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The Distribution of Vaccines in the 19th Century
Distributing a COVID vaccine to billions of people will be challenging. We will require vials, needles, cold storage, air travel, trained health care professionals and much more. The challenge of distributing a smallpox vaccine in the 19th century was even greater because aside from fewer resources the vaccine, cowpox, was geographically rare and infected humans only with difficulty. Moreover, the best method of storing the vaccine was in a person but that worked only until the person’s immune system defeated the virus. Thus, a relay-race of vaccine couriers was created to distribute the vaccine around the world.
In 1803, the [Spanish] king, convinced of the benefits of the vaccine, ordered his personal physician Francis Xavier de Balmis, to deliver it to the Spanish dominions in North and South America. To maintain the vaccine in an available state during the voyage, the physician recruited 22 young boys who had never had cowpox or smallpox before, aged three to nine years, from the orphanages of Spain. During the trip across the Atlantic, de Balmis vaccinated the orphans in a living chain. Two children were vaccinated immediately before departure, and when cowpox pustules had appeared on their arms, material from these lesions was used to vaccinate two more children.
The British tried the same thing to get the vaccine to India but heat and shipwrecks led to many failures until, as Andrea Rusnock writes, Jean De Carro successfully delivered live cowpox to Bombay from Vienna via Baghdad.
De Carro, a Genevan who had received his M.D. from Edinburgh and who practiced medicine in Vienna, became one of the staunchest supporters of Jenner on the continent. It was through De Carro’s effort that vaccination was introduced in Austria, Poland, Greece, and the cities of Venice and Constantinople. In a letter to Jenner, De Carro carefully described his successful shipping technique. First he saturated lint with cowpox lymph and then placed the lint between two pieces of glass, one concave, one flat. He then sealed it with oil. “To prevent the access of light,” De Carro continued, “I commonly fold it in a black paper, and when I was desired to send to Baghdad, I took the precaution of going to a wax-chandler’s, and surrounded the sealed-up glasses with so much wax as to make balls. With this careful manner it arrived still fluid on the banks of the Tigris.
In the United States, Thomas Jefferson also wanted to be vaccinated but after several failures to deliver live cowpox from the Harvard Medical School, “Jefferson designed a new container: An inner chamber would hold the fluid lymph, while a surrounding chamber, filled with cool water, insulated the lymph.”
[Later] President Thomas Jefferson gave some cow lymph to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to take on their explorations west of the Mississippi River. Antoine Saugrain, the only practicing physician in St. Louis when Louisiana was purchased by the United States from France in 1803, received some cowpox lymph from Lewis and Clark and began to vaccinate individuals free of charge, including Native Americans. Saugrain’s free vaccination program established cowpox in the Mississippi valley roughly a decade after Jenner published his inquiry.
Talk about Operation Warp Speed!
Even when delivered, the vaccine had to be kept alive so each cohort of vaccinators was incentivized to provide the vaccine for the next cohort:
In Glasgow, parents had to put down a deposit of 1 shilling (1801) and later 2 shillings (1806) to be refunded only when the child was returned to the clinic [and more cowpox could then be extracted from the children’s lesions]. In Boston, Waterhouse resorted to paying parents to vaccinate their children in order to keep a supply of cowpox.
Occasionally, herd immunity would be reached but that meant there was no way to store the vaccine for the next generation! Physicians, therefore, looked to newly created institutes that shipped the vaccine by one method or another around the world.
Returning to the British and India, after cowpox was delivered through De Carro’s efforts to Baghdad an Armenian child was infected and lymph from his arm was taken to Basra where an East India Company surgeon established a an arm-to-arm relay race that brought cowpox to Bombay:
On 14 June, 1802, Anna Dusthall became the first person in India to be successfully vaccinated against smallpox. Little else is known about her, except that she was “remarkably good tempered”, according to the notes of the doctor who vaccinated her…The following week, five other children in Bombay were vaccinated with pus from Dusthall’s arm. From there, the vaccine travelled, most often arm-to-arm, across India to various British bases – Hyderabad, Cochin, Tellicherry, Chingleput, Madras and eventually, to the royal court of Mysore.
