “In order to maintain order, all societies allocate resources to defence, policing, surveillance, contractual monitoring and other activities that sustain the property rights and other claims that characterise status quo institutions. Data from the United States indicate a significant increase in its extent in the USA over the period 1890 to the present. Cross-national comparisons show a significant statistical association between income inequality and the fraction of the labour force that is constituted by guard labour, as well as with measures of political legitimacy (inversely) and political conflict.

   Continental European welfare states devote considerably less resources to the maintenance of order than do the English-speaking economies. A possible explanation is that these economies divert fewer resources from directly productive uses to guard labour by undertaking larger transfers of claims on resources in the form of social expenditures and higher wages.”

   Link to the report.

   • For more on guard labor, link to a 2019 newsletter, in we shared Jayadev’s classic 2006 paper with Samuel Bowles on guard labor. Also shared in that letter, a 2014 Times op-ed by Bowles and Jayadev on the subject, with an unbeatable infographic comparing the US’ share of guard labor to other rich nations.
   • See Jayadev’s paper “Estimating Guard Labor” for more on the employment statistics behind their analysis. Link. And link to a 2018 blog post on police and prison spending in the US and Europe. Link.
   • For more on the relationship between the labor market and policing and prisons, see this recent paper by Seth Prins and Adam Reich. Link. See also a 2002 paper by Eric Gould et al on crime rates and labor market opportunity from 1979-1997. Link.
   • “Inequality and Guard Labor, or Prohibition and Guard Labor?” by Vincent Geloso and Vadim Kufenko. Link.

   ‡ guard_labor police economics

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   The origins of ranchos in 20th century Mexico

   ROMINA ROBLES RUVALCABA is a Postdoc in History at the University of Chicago. Her 2017 PhD dissertation examined the struggle for land rights in Caxcana, Jalisco between 1939 and 1959, a period during which the region saw a massive increase in agricultural productivity.

   From the introduction:

   “At the national level, this period marked the end of countryside’s basic unit of socioeconomic life: the hacienda. Scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to new social structures emerging after 1940, when war, agrarian reform, power politics, and emboldened farmers forced their eradication. This dissertation explores the form of land tenure that took the hacienda’s place as the key engine of rural society throughout Mexico: the Mexican rancho, or farm, also commonly known in the post-Revolutionary twentieth century as the pequeña propiedad. I argue that the rancho rose as a dominant form of land tenure post 1940, establishing its regime of property relations over the vast lands formerly belonging to hacienda owners. In my dissertation, the rancho represents the fight of farmers not only to guarantee their livelihood, but to eradicate traditional forms of arbitrary violence.”

   Link to the paper, link to Ruvalcaba’s website.

   ‡ land history new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • On the blog, Adam Tooze in conversation with Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein about their recent book Trade Wars Are Class Wars. Link. (And link to the recording of the discussion on YouTube.)
   • “Using an underutilized data set on the conditions associated with World Bank loans, we find that borrower countries that vote with the United States at the UN are required to enact fewer domestic policy reforms, and on fewer and softer issue areas.” Richard Clark and Lindsay R. Dolan on the indirect avenues of US global influence. Link.
   • Andrea Garnero with novel data on the impact of centralization and coordination in wage bargaining on unemployment and inequality. Link.
   • “The 19th century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article examines the different ways colonial governments sought to finance public works, including corporate investment through London capital markets. By the latter part of the century, irrigation projects were definitively financed through state debt.” Aditya Ramesh considers British speculation on Indian rivers. Link.
   • A special issue of Social Policy and Society on taxation: “Social policy analyses can reveal the ways in which taxation policies contradict and even undermine the stated goals of other public policies.” Link to the open access introduction, by Micheál Collins, Sally Ruane, and Adrian Sinfield.
   • Kory Kroft et. al on imperfect competition in America’s construction industry. Link.
   • In the new issue of European Labor Law, David Mangan and Adalberto Perulli reflect on changing employee classifications, and Philippa Collins proposes a “Bill of Rights for Workers.” Link, link, and link.
   • Bolormaa Gochoosuren’s 2013 dissertation on “Transformation of Social Welfare Policy in Mongolia, 1990-2010.” Link.
   • “When does reform provoke rebellion among its intended beneficiaries, and when does it discourage it? To answer this question, we look at Russia’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the accompanying program of land reform, whereby land rights and feudal obligations were renegotiated in anticipation of the eventual transfer of land from the nobility to the peasantry. A key feature of Russian emancipation was the inability of the central government to carry out reform on its own. The process was therefore carried out locally, with the participation of the nobility whose privileges were at stake. Much of the unrest that followed had its roots in that local implementation. We conclude that when–for reasons of state capacity or the nature of reform–the implementation of reform is predominantly local, a more ambitious reform leads to greater disappointment and thus more unrest.” Evgeny Finkel & Scott Gehlbach, Reform and Rebellion in Weak States. Download for free until June 17th. Link.

4. The Burning

   June 8, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on The Burning

   POLICE UNIONS

   As commentators and policymakers have scrambled to find explanations for and responses to the unprecedented uprisings against police brutality across the United States, interest in the role of police unions in local politics has soared. Recent research into the question joins a decades-long debate in the labor movement over the distinctive character of police associations—not only as regards their power relative to the public, but also their political strength relative to the rest of the public sector.

   A 2017 research paper by CATHERINE FISK and L. SONG RICHARDSON examines the evolution of US police unions, analyzes their impact on policymaking, and evaluates the efforts of cities to reform police departments over the past fifty years.

   From the piece:

   “Police officers formed local unions in various cities in the 1940s, and some police unions affiliated with national labor federations. However, well into the 1960s, police departments routinely fired officers who attempted to unionize, and courts upheld the power of cities to ban officers from joining unions. In the absence of legal rights to unionize or bargain collectively, government employee unions became adept at securing their members’ interests through political activity and negotiating informal agreements with public officials. Unions succeeded in gaining a lasting foothold in American police departments in the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, they negotiated for contractual protections against discipline and lobbied legislators to incorporate these protections in legislation. They opposed constitutional criminal procedure restrictions on police conduct and sought to block civilian oversight of police discipline. The legacy of the 1960s is collective bargaining agreements which make it difficult to investigate and punish officers to this day.”

