Transcripts For CSPAN3 20th Century Social Insurance Public Assistance 20240713

To be here today to celebrate prices former presidency of the American History association. The first eha meeting price and i went to was 1980 in boston. My wife and i were in graduate school. We didnt have much money. My wife and i shared a room with price. [laughter] i said that in the right order. [laughter] and i dont even remember who the president was in 1980, i tried to go online and i couldnt find out. Maybe we should put past president s on the website. And then i thought, i dont need to talk much about price because Everybody Knows who price is. And we had no idea who people were the first time we went. There were three of us from the university of washington, and none of the faculty was there. We had a lot of historians but nobody was there. Price and i and my wife terri, it was like being on survivor. We were on this island. Now, the hpa does a better job taking care of grad students. But i realize there is a bunch of you who know who price is, but you really dont know. So i wanted to do that, but then when i thought back about president ial addresses, the next year was st. Louis, 1981, john hughes was president , some of you were there. The provost from st. Louis university was not feeling well but he gave a talk and in the middle of johns speech, the guy passed out on his plate. That is a memorable president ial address. I thought, what about other president ial addresses . Remember 1994, when cynthia taft morris had to sing part of her address because next door there was a folk family thing going on and they were singing and nobody could hear her over it, so i thought, i dont want to give a memorable president ial address, because often what is memorable is the disasters. So i am not going to roast price, i am going to celebrate price. Melissa and his grad students will do that later tonight. I was thinking about what i wanted to say. I have known price since 1977. The very first day of graduate school even before graduate school started, we were tas together along with Sumner Lacroix and other people, and robert paul thomas, the rise of the western world, was teaching principles and we were tas in his section. Everybody got a laugh, here is price fishback, and price was a big thing at the university of washington. But i am going to talk about price. Price has a tremendous amount of energy, but i never thought of him that way because when sumner was 22, he had enough energy to light up atlanta. This was in 1977. The xerox machine existed but was expensive to use. So when you would go to a class they would give you a ditto reading list, it smelled, there was this blue stuff and there red articles. Ar sumner comes in and says, have you read the start article . We havent read anything, we are still trying to find our apartments. The scale of energy was so up here. Sumner is wonderful. He has calmed down a lot. [laughter] i never really thought about that. Price graduated from Butler University in 1977, came to university of washington grad school, phd 1983, went to georgia. He was at georgia until 1990, visited texas for one year, met his wife, no . Yes . Kind of. He was at georgia, he went to up, shehey got hooked was from atlanta. They went to arizona. Pam got a job. He has been at arizona since. Yeah. So he has been at arizona since 1990. What i want to talk about first is some of his intellectual look intellectual accomplishments. We had a really tight group of grad students. We are still friends. We would get together every three or four years, and we basically we didnt live together but every friday and saturday morning we were doing stuff, going out to dinner, doing these things. If you have ever heard price talk about this, he will talk about how we saved him in his first year of grad school, but the fact is we all saved each other. The kind of community we had as graduate students is somewhat like the community we have as economic historians. We talk a lot and really depend on each other for the kind of community and how we learned. So we lived through prices first book. I think it was 1985 at the new york meetings that price gave a paper. Was that the first paper . Maybe. And the great thing about his book, for those who never read it, was that in the early years, there was a struggle not only about competitive markets, but places in the world were people get stranded, like that peonage, or coal mining towns where there is no competition so guys are being exploited. Miners are being exploited. They go to the company store. And what price showed very persuasively is that that is not ers. Happened to the min around a lot and miners that treated their workers poorly lost their workers. This was in the time when economic history, economics was pasting economics was picking up lessons from history. These people were not just stock there. They were moving around. And that had a big implication for what we thought about the south. And then price and sean, who is also at arizona, wrote a book about workmens compensation, and the workmens compensation literature was all about competition between two groups, employers and employees, and then the state. So the framework, im trying to figure out who won. The conclusion to the book is, that is not the way to explain this. Workmens compensation only came about because all three parties