As today, there was fear and opposition to the vaccine, especially in India, because it was foreign, threatened local healers who used variolation, and the use of vaccine couriers meant that “the vaccine was passing through bodies of all races, religions, castes and genders, and that ran counter to unyielding Hindu notions of purity.”
To counter the opposition, the British started an advertising campaign featuring Indian royalty. The picture above, for example, according to one compelling interpretation shows three Indian queens of Mysore with the queen on the right prominently portraying her arm where she has been inoculated with cowpox while the older queen on the left shows the discoloration around the mouth associated with smallpox. Thus, the younger queen on the right symbolizes health, vigor and the value of British science.
The challenges of delivering a vaccine in the 19th century–storage, transportation, fear, and incentives–are surprisingly similar to the challenges we face today. The 19th century effort to deliver the smallpox vaccine was impressive. Within years of Jenner’s pamphlet, the vaccine had made its way around the world. The 21st century effort will need to be much larger. Our civilization has many more resources than that of the 19th century. I hope we can match their will and ingenuity.
Extreme Aging
Japan now has over 70,000 people who are more than 100 years old.
That stunning fact comes from Extreme Economies, an interesting new book by Richard Davies. Davies looks at extreme economies around the world such as extreme failure (Darien, Kinshasa, Glasgow), extreme resilience (Aceh, Angola Prison, LA), extreme inequality (Santiago) and in the case of Japan (Akita), extreme aging.
Japan’s aging is unprecedented and is having effects throughout the economy and society:
In 1975 social security and healthcare spending commanded 22 percent of the country’s tax revenues; by 2017 the figure, driven up by elderly care and pensions, had risen to 55 percent. By the early 2020s the figure is set to hit 60 percent. To look at it in another way, every other public service in Japan — education, transport, infrastructure, defense, the environment, the arts–could rely on almost 80 percent of tax revenue in 1975, but the increase in elderly-related spending means that only 40 percent is left for other national public expenditures. In budgetary terms, ageing is eating Japan.
As a country, Japan is aging not just because it’s people are getting older but because it’s birth rate is well below replacement. This year there will be fewer than 900,000 births in all of Japan–a number not seen since 1874 when Japan’s total population was much smaller. Overall, Japan’s population is declining.
Population decline may have some good effects but the combination of fewer young people and more elderly people is straining Japanese culture along with its finances. The young naturally resent the increasing burden put on them for supporting the elderly. As with all Ponzi schemes, pay-as-you-go social security schemes come under stress when the population is no longer growing.
…over the next 30 years or so, many countries’ pension systems will require young workers to fund a system that everyone knows will be far less generous by 2040. It is hardly a way to generate confidence in public policy.
And those 70,000 centenarians? Almost 90 percent are women so an aging society is a gender unbalanced society meaning old people lose caregivers or at least someone to share a household with.
Davies is interested in Japan as an example of where many countries are going,
Southern Europe, in particular, is following fast with Italy, Spain and Portugal already experiencing population decline. Germany will start to shrink in 2022, Korea in the early 2030s. Akita, Japan’s cutting edge of ageing economics,…offers a valuable window on the future.
Why so many women in public affairs schools?
This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to understand the linkage, if any, among these facts. We assembled a unique database of over 2,150 faculty salary profiles from the top 50 Schools of Public Affairs in the United States as well as the corresponding Economics and Political Science departments. For each faculty member we obtained salary data to analyze the relationship between scholarly discipline, department placement, gender, and annual salary compensation. We found substantial pay differences based on departmental affiliation, significant differences in citation records between male and female faculty in schools of public affairs, and no evidence that the public affairs discount could be explained by compositional differences with respect to gender, experience or scholarly citations.
That is the abstract of a new NBER working paper by Lori L. Taylor, Kalena E. Cortes, and Travis C. Hearn. I have a vague sense that the same might be true of public policy schools as well. Why?
Monday assorted links
1. List and ranking of economics blogs.
3. “Alex is a 43-year-old San Franciscan who works in the financial sector. He also eagerly eats uneaten and untouched leftover food off of plates if he spots it out in the open at a public dining establishment, even if it’s off a stranger’s plate…I’m very much a Libertarian and I kind of let people do whatever they want.” Link here, hilarious throughout.