   Link to the report.

   • “Cities which have low levels of police protections are also less likely to experience police abuse. Local-level politics does not have a salient effect on the level of police protections, but state labour laws have a significant impact on the level of protections which officers receive.” Findings from a novel police protection index drawing on data from the US’s 100 largest cities. Link. And a 2008 paper by Samuel Walker looks at, among other things, the relationship between the civil rights movement and the growth of police unions. Link.
   • Analyzing the consequences of a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision which increased unionization among sheriffs’ deputies, Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard McAdams, and John Rappaport find that “collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents.” Link.
   • A recent paper by Michael Zoorob looks at the electoral impact of the Fraternal Order of Police. Link.
   • “Until 1919, the AFL refused to charter police unions. The 1897 AFL convention rejected an application from a police group in Cleveland, explaining that ‘it is not within the province of the trade union movement to organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both are often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.'” Joseph Slater’s 2004 book recounts the tensions between police and the early American labor movement. Link.

   ‡ politics police history

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Punishment in the American South

   Recent Harvard PhD in Government SOUMYAJIT MAZUMDER studies political institutions. In his job market paper, he analyzes the development of criminal punishment systems in the American south following Reconstruction.

   From the introduction:

   “Why did policing and incarceration emerge as an institution in the South in light of its otherwise ‘hollow state?’ By empowering African Americans without fundamentally changing the social structure of Southern society, Reconstruction generated incentives for Southern elites to invest in repressive state institutions like incarceration and the police to maintain the existing social order. I test the argument by assembling a new panel dataset from individual-level administrative records from Georgia in addition to data on black wealth, black office holding, and the police force. A difference-in-differences identification strategy demonstrates support for the argument: counties with greater exposure to Reconstruction had higher rates of incarceration especially against blacks after the end of Reconstruction.”

   Link to the paper, link to Mazumder’s website.

   ‡ police history new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • With Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and the Economic Security Project, we were thrilled to announce this week our participation in the Newark Basic Income Task Force. Link to the roadmap report, by lead author Rachel Black, and link to coverage of the announcement.
   • For our readers in the policy, academic, and research communities, an open letter co-authored by some JFI staff, with signatories across the country, regarding the ongoing uprisings. Link.
   • “As workers formed themselves into unions and began to strike, the police became a quasi-military force whose central purpose was strikebreaking.” Alex Gourevitch on industrialization and the rapid growth in America’s police-force at the turn of the 20th century. Link.
   • New paper by Derek Denman tracks “the transfer of surplus armored vehicles to the police, and the visibility of these vehicles as they are deployed in urban and suburban spaces.” Link.
   • “People live or die based on the macroeconomic and social policy a society pursues.” From Nathan Tankus’ unparalleled ongoing series on the Fed and monetary policy last week. Link.
   • In Foreign Policy last week, on the relationship between food shocks and revolt. Link. h/t Francis
   • “Slavery and mass imprisonment are genealogically linked. One cannot understand the latter without returning to the former as historic starting point and functional analogue.” Loic Wacquant’s classic 2002 piece in the NLR. Link. A recent essay by John Clegg and Adaner Usmani updates certain elements of Wacquant’s narrative. Link.
   • A fascinating article by Stuart Schrader looks at the challenges of a reform effort in Menlo Park in the 1960s and 1970s aimed at demilitarizing police forces. Link.
   • Jamein Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau analyze the effects of over 700 uprisings that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s. Link. (The authors are currently building a database of all racialized uprisings in the United States post-1991. Link to the project page.)
   • A 2019 paper by Federico Masera debunks the alleged tradeoff between police safety and civilian deaths: “Each year police militarization results in 64 additional killings by the police, 12,400 police officers assaults and 2,600 police officers injuries.” Link.
   • “The curfew went into effect just after Brazil’s independence as a series of police edicts and municipal regulations that criminalized the act of being in any public space after the toll of the evening church bells for most, but significantly not all, persons. These regulations held force for more than half of the nineteenth century, spanning most of the post-independence period of monarchical rule. To the extent that interdictions are an index of what people actually do, we can surmise that nineteenth-century Rio was alive at night.” By Amy Chazkel. Link. h/t Paul

5. Clouds, Sun, Sea

   June 2, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Clouds, Sun, Sea

   UNREST AND POLICY

   This week has seen policymakers, scholars, and the public debate the meaning of collective violence. While political and media discourse often fails to examine the long-term effects of social unrest, a vast literature grapples with the mechanisms that link protests and uprisings with institutional change.

   A 1978 book by JAMES W. BUTTON integrates a vast amount of interviews, archival sources, and statistical data to analyze the public response to the US urban uprisings of the 1960s. Focusing the analysis on three federal agencies—the (now-dismantled) Office of Economic Opportunity, HUD, and the DOJ—the book suggests that the 1960s riots were understood by policymakers as political demands.

   From the introduction:

   “Although domestic collective violence has played a prominent role in American history, few other episodes of urban violence in this country’s history have been as dramatic as the black riots of the 1960s. As a result, the causes, precipitating events, and participants of the outbursts have been thoroughly studied over the past several years. Yet what is remarkable about this extensive analysis is the almost complete neglect of the political effects or consequences of these pervasive disorders. By concentrating instead on the factors that may have caused the riots, most investigators have implicitly reflected a normative bias concerning the disutility of domestic violence for affecting social and political change.

   The fundamental purpose of this study is to evaluate some of the political consequences of the urban black riots of the 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on responses of the executive branch of the federal government. In fulfilling such a task, it asks: did the riots affect executive officials’ decisions and ultimately federal public policy? Did the federal executive branch respond differently to the initial, less intense riots (1963-1966) than it did to the later, more severe disorders (1967-1968) and, if so, why? how have national executive responses to urban rioting been affected by the local political and environmental context and by local reactions to such violence? And how do public officials tend to view the role of violence in American society?”

   Link to the book page.

