Category: History
Can government coerce women into having more babies?
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future. By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.
Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023
We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard K. Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth.
My Conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin
This was great fun for me, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today’s CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won’t make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I have a few general questions about the 1920s. Obviously, you did an enormous amount of work for this book. Putting aside the great crash and the focus of your book, what is it you learned about the 1920s more generally that most surprised you? Because you learn all this collateral information when you write a book like this, right?
SORKIN: So many things. The book turned into a bit of a love letter to New York in terms of the architecture of New York. I don’t think I appreciated just how many buildings went up in New York and how they were constructed and what happened. That fascinated me. I think the story of John Raskob, actually, who was, to me, the Elon Musk of his time, somebody who ran General Motors, became a super influential investor. He was a philosopher king that everybody listened to at every given moment.
He ultimately constructs the Empire State Building, which was probably the equivalent of SpaceX at that time. He had written a paper about creating a five-day workweek back in 1929, November, as all of this is happening. Not because he wanted people to work less and be nice to them, but because he thought there was an economic argument that if people didn’t have to work on Saturdays, more people would buy cars and gardening equipment, and do all sorts of things on the weekends, and buy different outfits and clothing. There were so many little things.
Then, I would argue, actually, his role in taking his fortune — he got involved in politics. He was a Republican turned Democrat. He spent an extraordinary amount of money to secretly try to undermine the reputation of Hoover. I would say to you, today, I actually think that part of the reason that Hoover’s reputation is so dim, even today, is a result of this very influential, wealthy individual in America who spent two years paying off journalists and running this secret campaign to do such a thing. You go back and really read the press and try to understand why some of these views were espoused.
By the way, this was before the crash. He started this campaign effectively in May of 1929, just three months after Hoover took office.
COWEN: It’s striking to me how forgotten Raskob is today. There’s a lesson in there about people who think they’re doing something today that will be remembered in a hundred years’ time. It probably won’t be, even if you’re a big, big deal.
SORKIN: It’s remarkable. He was a very big deal. He famously used to tell everybody, “Everybody ought to be rich.” He was trying to develop, back then, what would have been something akin to one of the first mutual funds, levered mutual funds, in fact, because he also wanted to democratize finance.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re back in New York. It’s the 1920s; you’re you. Other than walking around and looking at buildings, what else would you do back then? I would go to jazz concerts. What would you do?
SORKIN: Oh my goodness. You know what I would do? But I’m a journalista, so you’ll appreciate this.
COWEN: Yes.
SORKIN: I would have been obsessed with magazines. This was really the first real era of magazines and newspapers and the transmission of media, the sort of mass media in this way. I would have been fascinated by radio. I think those things, for me, would have been super exciting.
The truth is, I imagine I would have gotten caught up in the pastime of stock trading. It is true that all these brokerage houses are just emerging everywhere, and people are going to play them as if it’s a pastime. I always wonder whether prohibition played a role in why so many people were speculating because instead of drinking, what did they do? They traded.
Some of the time he spent interviewing me…
What should I ask Paul Gillingham?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is a Professor of History at Northwestern, specializing in Mexico and to some extent the Caribbean. He has translated a Mexican book on Edgar Allan Poe. I am learning a good deal from his new 700 pp. book Mexico: A 500-Year History, and I very much like his earlier work on Mexico and violence. Here is an NYT review of the new book.
So what should I ask him?
What should I ask Joel Mokyr?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is of course one of this last year’s Nobel Laureates in economics, here is previous MR coverage of him. Here is Wikipedia.
He has a recent book Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000-2000, co-authored with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini.
So what should I ask him?
*Paul Celan: A Life*, by Anna Arno
I do not think it is crazy to regard Celan as standing in the very top tier of poets, noting the poems must be read in the German language. Who has more important topics at a comparable level of quality? This is an excellent biography of him, from the origins in Romania to his affair with Ingeborg Bachmann to his eventual madness and suicide. Recommended, pre-order it here. Definitely slated for the best non-fiction books of the year list.