4. A short take on progress in Bangladesh.
5. Multinational offshoring was behind much of employment deindustrialization.
6. Pay transparency in Canada led to lower academic salaries. And a smaller gender gap in salaries.
Appealing to your identity in making a point
In a post which is interesting more generally, Arnold Kling makes this point:
I think Tyler missed the important difference between taking identity into account and having someone appeal to their identity. I agree with Bryan that the latter is a negative signal. Opening with “Speaking as a ____” is a bullying tactic.
Many have had a similar response, but I figured I would save up that point for an independent blog post, rather than putting it in the original. Here are a few relevant points:
1. If someone opens with “Speaking as a transgender latinx labor activist…”, or something similar, perhaps that is somewhat artless, but most likely it is relevant information to me, at least for most of the topics which correlate with that kind of introduction. I am happy enough with direct communication of that information, and don’t quite get what a GMU blogger would object to in that regard. Does the speaker have to wait until paragraph seven before obliquely hinting at being transgender? Communicate the information in Straussian fashion?
2. Being relatively established, most of the pieces I write already give such an introduction to me, for instance a column by-line or a back cover photo and author description on a book. Less established people face the burden of having to introduce themselves, and yes that is hard to do well, hard for any of us. You might rationally infer that these people are indeed less established, and possibly also less accomplished, but the introduction itself should be seen in this light, not as an outright negative. It is most of all a signal that the person is somewhat “at sea” in establishment institutions and their concomitant introductions, framings, and presentations. Yes, that outsider status possibly can be a negative signal in some regards, but a GMU blogger or independent scholar (as Arnold is) should not regard that as a negative signal per se. At the margin, I’d like to see people pay more attention to smart but non-mainstream sources.
3. For many audiences, I don’t need an introduction at all, nor would Bryan or Arnold. That’s great of course for us. But again we are being parasitic on other social forces having introduced us already. Let’s not pretend we’re above this whole game, we are not, we just have it much easier. EconLog itself has a click space for “Blogger Bios,” though right now it is empty, perhaps out of respect for Bryan’s views. Or how about if you get someone to blurb your books for you?
4. I’ve noticed that, for whatever reasons, women in today’s world often feel less comfortable putting themselves forward in public spaces. In most (not all) areas they blog at much lower rates, and they are also less willing to ask for a salary increase, among other manifestations of the phenomenon. Often, in this kind of situation, you also will find group members who “overshoot” the target and pursue a strategy which is the opposite of excess reticence. I won’t name names, but haven’t you heard something like “Speaking as a feminist, Dionysian, child of the 1960s, Freudian, Catholic, pro-sex, pagan, libertarian polymath…”? Maybe that is a mistake of style and presentation and even reasoning, but the deeper understanding is to figure out better means of evaluating people who “transact” in the public sphere at higher cost, not simply to dismiss or downgrade them.
5. If someone like Bill Gates were testifying in front of Congress and claimed “Speaking as the former CEO of a major company, I can attest that immigration is very important to the American economy” we wouldn’t really object very much, would we? Wouldn’t it seem entirely appropriate? So why do we so often hold similar moves against those further away from the establishment?
How about “as a Mongolian sheep herder, let me tell you what kinds of grass they like to eat…”?
Then why not “As a transgender activist…”? You don’t necessarily have to agree with what follows, just recognize they might know more than average about the topic.
To sum up, appealing to one’s identity possibly can be a negative signal. But overall it should be viewed not as a reason to dismiss such speakers and writers, but rather a chance to obtain a deeper understanding.
Do Boys Have a Comparative Advantage in Math and Science?
Even with a question mark my title, Do Boys Have a Comparative Advantage in Math and Science, is likely to appear sexist. Am I suggesting the boys are better at math and science than girls? No, I am suggesting they might be worse.