   • A new article by Omar Wasow examines the relationship between violent and nonviolent protests, media, public opinion, and policy alignment from the Civil Rights Era, and in particular on Nixon’s election in 1968. Link. And a 2018 paper by Shom Mazumder looks at the persistent effects of Civil Rights protects on political attitudes. Link.
   • A 1978 paper by sociologist Charles Tilly on collective violence: “Historically, collective violence has flowed regularly out of the central political processes of western countries. People seeking to seize, hold, or realign the levers of power have continually engaged in collective violence as part of their struggles.” Link.
   • In a 2007 article, historian Michael Kazin asks: “Many of the conditions thought to have precipitated the eruption of civil violence in the 1960s either persist or have grown worse. What accounts for the absence of civil violence on American streets?” Link. And a new book by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener looks at the 1960s in Los Angeles. Link.

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Household registration and migrant stratification

   YIMING DONG is a post-doctoral research associate at King’s College London. In a 2019 paper co-authored with Charlotte Goodburn, Dong analyzes the consequences of the Chinese government’s 2014 hukou reforms, which eliminated the distinction between rural and urban citizens in the country’s household registration system.
   From the paper:

   “The household registration (hukou) system has been a fundamental feature of social organization in China since the 1950s. Deep into the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening, it remained a contentious policy, dividing all citizens at birth into rural or urban classes and binding them to their place of origin administratively, even as huge waves of rural-urban migration challenged this legacy. In July 2014, China’s State Council issued what were widely regarded as a series of ground-breaking reform policies. The reform’s provisions that the ‘residence permit’ (juzhuzheng) system for migrants should be applied nationwide and its ‘points system’ for migrants have gone overlooked. Far from their stated aims of equalizing migrant services with locals, the policies introduce new forms of educational and social stratification, aimed at increasing control over migrant selectivity, with far-reaching consequences for Chinese social development.”

   Link to the paper, link to Dong’s website.

   ‡ migration education new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • On Thursday, we were thrilled to host Michael Pettis, Matthew Klein, and Adam Tooze for a discussion on Trade Wars Are Class Wars, Pettis and Klein’s new book. Link to a recording of the discussion, link to the book’s publisher page (and email us for a discount code to purchase the book in the US and UK).
   • “A bias towards effort extraction rather than automation would look something like the current pattern—modest rather than surging productivity growth.” At Phenomenal World, Brian Callaci on the relationship between automation and labor effort. Link.
   • JFI senior fellow Max Kasy gave a session on experimental design last week, covering many papers of his on the topic: “What do we want? And when do we want it? Alternative objectives and their implications for experimental design.” Link to the recording.
   • The Association for Promotion of Political Economy and Law, INET, and International University College of Turin have issued a call for participants in a comparative study of legal-economic responses to COVID19. Rapporteurs will be asked to respond to a series of survey questions, with the option to contribute to a country based policy report in August. Graduate students throughout North America are especially encouraged to apply. Preferred deadline is June 1. More details and contact information in this document. h/t reader Kendall S.
   • Barthélémy Bonadio, Zhen Huo, Andrei A. Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar analyze “Global Supply Chains in the Pandemic.” Link.
   • Larry Katz and William Spriggs on the history of the unemployment insurance system in the US. Link.
   • An excellent new issue of the Cambridge Financial History Review (much of it open access). Inside: multi-currency regimes in early 19th century Finland, a history of Singapore’s dollar market since the 1960s, the role of economic advisers in shaping early 20th century German central banking. Link.
   • New research by Adam D. Reich and Seth J. Prins finds “a negative relationship between
     exposure to the criminal justice system and involvement in labor organizations.” Link.
   • “We find that European immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state and influenced American political ideology during one of the largest episodes of redistribution in US history, the New Deal.” Paola Giuliano and Marco Tabellini on immigration and ideology. Link.
   • Karl Gauffin examines trends in precarious employment in Sweden. Link. And Lorenzo Feltrin argues against institutional analyses of Moroccan industrial relations. Link.
   • Using data on annual state budgets from 2006 to 2015, Thomas T. Holyoke and Jeff Cummins study the relationship between interest group lobbying, electoral competition, state spending, and debt. Link.
   • “We rigorously test the historicity of indigenous Tsimshian oral records (adawx) using an extended simulation-based method. Our methodology is able to detect short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic events. First, we successfully test the methodology against a simulated radiocarbon dataset for the catastrophic European Black Death/bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis). Second, we test the Tsimshian adawx accounts of an occupational hiatus in their territorial heartland ca. 1,500–1,000 years ago. We are unable to disconfirm the oral accounts. This represents the first formal test of indigenous oral traditions using modern radiocarbon modeling techniques.” By Kevan Edinborough et al. Link.

6. Radio

   May 26, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Radio

   STATE CAPACITY IN THE US

   Analyses of variation in state-level responses to the coronavirus tend to focus on party determination: On the whole, states led by Democrats have been found to undertake more rapid and extensive responses to the crisis. The focus on immediate political factors, however, masks the broader history of America’s uneven and disaggregated bureaucratic capacity.

   A 1982 book by STEPHEN SKOWRONEK presents one of the most comprehensive accounts of the origins of the US administrative state. Focusing on reforms in civil administration, the army, and national railroad regulation from 1870-1920, the book demonstrates how regional differences contributed to the particular character of American state development.

   “Unravelling the state-building problem in modern American political development places the apparent statelessness of early America in a new light. The governmental forms and procedures necessary for securing order in industrial America emerged through a labored exercise in creative destruction. Modernization of national administrative controls did not entail making the established state more efficient; it entailed building a qualitatively different kind of state.

   The Civil War brought national military conscription, a national welfare agency for former slaves, a national income tax, national monetary controls, and citizenship. Yet, this was a state grounded in only half the nation. As the South returned, national electoral politics changed, and these institutional achievements began to be undone. Here, then, was a state only in the sense of the word imputed to it by the interests and strategies of the mass electoral organizations controlling its offices. No institution stood beyond the reach of party concerns. The fate of the wartime governmental apparatus suggests that if new institutional forms are to constitute a new state, they must alter the procedural bonds that tie governmental institutions together and define their relationship to society.”