The United States as an Active Industrial Policy Nation
We document and characterize a new history of U.S. federal-level industrial policies by scanning all 12,167 Congressional Acts and 6,030 Presidential Orders from 1973 through 2022. We find several interesting patterns. First, contrary to a common perception, the United States has always been an active industrial policy nation throughout the period, regardless of which party is in power, with 5.4 laws and 3.4 Presidential Orders per year on average containing new industrial policies. Second, we identify roughly 300% more instances of industrial policies than those in the Global Trade Alert (GTA) database during 2008-2022, despite using essentially the same definition. Third, industrial policies in practice are as likely to be justified by national security as by economic competitiveness. Fourth, many U.S. industrial policies incorporate design features that help mitigate potential drawbacks, such as explicit expiration dates and pilot programs for emerging technologies. Finally, based on stock market reactions and firm performance, the identified policies are recognized as economically significant in shifting resource allocations.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
So if I were designing an “industrial policy” for America, my first priority would be to improve and “unstick” its procurement cycles. There may well be bureaucratic reasons that this is difficult to do. But if it can’t be done, then perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t be setting its sights on a more ambitious industrial policy.
A second form of American industrial policy is the biomedical grants and subsidies associated with the National Institutes of Health.
Published in 2019, but still relevant today.
Should You Resign?
At least six prosecutors resigned in early January over DOJ pressure to investigate the widow of Renee Good (killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross) instead of the agent himself. They cited political interference, exclusion of state police, and diversion of resources from priority fraud cases. Similarly, an FBI agent was ordered to stand down from investigating the killing of Good. She resigned. The killing of Alex Pretti and what looks to be an attempted federal coverup will likely lead to more resignations. Is resignation the right choice? I tweeted:
I appreciate the integrity, but every principled resignation is an adverse selection.
In other words, when the good leave and the bad don’t, the institution rots.
Resignation can be useful as a signal–this person is giving up a lot so the issue must be important. Resignations can also create common knowledge–now everyone knows that everyone knows. The canonical example is Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigning rather than carrying out Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. At that time, a resignation was like lighting the beacon. But today, who is there to be called?
The best case for not resigning is that you retain voice—the ability to slow, document, escalate, and resist within lawful channels. In the U.S. system that can mean forcing written directives, triggering inspector-general review, escalating through professional responsibility channels, and building coalitions that outlast transient political appointees. Staying can matter.
But staying is corrupting. People are prepared to say no to one big betrayal, but a steady drip of small compromises depreciates the will: you attend the meetings, sign the forms, stay silent when you should speak. Over time the line moves, and what once felt intolerable starts to feel normal, categories blur. People who on day one would never have agreed to X end up doing X after a chain of small concessions. You may think you’re using the institution, but institutions are very good at using you. Banality deadens evil.
Resignation keeps your hands and conscience clean. That’s good for you but what about society? Utilitarians sometimes call the demand for clean hands a form of moral self-indulgence. A privileging of your own purity over outcomes. Bernard Williams’s reply is that good people are not just sterile utility-accountants, they have deep moral commitments and sometimes resignation is what fidelity to those commitments requires.
So what’s the right move? I see four considerations:
- Complicity: Are you being ordered to do wrong, or, usually the lesser crime, of not doing right?
- Voice: If you stay can you exercise voice? What’s your concrete theory of change—what can you actually block, document, or escalate?
- Timing: Is reversal possible soon or is this structural capture? Are you the remnant?
- Self-discipline: Will you name the bright lines now and keep them, or will “just this once” become the job?
I have not been put in a position to make such a choice but from a social point of view, my judgment is that at the current time, voice is needed and more effective than exit.
Hat tip: Jim Ward.
Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
What should I ask Julia Ioffe?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She has a new and very good book out, namely Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia. I will focus on that topic, but she has done much else as well. From Wikipedia:
…a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.
And here is Julia on Twitter. So what should I ask her?