Consider first the so-called gender-equality paradox, namely the finding that countries with the highest levels of gender equality tend to have the lowest ratios of women to men in STEM education. Stoet and Geary put it well:
Finland excels in gender equality (World Economic Forum, 2015), its adolescent girls outperform boys in science literacy, and it ranks second in European educational performance (OECD, 2016b). With these high levels of educational performance and overall gender equality, Finland is poised to close the STEM gender gap. Yet, paradoxically, Finland has one of the world’s largest gender gaps in college degrees in STEM fields, and Norway and Sweden, also leading in gender-equality rankings, are not far behind (fewer than 25% of STEM graduates are women). We will show that this pattern extends throughout the world…
(Recent papers have found the paradox holds in other measures of education such as MOOCs and in other measures of behavior and personality. Hat tip on these: Rolf Degen.)
Two explanations for this apparent paradox have been offered. First, countries with greater gender equality tend to be richer and have larger welfare states than countries with less gender equality. As a result, less is riding on choice of career in the richer, gender-equal countries. Even if STEM fields pay more, we would expect small differences in personality that vary with gender would become more apparent as income increases. Paraphrasing John Adams, only in a rich country are people feel free to pursue their interests more than their needs. If women are somewhat less interested in STEM fields than men, then we would expect this difference to become more apparent as income increases.
A second explanation focuses on ability. Some people argue that more men than women have extraordinary ability levels in math and science because of greater male variability in most characteristics. Let’s put that hypothesis to the side. Instead, lets think about individuals and their relative abilities in reading, science and math–this what Stoet and Geary call an intra-individual score. Now consider the figure below which is based on PISA test data from approximately half a million students across many countries. On the left are raw scores (normalized). Focus on the colors, red is for reading, blue is science and green is mathematics. Negative scores (scores to the left of the vertical line) indicate that females scores higher than males, positive scores that males score higher on average than females. Females score higher than males in reading in every country surveyed. Females also score higher than males in science and math in some countries.
Now consider the data on the right. In this case, Stoet and Geary ask for each student what subject are they relatively best at and then they average by country. The differences by sex are now even even more prominent. Not only are females better at reading but even in countries where they are better at math and science than boys on average they are relatively better at reading.
Thus, even when girls outperformed boys in science, as was the case in Finland, girls generally performed even better in reading, which means that their individual strength was, unlike boys’ strength, reading.
Now consider what happens when students are told. Do what you are good at! Loosely speaking the situation will be something like this: females will say I got As in history and English and B’s in Science and Math, therefore, I should follow my strengthens and specialize in drawing on the same skills as history and English. Boys will say I got B’s in Science and Math and C’s in history and English, therefore, I should follow my strengths and do something involving Science and Math.
Note that this is consistent with the Card and Payne study of Canadian high school students that I disscused in my post, The Gender Gap in STEM is NOT What You Think. Quoting Card and Payne:
On average, females have about the same average grades in UP (“University Preparation”, AT) math and sciences courses as males, but higher grades in English/French and other qualifying courses that count toward the top 6 scores that determine their university rankings. This comparative advantage explains a substantial share of the gender difference in the probability of pursing a STEM major, conditional on being STEM ready at the end of high school.
and myself:
Put (too) simply the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to get into non-STEM and STEM fields. Thus, among university students, women dominate in the non-STEM fields and men survive in the STEM fields.
Finally Stoet and Geary show that the above considerations also explain the gender-equality paradox because the intra-individual differences are largest in the most gender equal countries. In the figure below on the left are the intra individual differences in science by gender which increase with gender equality. A higher score means that boys are more likely to have science as a relative strength (i.e. women may get absolutely better at everything with gender equality but the figure suggests that they get relatively better at reading) and on the right the share of women going into STEM fields which decreases with gender equality.
The male dominance in STEM fields is usually seen as due to a male advantage and a female disadvantage (whether genetic, cultural or otherwise). Stoet and Geary show that the result could instead be due to differences in relative advantage. Indeed, the theory of comparative advantage tells us that we could push this even further than Stoet and Geary. It could be the case, for example, that males are worse on average than females in all fields but they specialize in the field in which they are the least worst, namely science and math. In other words, boys could have an absolute disadvantage in all fields but a comparative advantage in math and science. I don’t claim that theory is true but it’s worth thinking about a pure case to understand how the same pattern can be interpreted in diametrically different ways.