   Link to the publisher’s page.

   • Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold expand Skowronek’s research into the New Deal era. Link.
   • “In societies where social status is a cleavage, elites can use the threat of desegregation to unite wealthy and poor members of high-status groups against taxation and the bureaucratic capacity required to collect taxes.” Pavithra Suryanarayan and Steven White on “Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South.” Link. In another article, Roberto Stefan Foa and Anna Nemirovskaya analyze the development of state capacity on the frontier. Link.
   • Daniel Berliner, Anne Greenleaf, Milli Lake, and Jennifer Noveck present “systematic study of relationship between state capacity and labor rights.” Link.

   ‡ state_capacity bureaucratic_history covid19

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression

   In a recent working paper, Assistant Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt SARAH QUINCY examines the effect of credit supply shocks on local economies during the Great Depression.

   “I take advantage of the expansion of Bank of America branches in 1920s California to isolate local lending variation during the largest financial crisis in United States history. Some towns all over California had much better access to credit supply during the banking crisis of the early 1930s. These cities, despite their similarity to those without access to Bank of America during the 1920s, contracted by ten percentage points less from 1929 to 1933. The spillovers from credit supply shocks to the real economy persisted even after California returned to full employment. Areas with Bank of America branches grew by 25 percent during the decade, while those without branches did not grow at all from 1930 to 1940.”

   Link to the paper, link to Quincy’s website.

   ‡ political_economy criminal_justice new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • We’re hosting Adam Tooze, Michael Pettis, and Matthew Klein for a discussion on Pettis and Klein’s new book Trade Wars are Class Wars next Thursday, May 28, at 10am EST. Email editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org to register.
   • “As voters, all we usually see on Election Day is a simple choice: Yes to more debt; no to more debt. It’s an extreme flattening of a very complex world. In the 1960s, there was actually blistering and prescient criticism of bondholders by many voters. Black San Franciscans noted that they had been servicing debt for 20 years with very little in return. And until that changed, they would boycott local bond referenda.” On the blog, Daniel Kay Herz interviews historian Destin Jenkins about municipal bonds and racial disparites. Link.
   • C. Jessica Metcalf and JFI senior fellow Johannes Haushofer have an important and timely new paper in Science: “Which [non-pharmeceutical] interventions work best in a pandemic?” Link.
   • Striking new research by David Altig et. al compares effective tax rates across income groups, finding that “one in four low-wage workers face marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty.” Link.
   • A new paper by Tiago Couto Porto analyzes the changing political coalitions of the Brazilian PT. Link.
   • “This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our findings show that the capital share decreased in response to radical institutional and political shifts, such as the introduction of universal suffrage in the early 1900s, the undoing of colonialism and the implementation of redistributive policies during the post-war period.” New research from Erik Bengtsson, Enrico Rubolino, and Daniel Waldenstrom. Link.
   • A new version of Jesse Rothstein’s paper on labor market scarring for new graduates after the Great Recession. Link.
   • Isabel Rousset examines the housing reform debates induced by the proliferation of tenements (mietskaserne) in late 19th century Berlin. Link.
   • Farwa Sial with a fascinating analysis of informality in the trucking industry in Tanzania. Link. And a newly open access issue of South Atlantic Quarterly examines contingent labor around the world. Link.
   • “Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline. Overall, we document that the speed and magnitude of labor market deterioration during the early parts of the pandemic were unprecedented in the postwar period, particularly for the bottom of the earnings distribution.” The state of the labor market since covid-19. Link.
   • “This article investigates how, with increasing land pressure during Russian settlement in Kazakh steppes in the late nineteenth century, clan institutions affected the transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled agriculture. Using a novel dataset constructed from Russian colonial expedition materials matched with clan genealogies, we find that, controlling for geographic factors, clan identity strongly influenced the duration of transhumance period, the organization of production, and the acquisition of new agricultural tools. Information transmission within clans, external economies of scale in nomadic pastoralism, and clan-specific values and norms underlie the results.” Link.

7. Plate Study

   May 19, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Plate Study

   STABLE SHOCK

   Remittances across contexts

   Among the many corona-induced shocks rippling through the global economy is the crash in remittance payments to developing countries. The World Bank predicts that remittance flows will fall 20% this year—a decline of $100b—largely as a result of shutdowns and wage losses in the global north. The politics of remittances are complex: the scholarly literature both touts the positive development effects of countercyclical cash inflows, and questions the effects of a system that supports consumption at the expense of longer-term economic development.

   In a fascinating study on remittances from GCC countries—where migrant workers tend to have few rights while making up a large share of the population—FAISAL Z. AHMED looks at the political effects of remittance economies.

   “Using duration models of government turnover for a sample of 97 countries between 1975 and 2004, this article demonstrates that the combination of aid and remittance inflows can empower governments in autocracies to survive longer. The link between the effects of foreign aid and remittances on government survival hinges on the fact that these inflows of money constitute forms of unearned foreign income that a government can potentially exploit for nefarious purposes. This is achieved via two channels. In the first, governments direct some foreign aid to finance patronage goods (income effect). In the second, governments respond to shocks in unearned and largely untaxable household income (i.e., remittances) by diverting expenditures from the provision of welfare goods in favor of patronage goods (substitution effect). My findings suggest that domestic political institutions (and the incentives they generate for governments) mediate the impact of aid and remittance inflows on the quality of governance and the endurance of governments in autocracies.”

   Link to the paper.

   • A 2019 analysis from the Financial Times provides an excellent overview of remittances to emerging market economies. Link. Part of a FT series on remittances, including case studies on Zimbabwe and Nepal, and reporting on the nations attempts to issue “diaspora bonds” to attract the earnings of expatriate workers. Link to the series.
   • A paper by Muhammed Tariq Majeed looks at the effects of remittances on poverty across 65 countries from 1970-2008. Link. Relatedly, a 2015 paper by Phanindra Wunnava et al looks at the impact of financial liberalization on remittances across 84 countries from 1986-2005, and finds mixed results: increased economic freedom in the financial sector has a positive impact, while improved robustness of financial markets has a negative and lagged effect. Link. h/t Alison Oh
   • A 2011 paper by Rui Esteves and David Khoudour-Castéras examines remittances and capital flows in the European periphery from 1870-1913. Link.