figured out an arrangement that made each one better off. But you cant coordinate by beating up on other people. And that is the fundamental political economy insight that i think about a lot, the coordination aspect. And they really showed that in that book. It was very important. Prices other book is government and American Economy which about of us wrote together in honor of bob, who wrote about Household Finances in the new deal, now working on the great many of us worked on the 1930s. It is the Great Pumpkin of American Economic history. It is out there, periodically it appears. [laughter] whether it is going to sing to you are not, or what it is going to do, with respect to many in the crowd, we dont understand why it happened. We have stories about it and we teach people what appears to be the truth, but in fact, you know, there is a wonderful graph of per capita income in the end in the United States, and you look at that graph, which i use with my students, and the only major thing there is the Great Depression. What stands out is that. Price has become one of the experts on the Great Depression, not on the macro part of it , although he had a great paper on multipliers in the Great Depression and won the prize for best article a couple of years ago, but on labor markets. Hes going to talk about public assistance. Many of you who have worked on the 1930s have gone to prices website and collected data. The data i collected i gave to price. He has provided a real service. I could ask for a show of hands of retail sales at the county level, that kind of data was important. So price has had a Significant Impact on the profession not a the profession at a very high level of scholarship. This is shifting subjects. Can you get me that water . I will get it. There is no water in there. [laughter] price and i played basketball, tennis, golf, a regular thing, we get together and play golf with whoever else is around. This year we played three times. People ask us, did you hear that paper . And we are, no, we were playing golf. Price was also a swimmer at butler. Some of you may know he was an announcer at the 2000 olympics here in atlanta. This is the only thing i did on the internet, which was from a swim magazine in 2013, which said, what happens when you take an economics professor, one wild swim meet and 4805 points . It is swim geek heaven. Arizona professor of economics us thingsback brings as his calculation on how much scoring matters. I dont know what that means, but it matters. [laughter] fishback is a former coach who has been serving as a meat announcer for the better part of 30 years. We would hear about the olympics and the ncaa. One irony of this is that after the olympics, he lost his voice. He had stuff on his vocal cords. For a while, he couldnt talk, which would be a trial for any of us, but it was seriously a trial for price. [laughter] we were at nvr Summer Institute and price couldnt talk. Literally, he could not talk. He had this notepad, and he would write comments on the notepad and pass it to who he was sitting next to, which meant after a while, people got wise and did not want to sit next to price. [laughter] at one point, price passed the note to someone and he turned and said, fishback, shut up. [laughter] ok. This is going to be memorable. We are headed for disaster. If you visit price and go to arizona in basketball season, price tapes them but doesnt watch them and then plays them on speed. Watched a game, patriots and raiders, many of you it may not have been born. So sports is prices life. At his service is enormous. This gets to me. People ask me to organize a oneday conference for five people and it overloads my capacity. Price was the Conference Organizer for cleo from 1996 to 2008. He was the pi with melissa. Tos is a long time, 1996 2008. He was the editor of the journal of economic history from 2008 to 2012. He was the executive director of the eha. I can remember at the boston meetings when price said he was thinking about being an executive director. You are thinking about what . Arent you tired . I want to go on vacation. And he did that from 2012 to 2017, then mike took over. And he has been president elect and president for the last two years. So there was never really a break in that service. And that is a service we have all enjoyed. We have all benefited from what price did. I have a question. How many people know how many basketball teams price roots for during the ncaa tournament . Hold your hand up with fingers. Nobody has got the right number of fingers up. Ok, you give them the book. Sumner had it up first. Prof. Wallis sumner had it first. This is government of the u. S. Economy by price and me and 25 others. Four was the answer. I think five is the answer, but he is the authority. Who can tell me which teams he roots for . Not sumner. Butler. Kentucky. Arizona. Louisville. Is that what you said . Somebody got three. Well. This isnt horseshoes. This is scholarship. Washington. This is a book called well worth saving. You win that, maybe because you were sitting in front. How many of you have gotten a prize from price at a cleo meeting or a book from price . Stand up if you have gotten one. That is a lot of people. Right . It is a lot of people. What happens is that i mean that is something that didnt start with price, but it is something that we do, in that we recognize each