Sexy Selfies as Competition Strategy
Publicly displayed, sexualized depictions of women have proliferated, enabled by new communication technologies, including the internet and mobile devices. These depictions are often claimed to be outcomes of a culture of gender inequality and female oppression, but, paradoxically, recent rises in sexualization are most notable in societies that have made strong progress toward gender parity. Few empirical tests of the relation between gender inequality and sexualization exist, and there are even fewer tests of alternative hypotheses. We examined aggregate patterns in 68,562 sexualized self-portrait photographs (“sexy selfies”) shared publicly on Twitter and Instagram and their association with city-, county-, and cross-national indicators of gender inequality. We then investigated the association between sexy-selfie prevalence and income inequality, positing that sexualization—a marker of high female competition—is greater in environments in which incomes are unequal and people are preoccupied with relative social standing. Among 5,567 US cities and 1,622 US counties, areas with relatively more sexy selfies were more economically unequal but not more gender oppressive. A complementary pattern emerged cross-nationally (113 nations): Income inequality positively covaried with sexy-selfie prevalence, particularly within more developed nations. To externally validate our findings, we investigated and confirmed that economically unequal (but not gender-oppressive) areas in the United States also had greater aggregate sales in goods and services related to female physical appearance enhancement (beauty salons and women’s clothing). Here, we provide an empirical understanding of what female sexualization reflects in societies and why it proliferates.
From a new paper in PNAS.
The paper looks mostly at cross-sectional relationships but social media has increased the reach of sexy selfies so the payoff to advertising in this manner has gone way up. Furthermore, sexy selfies have launched more than one billionaire in recent years and not only through marriage so we would expect the trend to continue.
Tuesday assorted links
1. People are averse to machines making moral decisions.
2. Declining Chinese productivity growth.
3. Paying the gender stereotype tax in poker.
4. New NBER paper, possible overturning of the Autor, et.al. results on the China shock? I am not able here to read through it, however.
5. “We find that at least 31.2% of the citations to retracted articles happen a year after the article has been retracted. And that 91.4% of these post-retraction citations are approving.” Link here.
How can families afford children?
Answer me the riddle: The richer the society becomes the less families can afford children? (Note look at India being at replacement level fertility and it is the rich areas bringing the average down.)
I have three boys and wonder how they are ever going to be able to afford a family of more than 1 children in 2030.
“Afford” is a tricky word here. If the goal is simply to avoid bankruptcy, at the expense of the life satisfaction of the main child rearer (usually the wife), that isn’t so difficult for most Americans and Europeans. But of course people wish to maximize utility. And so here are some trends operating against having large numbers of children:
1. Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families.
2. Divorce is these days socially imaginable, and for many people desirable if feasible. The larger the number of children, the harder it is to take advantage of the divorce option, and so that too encourages smaller families.
3. Living space has become especially costly in so many of the major Western cities and suburbs.
4. Given the connection between where you live and your public school system, the very best neighborhoods have become very costly positional goods, in part because of their school systems and the embedded social peers for your kids (even if they bus away to private schools.)
5. Child care is subject to some version of the cost disease, as is higher education. Those services have risen in relative prices and some would say they also have decreased in reliability.
6. These days, there is much more you can do for your single kid (or two), including fancy SAT tutors and unending extracurricular activities. You thus are less likely to arrive at the “I can’t do any more for this kid, let’s summon up another to keep me busy” point than formerly was the case. In Beckerian language, you always have the option of a greater investment in quality, in lieu of boosting quantity.
7. Daughters are no longer less popular than sons and arguably they have become somewhat more popular (NYT). So the notion that you must keep on having kids until a son arrives is weaker than it used to be. The first child is already a “quality child,” no matter what the gender.
8. Most Westerners are on the whole less religious, and this too diminishes the motives for having a larger number of children, for whatever reasons.
9. The decline of the extended family, with babysitting grandparents, is hardly new news. Still, I suspect both work and leisure opportunities for the elderly have improved, which lowers their desire to babysit. Some prefer watching those same babies on Facebook.