   ‡ migration development_economics covid19

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   The social consequences of health insurance

   HEEJU SOHN is postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s Center for Population Research. Her dissertation considers how health policy structures social life by measuring the impact of health insurance access on rates of divorce and mortality.

   From the introduction:

   “I present a national landscape of health insurance coverage and inequality in the years prior to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In chapter 1, I find that women who depend on their husbands for health insurance had the lowest rates of divorce, indicating that family- and employment-based insurance coverage could create inequalities between men and women. In chapter 2, I establish a connection between the availability of public insurance at birth to improvements in later life mortality, underscoring the lasting consequences of medical care during critical periods in the life-course. Chapter 3 examines how gaining and losing health insurance across the life course contributes to racial and ethnic disparities in coverage. African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians have high uninsurance rates mostly due to their greater likelihoods of losing the insurance that they already have, demonstrating the importance of policies that stabilize existing insurance in addition to increasing access.”

   Link to the paper, and to Sohn’s website.

   ‡ health inequality new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • New on the Phenomenal World: Maya Adereth interviews Gøsta Esping-Andersen, whose book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is foundational for contemporary welfare studies. Link.
   • Next Wednesday, please join our staff and fellows for a public webinar discussing the findings of a new report on some potential challenges to a renewable energy transition by JFI researcher Francis Tseng (for a summary of the report, see Francis’ post on Phenomenal World). Link to register for the event.
   • “Using administrative data, we find that the share of inequality that is between workplaces is growing in 12 of 14 countries examined, and in no country has it fallen. These results suggest reducing market income inequality requires raising the bargaining power of lower-skilled workers, targeting the increasing market power of firms in concentrated markets, and curbing the ability of powerful firms to outsource low skill employment.” New research by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey et. al. Link.
   • On the Economics & Beyond podcast, Dani Rodrik stresses the importance of halting debt payments for developing countries as they cope with the unfolding crisis. Link. And a recent paper by Eric Verhoogen looks at the persisting barriers to industrial upgrading. Link.
   • Wei Huang and Chuanchuan Zhang find that China’s New Rural Pension Scheme leads to “higher household income and food expenditure, less farm work, better health, and lower mortality.” Link.
   • Mark Blyth and Adam Tooze discuss the structural risks of our financial system and how the current policies of the Federal Reserve serve to preserve and exacerbate them. Link.
   • A new PERI report by Robert Pollin, Jeannette Wicks-Lim, and Peter Arno assesses the Medicare Crisis Program proposed by representatives Pramila Jayapal and Joe Kennedy, finding that it would “provide significant support for 95 million people—30% of the U.S. population.” Link. And also from PERI, a policy brief by Gerald Epstein “describes how the Fed’s newly created Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) can be used to compensate for the $500 billion hole in state and city public education systems.” Link.
   • “This paper examines the ownership structure of eurozone public debt and the distributional consequences thereof. It asks two questions: who holds government debt in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy, and who benefits from the interest received on government debt.” Tobias Arbogast with a fantastic new paper on sovereign debt ownership in the Eurozone. Link.
   • Erdem Yörük and Alvaro Comin on contemporary class politics, electoral strategy, and welfare reforms in Turkey and Brazil. Link.
   • “The share of workers in frontline industries who are mothers (23.8%) is larger than the share of workers in all industries who are mothers (16.9%).” Hayley Brown, Hye Jin Rho, and Shawn Fremstad look at the share of mothers in frontline industries by compensation and benefits. Link.
   • “We develop a multi-period contest model to formulate the role of the power structure of government in the outbreaks and outcomes of coups. In our model, the coup plotter decides whether to carry out a coup against the central government, and the local government chooses whether to confront the military government after a successful coup. More centralized countries constitute an ample prize for the coup plotter since he can enjoy advantages in dealing with the local government. Consequently, military governments are more stable in more decentralized countries. Moreover, the players’ inability to commit imposes an upper-bound on the payo§ to the strong player. And a strong central government has more resources to defend himself. Thus, the relationship between decentralization and coup risk is non-monotonic. This sheds some light on the role of decentralization in political stability.” By Pinghan Liang. Link.

8. The Giant

   May 12, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on The Giant

   GREATER SHAPE

   Public opinion and policymaking

   Covid is changing popular attitudes towards the public sector, prompting many commentators to anticipate a new period of welfare expansion. Others are more skeptical, noting that public opinion undergoes rapid fluctuations, which rarely resolve into a new equilibrium.

   Like its forebear in debates over the 1981 Meltzer-Richards model, the present discussion assumes a strong relationship between public opinion and policymaking. A 2012 book by political scientist MARTIN GILENS demonstrates the flaws underlying this assumption.

   From the book:

   “Democracy is commonly understood to entail a substantial degree of political equality. This ideal of political equality is perhaps impossible to fully achieve in the face of economic inequality—in every democracy citizens with greater resources are better able to shape government policy. But the degree of political inequality in a society tells us much about the quality of the society’s democracy. I aim to document and explain patterns of representation in the United States over the past few decades by examining the relationship between the policy preferences expressed by the American public and the policies adopted by decision makers in Washington. To do so I have assembled a dataset of survey questions reflecting the policy preferences of hundreds of thousands of Americans at different income levels on all sorts of government policies—from raising the minimum wage, to restricting abortions, to sending U.S. troops to Bosnia.

   When preferences across income groups diverged, only the most affluent appeared to influence policy outcomes. Representational inequality was spread widely across policy domains, with a strong tilt toward high-income Americans on economic issues, foreign policy, and moral/religious issues, and only modestly greater equality of responsiveness to the middle class and the poor in the social welfare domain. Even this partial exception to the dominance of the affluent was accounted for by the fortuitous confluence of preferences between middle-class citizens and powerful interest groups on issues like health care, education, and Social Security. Yet the importance of political conditions in shaping responsiveness means that our political destiny is not predetermined. The obstacles to enhancing representational equality in America are considerable, but the costs of not doing so are considerable as well.”