others accomplishments. Sometimes the accomplishments are silly things. Sometimes the accompaniments are serious things. I am saving the best for last , price is a great teacher. When we were in graduate school, there was a Football Player nes. D spider gai spider had flunked econ two or three times and we knew he was trying to pass byways, passed by ways, hmmmmm. So price went oneonone with spider. He was a dedicated teacher. I think i need to put my classes onto do this. He won three Teaching Awards in the years he was in georgia. Then he went to arizona. And they have the economics apartment is in the business school. Mbas have lots of awards. But price won the faculty member of the year, the distinguished faculty member, the outstanding 2003,y member in 1999, 2010, 2011,wice, 2015, 2017, 2018, when he got an honorable mention. [laughter] i dont know what happened in 2012. Were you away . Was it a bad year . Ok. So i would win the award when i was gone. That was outstanding. You werent teaching this year. Price has had 41 dissertations that he has supervised. So if you have a phd with price, stand up. [applause] there have been some superior dissertation advisors, and in my generation there has been joel, margo, and there is price. Price is by no means the least of that group. Some people are innately gifted at doing that. They care, work hard at it and they are fantastic. Price has had an enormous impact on economic history, through his own work and the service that he has done. But also because we are populated with students, and they are really good and they have learned a lot, and it is an incredible contribution. We recognized that in 2015 with the hughes prize, which i thought was welldeserved. Price loves music. He sits still all the time. When he comes to our house or we go to his house, when price was editor, he would read papers because you have to. Guess where he would read them . Does anybody know . In the bathtub. [laughter] so you give price the paper, he gives it back and there are scrawled comments hard to read, but oftentimes the edges of the paper are wrinkled. That is because he was reading it in the bath. That happens all the time. He is doing something all the time. You cant do all this stuff if you are just sitting there. I do a lot of that. Thats kind of how i do research now. Just sitting and thinking. So price also loves music. If you have ever been anywhere with him, you will notice we went to london together for a conference organized on the lessons of the Great Depression. They invited American Economic historians to go to england. It depended on when you took off, but the day before the conference started, a volcano in iceland blew up. My wife and i were on the runway lles and we were just about to take off, and they said, there has been a volcano. We are not sure we are going to be able to take off. We waited on the runway for about an hour, they let us take off, we were going across, we were coming down into heathrow and the pilot comes on and says, there is two planes in front of us and we have been diverted to de gaulle. That was an expensive hour. We did three cars, three trains, three taxis and a boat to get to london that day. And then some of the people here, we were stuck, we couldnt get back, mike was there, chris was there, greg is here, we couldnt get back to america. The planes were stuck. So we were staying in this hotel that was 400, there was a conference rate, and luckily nick got the British Academy to squeeze them. But price, the next day we went to a musical, the next day we went to a concert, we went to two concerts in one day. So i was in oxford in june and a guy says price, when he comes here, he goes to the theater, he goes to music, everywhere price goes, i have to go to the music, i have to hear some stuff. When he goes to chicago in april, when you were in graduate school you would never associate price with opera. But he is going now. Prices mother passed away, and he talked about it. He said, we spent the whole weekend just listening to the beach boys, good vibrations. I love price. And i got lots of good vibration about him being president. Price fishback. [applause] prof. Fishback it is a real pleasure to be here. Im going to talk about social insurance and public assistance in the 20th century. The main things i will talk about, aid to dependent children, families with dependent children, supplemental security income, old age assistance, workers comp Unemployment Insurance. , those of the main things we are going to talk about. This is typical. There we go. There are how come that is not up there . Ok. We are on tv, a good way of starting. Ok. Im not exactly sure. Welcome, thank you. There we go. Thank you. Great job. [applause] donnie, how about another hand for donnie . [applause] these are people directly involved in my talk. I wanted to particularly thank richard and susan. They are the ones that got me into this when they talked me into doing social welfare statistics in napa valley for historical statistics in the United States. I have a lot of students on here, i have john on here, i need to talk about bob, they were chief advisers and there they were amazing. Doug if he thought i would become president , he was that he would say there was no way he thought that was going to happen. I would like to think sean cantor, my colleague, gary, lee, i have to think