That’s a lot of weight operating against multiple children — praise to those who manage nonetheless!
Why men are not earning more
“And it all starts at age 25,” Mr. Guvenen said. The decline in lifetime earnings is largely a result of lower incomes at younger ages rather than at older ages, he said, and “that was very surprising to us.”
Most younger men ended up with less because they started out earning less than their counterparts in previous years, and saw little growth in their early years. They entered the work force with lower wages and never caught up.
That is from a very good NYT piece by Patricia Cohen. And note that in spite of all the recent very good economic news, for men the basic story really hasn’t changed, namely that of stagnation as a class.
I wonder sometimes if a Malthusian/Marxian story might be at work here. At relevant margins, perhaps it is always easier to talk/pay a woman to do a quality hour’s additional work than to talk/pay a man to do the same. And so as the demand for such additional hours opens up, the gains go to women, not men. That is at least for the lower income brackets, and perhaps the very most for younger earners. In other words, especially at young ages, women might be serving as a kind of “reserve army of the underemployed.”
The Hijra of India
Driving around Mumba one sometimes sees hijra begging at street intersections. The Indian term hijra is typically translated as eunuch but not all hijra are eunuchs or even want to be eunuchs so the term transgender is more accurate. In India, transgendered people are discriminated against, widely disliked, and feared. At the same time their blessings are sometimes sought after on important occasions.
It’s common for a transgendered person to be abandoned and thrown out of their home. Most then come to live in small communes of hijra headed by a guru and served by chelas (disciples/students).
We chelas must work hard, do the cooking inside the house, and most of the dancing outside. We have an obligation to look after our guru when she grows old, just like we would look after our own mother. In return, when we first become hijras our Chaman Guru teaches us chelas the way of the eunuchs.
(The quote is from William Dalrymple’s wonderful book, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. Dalrymple, however, draws too close a connection between hijra and the kind of eunuchs who were forcibly created to guard harems among the Mughals).
The communes of 5-15 hijras are like families but also like firms. The hijra make money by begging and by blessing weddings and births. The guru’s job is to learn the time and place of such celebrations for which she develop informants among midwives, musicians and caterers. A supra-community of hijra divide each city into exclusive territories. Each guru thus has a local monopoly and any hijra thrown out by her guru forfeits the right to work. A hijra thus has little choice but to work as a chela especially since other avenues of work are closed. Thus, the guru is both mother, father and boss.
The woman in the guru makes him feel motherly toward his chelas, but the man in him makes him authoritarian and dictatorial.
The blessings of the hijra are always double-edged. When are the blessed paying for the blessing and when are they are paying for the hijra not to curse them or just to go away? The hijra are not above embarrassing your wedding guests with bawdy and rude behavior.
Times have never been easy for the hijra but times are especially tough now because only the traditional occupations are open to them yet fewer people today believe in either their blessings or their curses. Many people consider them a nuisance. As a result, earnings are down.
Our main occupation is to perform badhai at weddings, or when a child is born. At such times we sing and dance to bless the newlyweds or the newborn. But can badhai alone fill our stomachs? Obviously not, and so we supplement our earnings by begging on city streets, and performing sex work, and dancing in bars and night clubs. Dancing comes naturally to us hijras.
…We are thus destitute. Estranged from family and ostracized by society, people couldn’t care less how we earn a livelihood, or where our next meal comes from. If a hijra commits a crime, the mob rushes to attack him while the police are only too glad to press charges against him. This is not to justify crime, but to reiterate that all crimes have a social dimension, and in the case of hijras this cannot be overlooked. Yet it is never taken into account.
A small trans and hijra empowerment movement works to bring greater acceptance to allow hijra to move into other occupations. On Sunday, I attended a hijra festival. The hijra were sweet and welcoming when I talked with them but it was not well attended.