   Link to the publisher’s page.

   • Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s much-cited Winner Take All Politics outlines the mechanisms of policy influence in the US. Link.
   • A new paper by Matias López et. al examine the economic and social factors which shape elite attitudes towards redistribution in Brazil. Link. h/t Paul
   • “In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate this thesis by tracking the frontier between 1790–1890 and constructing a novel, county-level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution.” Samuel Bazzi, Martin Fiszbein, and Mesay Gebresilasse on the historical roots public opinion. Link.

   ‡ digital_ethics public_health covid19

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Iraqi Sovereign Debt Through Defaults and Restructuring

   In a 2019 working paper, LSE PhD candidate in economic history SIMON HINRICHSEN studies the unique story of Iraqi sovereign debt. The paper both creates a novel debt series since 1979 and uses oral history to describe the post-US-invasion restructuring, shedding light on how major geopolitical shifts over the past four decades have shaped sovereign debt relations around the world.

   From the introduction:

   “Iraq’s entire debt stock was a consequence of the geopolitics of the Iran-Iraq War. The US, the Soviet Union, and many European countries showed a willingness to disregard solvency concerns and gave loans to Iraq on non-market terms. In less than fifteen years, the war turned Iraq from a net creditor in 1979 to having a debt-GDP ratio of over ten. Sovereign debt restructurings are increasingly creditor friendly, but the Iraqi restructuring circumvented these obstacles, and was unlike most other restructurings at the same time. Sovereign creditors were placed under immense political pressure by the US to forgive debt, with the Paris Club inflicting large write-offs on Iraqi creditors. However, the restructuring was a missed opportunity to set precedent by declaring Iraqi debt odious, thereby reforming how sovereign debt is restructured.”

   Link to the full paper.

   ‡ history sovereign_debt new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • On Friday, May 15, at 3PM EST we’ll be hosting political scientist Alexander Hertel-Fernandez for a virtual research session covering his recent and ongoing work, with the title “Collective Action in Private Governments.” Email editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.orgto register. (And link to Hertel-Fernandez’s post for Phenomenal World.)
   • The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s April Jobs Report was released yesterday, with staggering (if widely-predicted) numbers of un- and under-employment. Link to the report. EPI’s Elise Gould breaks down the numbers: “It’s as if all the gains in employment since 2000 were wiped out.” Link. And link to a CNN report on how the BLS conducted its surveys under pandemic conditions.
   • For CGDev, Martin Ravallion examines pandemic policies in the global south. Link.
   • “I merge several historical data sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 is correlated with lower per capita municipal spending, as well as the share of votes received by extremist parties in 1932 and 1933.” By Kristian S. Blickle. Link.
   • “We use new data on the distribution of PPP loans and high-frequency micro-level employment data to consider two dimensions of program targeting. First, we do not find evidence that funds flowed to areas more adversely affected by the economic effects of the pandemic. Second, we find significant heterogeneity across banks in terms of disbursing PPP funds.” João Granja, Christos Makridis, Constantine Yannelis, and Eric Zwick on the impact of the Paycheck Protection Program. Link.
   • “New Liberalism and the City of London.” Alexander Zevin on Francis Hirst and the relationship between finance and politics in turn of the century England. Link.
   • A paper by Dan Immergluck, Jeff Ernsthausen, Stephanie Earl, and Allison Powerll looks at eviction data in Atlanta and finds disparities in serial versus nonserial eviction findings, and that “property turnover is a significant predictor of rising evictions.” Link.
   • Anna Simmons on the institutional development of the Society of Apothecaries from 1670-1800. Link.
   • A timely new paper by Adam Bonica, Jacob Grumbach, Charlotte Hill and Hakeem Jefferson examines the effects of all-mail voting in Colorado: 9.4 percentage point turnout effect, with significantly larger turnout among lower-propensity voters like young people, blue-collar workers, voters of color, and voters with lower levels of educational attainment. Link to the paper, link to an accompanying op-ed in the Times.
   • “At the end of the seventeenth century, Scottish agriculture was remarkable only in one respect: the rural class structure within which it took place corresponded to the classic feudal model more closely than that of any other state west of Poland. The subsistence crisis of the 1690s exposed the productive limits of an agriculture based on feudal social relations, but also severely weakened any possible capitalist alternative. The Treaty of Union with England of 1707 brought the feudal powers of the Scottish lords into the new British state intact, but access to English and imperial markets encouraged a minority of them to experiment with the same forms of agricultural improvement which had produced such increases in landlord income south of the border. Although these attempts were not successful in the short term, they laid the basis for the transformation of Scottish agriculture in the changed circumstances after 1746.” In memory of the late Neil Davidson, the first in his three part exposition of the of the oft-overlooked Scottish revolution of 1688-1746. Link. (And links to the second and third installments.)

9. Security for the People

   May 4, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Security for the People

   ADVANCE CAUSE

   Ethics in mitigation

   Following the comparative success of South Korea and Singapore to flatten the Covid-19 curve, governments around the world have been discussing the merits and feasibility of tech-aided contact tracing systems. (Whether these comparative public health successes are actually attributable to such systems remains a point of debate.) In the US context, app-based tracing proposals have been floated by various think tanks, and Apple and Google have released protocols for their design.

   Privacy concerns are paramount, as are questions of efficacy and the opportunity costs of new mitigation tools. In a white paper last month, Danielle Allen, Lucas Stanczyk, Glenn Cohen, Carmel Shachar, Rajiv Sethi, Glen Weyl, and Rosa Brooks examined the ethical and legal bases of pandemic mitigation.

   From the paper:

   “We are currently in the initial stage of facing the spread of an epidemic, with clear emergency needs to secure our health system while seeking to minimize lives lost and ensure that all patients, including the dying, are treated with dignity. We have to fend off a near-term catastrophe, and in that regard we are in our ‘triage’ moment. We are currently making triage decisions across all sectors of society.