Sectoral shifts in supply, wartime agriculture edition
It is all the more remarkable, then, that within six years Britain’s agricultural output had transformed, more profoundly and at a faster pace than any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most urgent need was to provide a substitute for all that previously imported foreign wheat. In 1939, Britain only had 11.8 million acres of suitable land under the plough, compared to 17.3 million acres of grass and pastureland. Four years later those figures had been almost exactly reversed — to 17.3 million and 11.4 million acres respectively. The amount of tillage soil devoted to wheat had doubled. Just over 4.2 million harvested tons of wheat, barley and oats had become 7.6 million tons. By 1943 the potato crop was almost twice as big as it had been in 1939. Less pastureland meant fewer animals, and so a veritable massacre on pork and poultry farms ensued. By 1943 there were almost 30 million fewer British chickens and 2.2 million fewer pigs than pre-war numbers. Cows were spared — but strictly for milk production, not beef.
That is from the new and excellent book by Alan Allport, Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945.
Measuring Efficiency and Equity Framing in Economics Research
Using LLMs:
We measure how frontier research frames what is normatively at stake along the efficiency and equity dimension. We develop and validate an LLM-based measurement pipeline and apply it to 27,464 full-text journal articles from 1950 to 2021. Efficiency focused framing rises through the late 1980s, then declines as equity related framing expands after 1990, especially in applied work and policy evaluations. By 2021, papers with an equity component are about as common as papers framed purely around efficiency. President transmittal letters in the Economic Report of the President show a similar post 1990 shift toward equity, providing an external benchmark.
Here is the new NBER working paper by . I take this to be a sign of radical decline in the quality of our profession. I am all for welfare economics considering values other than efficiency. How about liberty, opportunity, and merit? Actual people, especially Americans, care about those too. The longstanding focus on equity as the relevant alternative to efficiency is one of the most blatant politicizations of economic research you will find. Most people doing it are not even aware of that, they simply take for granted that is the relevant trade-off.
The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies
The great biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, gave his retirement lecture at UNC. It’s an excellent overview on the theme of the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. After encomiums, Bart starts around the 13:30 mark with about 10 minutes of amusing biography. He gets into the meat of the lecture at 24:38 which is where it is cued.
Greenland fact of the day
Greenland held a referendum on 23 February 1982 and voted to leave the European Communities / European Economic Community (EEC) (about 52–53% for leaving).
GPT link. They left in 1985.
I write this not to justify current American policy, which I consider a major mistake with extremely poor execution. Rather the point is that we are pushing the Greenlanders into the arms of the Danes, when over some longer haul it could be very different.
The FT offers many more interesting facts about Greenland, including its growing dependence on Asian foreign labor.
When did Argentina lose its way?
From a new paper by Ariel Coremberg and Emilio Ocampo:
This paper challenges the increasingly popular view that Argentina’s economy performed relatively well under the corporatist import substitution industrialization (CISI) regime until the mid-1970s, and that its much-debated decline began only after 1975. Instead, it advances the alternative hypothesis that although real GDP per capita growth during this period was high by Argentina’s historical standards, it was low relative to the rest of the world, to typical comparator countries, and to what was achievable given the country’s factor endowments and investment levels. Distortions in relative prices and systemic capital misallocation generated significant inefficiencies that constrained economic dynamism and limited productivity gains. We support this hypothesis using a range of empirical methodologies—including comparative GDP per capita ratios, convergence analysis, growth accounting, and cyclical peak-to-peak analysis— complemented by historical interpretation. Although post-1955 modifications to the CISI regime temporarily improved performance, by the early 1970s it had exhausted its capacity to sustain growth. The prolonged stagnation that followed the 1975 crisis can be explained by the inability of successive governments to overcome the resistance of entrenched interest groups and thus complete the transition to an open market economy. Abrupt regime reversals fostered social conflict, political instability, and macroeconomic uncertainty, all of which undermined the sustained productivity gains required for long-term growth.
Via the excellent Samir Varma.