The movement has found success among India’s liberal “internationalized” elite. India’s Supreme Court, for example, recognized a third gender in 2014, so Indian passports, driver’s licenses and other official documents now include M, F and an Other category. Gay sex, however, is still against the law (although prosecutions are rare to nonexistent). It’s notable that Bangladesh and Pakistan, two other countries not known for their liberalism, also recognize a third gender. The seeming contradiction is in part because sexual categories are different than in the West so, for example, sex between men and the third gender (hijra) isn’t considered sex between two men. As is true everywhere, all these issues are complicated and contested.
Intellectuals can also find support for the third gender in Hindu culture. The Vedas, for example, refer to Tritiya prakrti, people of the third sex, and the major Hindu texts treat homosexuality as normal, or at most give it mild admonishments. Hindu gods will often be reincarnated in different genders or even as hermaphrodites (the sculpture at Elephanta island near Mumbai shown at left depicts a hermaphrodite reincarnation of Shiva). The famous erotic carvings at the Khajuraho temples and elsewhere include depictions of homosexual sex.
The relative tolerance of the Hindu classics leads some people to blame Islamic and British influences on Indian society for it’s intolerance but discrimination against the Hijra is widespread. Although intellectuals may find support for tolerance in Hindu classics, the folk do not. Indians by and large are embarrassed about Khajuraho’s depiction of heterosexual sex, let alone anything more challenging.
The willingness of trans and hijra, both in India and the West, to live with discrimination and abandonment is testament to the great drive to live as one feels one is. I wish the hijra good fortune.
Hat tip: Kshitij Batra for discussion.
The panel data great stagnation and also student debt edition, courtesy Justin Weidner
Yes it supports what many of us have been saying for what is now quite a few years:
Using panel data on individual labor income from 1957 to 2013, we document two empirical facts about the distribution of lifetime income in the United States. First, we show that from the cohort that entered the labor market in 1968 to the one entered in 1983, three-quarters of U.S. workers did not experience any increase in lifetime income. Further, during the same period, median lifetime income actually declined by 10-20% for men but increased by 20-30% for women, yet the latter increase was not enough to offset the decline for males because of the very low lifetime income of the earlier cohorts of females. Accounting for rising employer provided health and retirement benefits partly mitigates these findings, but does not overturn them. Much of these changes across cohorts that we document come from the large changes in starting income levels (i.e., at age 25) across cohorts. Based on partial life-cycle income observed for cohorts that are currently in the labor market, the stagnation of lifetime incomes is unlikely to reverse. Second, turning to inequality in lifetime incomes, we find that it has increased significantly within each gender group, but the closing lifetime gender gap has kept overall lifetime inequality virtually flat.
That is from forthcoming work by Justin Weidner, Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song. Right now I am looking at Weidner’s site, his job market paper (pdf) is also quite interesting:
I demonstrate that rise in debt since 1990 has contributed to income stagnation, lowering affected graduates’ income by 1.9\% on average. Because it does not distort occupational choices, an income contingent repayment scheme would increase income for constrained graduates by 3.5% on average.
I look forward to following his work in years to come.
Friday assorted links
1. Chris Blattman bleg on best job market advice and resources.
2. Data on how the social sciences treat gender differences.
3. The economics of sugar in Egypt (NYT).
6. The cashless world is arriving in Sweden.
7. Early vote margins not looking good for Trump. And new Wolfers and Zitzewitz paper on financial markets and the election.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The infrastructure that is China, Stephon Marbury edition.
2. Price differences across gendered but otherwise highly similar toys. On Twitter Robin Hanson wrote: “My guess: women more infer quality/status from price…An obvious other theory of higher prices for women: their products more varied, & so fixed costs are spread over fewer items.”
3. Has the time come for a Pigouvian state? (pdf)
4. The Drone Wars have shifted to the ski front. And comet strikes too.
5. Neil Irwin on The Big Short.
6. Why is the author of The Revenant obsessed with trade disputes?
Denmark fact of the politically incorrect paper of the day
Using Danish matched employer-employee data, this paper estimates the relative productivity of men and women and finds that the gender “productivity gap” is 12 percent–seventy five percent of the 16 percent residual pay gap can be accounted for by productivity differences between men and women.
That is from the job market paper of Yana Gallen, a job market candidate from Northwestern.