   Securing our health infrastructure and minimizing loss of life requires changing the trajectory of transmission through screening, testing, contact tracing, mobility restrictions, and social distancing. Whereas contact tracing and individualized quarantine and isolation suffice in non-pandemic circumstances, community quarantine and isolation become necessary under pandemic conditions in order to address the emergency. Here the challenging questions are to create the right package of temporarily adjusted norms, regulations, and laws around rights of mobility and association, and to determine whether the relevant packages of norms, regulations, and laws are best.”

   The authors propose guidelines for decision procedures that promote mitigation without violating civil liberties, justice, democratic institutions, or the “material supports of society.” Link to the paper. h/t David Grant

   • An evolving list of projects using personal data for Covid-19 response. Link.
   • From a 2019 paper on the efficacy of contact tracing and epi models: “A major concern identified in future epidemics is whether public health administrators can collect all the required data for building epidemiological models in a short period of time during the early phase of an outbreak.” Link. A 2018 paper on contact tracing’s role in the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. Link.
   • Previously shared in this newsletter, a technical paper for the Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) protocol. The tweet-length summary from researcher Michael Veale: “Health authorities learn nothing about users. Users learn nothing about other users. Users learn if they were too close to others who tested positive. Governments learn nothing about users. No-one is coerced: everything based on genuine, voluntary consent.” Link to the paper. (And link to a comic strip explanation of how it works.)
   • An excellent blog post from Ross Anderson at Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology on contact tracing in the real world. Link. See also “Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy in an Epidemic.” Link.

   ‡ digital_ethics public_health covid19

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Industrial Enclosures and the American Civil War

   Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cambridge University EMMA TEITELMAN studies the history of capitalism with a focus on the antebellum United States. In a newly published paper, she uncovers the history of enclosures which paved the way for industrial production in the American South and West.

   From the paper’s introduction:

   “In the wake of political fracture, federal authorities and northern capitalists worked to transform regional property relations and orient them toward the capital-intensive development of natural resources. Their struggles coalesced in a broad project to reorganize property, amounting to a transregional wave of land enclosures in the era of Reconstruction.

   This article examines struggles to make antebellum property regimes compatible with capital-intensive forms of extraction. To do so, it tracks the postwar expansion of Phelps, Dodge, & Co. In Georgia’s southern pine barrens, where Dodge purchased three hundred thousand acres in 1868, yeoman households had maintained common rights to the timberlands before the war, which antebellum institutions had only loosely regulated. The political economy of slavery had made this southern regime possible, but related patterns existed across western mineral lands, where federal authorities strained to keep up with miners.”

   Link to the full piece.

   ‡ history political_economy new_researchers

   Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • “Traditional views of Westphalian sovereignty are not sufficient to explain the cleavages caused by the dollar in the ‘matrix’ of interlocking balance sheets that make up the global financialized economy.” New on the blog: Yakov Feygin and Dominik Leusder on “The Class Politics of the Dollar System.” Link.
   • “Collective Action in Private Governments.” Join us on May 15 at 3PM EST for a (virtual) JFI research session. Email editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org to register. And link to Hertel-Fernandez’s post for Phenomenal World.
   • Benjamin Della Rocca and Nate Loewentheil analyze “The Distribution of Phase 1 of the Federal Paycheck Protection Program.” The main beneficiaries: Northeastern and Midwestern states, states with a higher density of community banks, businesses with more than 20 employees, and construction, manufacturing, and professional, scientifiic & technical companies. Link.
   • A new draft of one of our favorite papers: Eliot Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu on the influence of the Manne seminars on the decision making of the federal judiciary, with new evidence on antitrust decisions. Link.
   • Ilan Noy et. al on institutional capacity and COVID recovery: “The evidence shows that economic risks are especially high in Africa, Iran, South and Southeast Asia.” Link.
   • The most cited articles in the Cambridge Journal of Latin American Studies are open access. In the collection: the 1925 Panamanian tenants’ strike, cash transfers in Argentine provinces, and internationalization of Mexican banks. Link.
   • New research from the World Resources Institute estimates that the number of people impacted by floods will double to 147 million by 2030. “The amount of urban property damaged by riverine floods will increase threefold—from $157 billion to $535 b annually. Urban property damaged by coastal storm surge and sea level rise will increased tenfold—from $17 b to $177 b annually.” Link to the report.
   • “Using newly digitized archival data, we show that the 1950 and 1966 revolutions in China effectively homogenized the population economically and culturally in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today.” Alberto F. Alesina et. al on persisting inequality in contemporary China. Link. And Isabella Weber analyzes Milton Friedman’s lectures in China to gain insight into the country’s changing economic ideology since 1978. Link.
   • A new EPI survey finds that “For every 10 people who successfully filed for unemployment benefits in the previous four weeks, 3-4 additional people tried to apply but were unable to get through the system, and 2 additional people did not try to apply because it was too difficult to do so. In total, we estimate that an additional 8.9–13.9 million people could have filed for benefits had the process been easier.” Link.
   • “The Struggle of the Orders was a political conflict between the plebeian and patrician classes of Rome that lasted from the 5th-3rd Centuries BC of the Republic. Most of this period is shrouded in legend, but later Roman historians provide evidence that suggests a major social and political revolution occurred during the early years of this struggle. I construct a new narrative that reveals a city crippled by divisive revolution. I begin by examining the catalysts of this social revolution, then focus in on the First Secession of 494 BC and the establishment of the plebeian movement and formation of its anti-government. Next I move to the impact of the plebeian movement and the radical oligarchy of the Decemvirate that followed. Lastly, I examine the Second Secession of 449 BC and the incorporation of the plebeian institutions into the Roman government through the Valerio-Horatian Laws and the Twelve Tables. I argue that the secessions mark a full scale political revolution carried out by less advantaged Romans that redefined the Roman government for centuries to come.” Christopher Schley Saladin on the 494 BC secessio plebis, the first ever recorded general strike. Link.

10. Yellow TV

    April 28, 2020 12:00 am Comments Off on Yellow TV

    ALLOVER SECTOR

    A political history of the US Postal Service

    It’s been a turbulent week for the US Postal Service. With revenues plummeting as mail volume drops, the Postal Worker’s Union leader recently estimated that the service is likely to literally “run out of money” by October. The crisis has once again sparked a debate on the organization of America’s most popular public institution. Many have called for structural reforms, while others have advocated increased investment and a return to postal banking to raise revenues.

    A 1998 book by RICHARD R. JOHN argues that between its founding in 1775 and the commercialization of the electric telegraph in 1844, the post office represented a communications revolution as influential for American public life as the telegraph, the telephone, and the computer.

    From the introduction:

    “By 1828, the American postal system had almost twice as many offices as the postal system in Great Britain and over five times as many offices as the postal system in France. In 1831, the postal system, with more than 8,700 postmasters, employed just over three quarters of the entire federal civilian work force. (The federal army, in contrast, consisted of a mere 6,332 men.) The postal system transmitted 13.8 million letters and 16 million newspapers at a cost of $1.9 million through a network that extended over 116,000 square miles.

    Thanks to a variety of generous government subsidies, a large percentage of the total volume of the mail consisted of newspapers and public documents that described the proceedings of Congress. This steady flow of information helped to introduce a widely scattered population to two key ideas: that the boundaries of the community in which they lived extended well beyond the confines of their individual locality; and that the central government might come to shape the pattern of everyday life.”

    Link to the publisher’s page.

    • A couple links from our 2018 newsletter on postal banking: A 2014 article by Mehrsa Baradaran argues that subsidies for postal banking are “appropriate and justifiable.” Link. A USPS white paper details how the policy could expand financial services to the 68 million underbanked Americans. Link.
    • An extensive legislative history of “the concepts, policies, practices, and controversies associated with universal postal service from 1790 to 1970.” Link.
    • Léonard Laborie on parcel post and globalization: “In 1880, several Universal Postal Union member states signed a convention for the exchange of parcel post, opening a new channel in the world of commerce. By the end of the 19th century, millions of packets poured into post offices and railway stations, crossed countries, and created unprecedented transnational connections.” Link.
    • “Couriers, ships, caravans, and rest houses—throughout pre-modern history, such features have been central to the infrastructural matrix without which complex and enduring states, empires, and polities are not conceivable.” Gagan Sood reviews Adam Silverstein’s Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World. Link. And Ying-wan Cheng on Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860–1896. Link.

    ‡ mail public_sector history

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Rethinking inter-war protectionism

    TED FERTIK is a PhD student in History at Yale University. In a paper based on his dissertation, he argues against narratives of the interwar period which stress the rise of nationalism and protectionism, instead proposing that the period simply involved the assertion of autonomy in industrializing agrarian economies.

    From the paper:

    “The term ‘autarky’ has been trotted out to serve as a catchall for the impulse motivating the making of economic policy across the world between the wars. This is a distorting caricature. Much closer to the truth is the sentiment captured in a speech of the Brazilian president Getulio Vargas, who, at the groundbreaking of the state-owned steel mill that bears his name, articulated a desire for his country to cease to be a ‘semicolonial agrarian country, importer of manufactures and exporter of raw materials,’ and become one ‘able to meet the exigencies of an autonomous industrial life.’ The ‘industrialization of agrarian countries’ was not a revolt against the international economy, but an effort to negotiate a different relationship to it—one that would guarantee their sovereignty and, in keeping with the promise of the Fourteen Points would entitle them to an equal membership in the society of nations.”

    Link to the paper.

    ‡ history war new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

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    • On the blog, editors Maya Adereth and Jack Gross interview sociologist Frances Fox Piven (of Cloward-Piven Strategy fame) about social movements and the American safety net. Link. (As always, if you have an idea for something to run on the Phenomenal World, email us: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.)
    • “Job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million lost jobs by April 6th. Many of those losing jobs are not actively looking to find new ones. As a result, we estimate the rise in the unemployment rate over the corresponding period to be surprisingly small, only about 2 percentage points. Participation in the labor force has declined by 7 percentage points, an unparalleled fall that dwarfs the three percentage point cumulative decline that occurred from 2008 to 2016.” New NBER paper by Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Michael Weber on unemployment during Covid-19. Link. Relatedly, from the IRLE at Berkley, an in-depth analysis of hours reductions resulting from the crisis. Link. And a useful resource from Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley at the University of New Hampshire tracking economic impacts by state. Link.
    • In the Washington Post, Anke Hassel and Kathleen Thelen discuss the difficulties that the Paycheck Protection Program lending program faced in its first round, and compare the US’s response to spiking unemployment against that of Europe. Link. And link to a thread from Henry Farrell discussing the arguments.
    • A brand new, open access volume on Latin America in the Cold War—the “first truly global history of contemporary Latin America.” Link. h/t Paul
    • A paper on cash transfer programs in Uganda looks at long-run effects, finding “important gains in child health, schooling, and income growth. The rates of return improve over the medium term but remain negative after 10 years. This underlines the need to regard cash transfers as longer-term social investment instead of short-term costs.” Link.
    • Hereward Longley with a fascinating examination of the Alberta tar sands—for which the provincial government acted as both regulator and developer—from the immediate post-war period through the 1973 oil crisis and beyond. Link.
    • On oil this week and the petrostates of the global south, see Nicholas Mulder and Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy. Link. (On similar themes: Kate Aronoff in the New Republic. Link.) See also: Giuliano Garavini’s The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. Link.
    • Tom Arnold-Forster reviews three books on the history of the American newspaper industry. Link. And also in Cambridge History, Edwin D. Rose considers “how the French Revolution influenced approaches to constructing and distributing works of natural history in Britain,” focusing on the production of copper plate images of botanical illustrations. Link.
    • Edward W. Felten provides an exceptionally clear overview of some of contact tracing proposals from a computer science and policy perspective. Link. h/t Milo
    • “I use data covering 267 prefectures over four centuries to investigate two questions about historical China. To what extent did weather shocks cause civil conflict? And to what extent did the historical introduction of (drought-resistant) sweet potatoes mitigate these effects? I find that before the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.7 percentage points, which translates into a revolt probability in drought years that is more than twice the average revolt probability. After the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts only increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.2 percentage points.” By Ruixue Jia. Link.