sean, he does not look like this at all. There he is back there. I didnt have time to draw the beard on or anything, but sean was the one who talked me into working on workers compensation, working on new deal. Pathsrted us down these and has been my coauthor on a bunch of these things. I want to mention peter, he wrote a great book called going public growing public. But all these people had big impacts. You will see them throughout the talk. The major findings are the following, the rise of the welfare state. Everyone talks about the rise of the welfare state, was a really been is the rise of the social insurance state. The programs that have grown so much have been programs were people make a contribution are employers make a contribution. These are not your transfers to the taxpayer. One reason is that is it is easy to sell to taxpayers and less stigma because people feel like they earned it and should be able to accept it. Stigma was a big factor to control how much people took from public assistance before. Mandates and tax subsidies are not spending, but have a big impact on the american system. They also have a big impact on other systems. You dont want to just focus on spending, you want to focus on the mandates as well. The other feature of american legislation is that most programs start at the local level and there is assistance from the state, then there is the statefederal version of things and there are federal things as well. One of the things about the pre1930s, they are almost entirely local. We dont know enough about what is going on, only a handful of studies on this. The state comes late during these things and Charities Plan play an outside role. During the 1890s they were running a lot of these welfare systems locally. I have a lot of major findings. Public assistance programs, people talk about spending but public assistance programs set minimum targets. My goal in this talk is to talk about the target they were setting and how does it compare to various measures. That is the primary thing i am going to do. Averages are often much lower, but one reason is because they have this budget principle, they are trying to fill the budget. A lot of people were earning income already so the spending is not as large because all they are doing is topping them up to get to that minimum. And intentions are not always met. Im showing you the intended target. It doesnt mean they always meet that target. I make comparisons to poverty line, manufacturing earnings, employer costs hiring workers, compare it to the minimum im also going to focus on costofliving adjustments across the United States. Those are important. A minimum amount of work has been done on this. When you adjust cost differences, it squeezes distribution unless there is only one benefit across the country. Then, the south rises again. It also greatly weakens the correlations of programs. What i mean is you could be a high Unemployment Insurance state, but not necessarily i high public assistance state. Somebodys correlations are zero. How does the bottom fare . The good news is in terms of consumption, it is ok. There is great work by jim sullivan and meyer, i will show you their work. It is true also the high income quintile has increased its income share even after taxes and transfers at the expense of the others. At the consumption which is what people are targeting, the consumption has stayed stable for the various groups. I will also compare the u. S. Spending internationally. I got involved in this with rita put this session on the nordic model on the World Economic history conference. What do i know about that . I see how the u. S. Compares it. Compares to it. The big thing is we spent bigger share of gdp than most people realize particularly because we spent privately. We have a lot of people falling through the cracks. The bottom 10 , there are problems with take up rates. At the bottom we are not doing well. It is like the poor safety net. I announced the Olympic Games in 1996. I wanted to make comparisons to competitions. We had the trials inside the olympic United States and the olympics where you can see how we do internationally. That is my goal. It sounds like a lot of stuff so i better talk fast. Thomas did a lot of work with me on these things. Her picture is up there and she will roast me within an inch of my life tonight. She is very funny. Im looking forward to this and hope i survive until tomorrow. Here is situation. What i am trying to show you look at the public assistance. , that is the blue line. The first number is too low. I will show you why. You can see the huge rise in public assistance and this is transfer of payments going on. They are making people work for it. One man did a lot of work on this, john, sean and i did a lot of work on these things. You can see it is relatively flat and staying below 1 for the most of the rest of the century until 1966. Everyone talks about the war on poverty and how big it was in terms of spending. It was a tax cut as well as a few programs that were designed for training. Not much spending. The spending went up with medicaid. Medicare is in the red line, medicare in the blue line. The yellow line, there is a lot of private spending on welfare type issues. If you look at just transfers, the entirety of the United States, that is what will is. Welfare is. It is not a social insurance thing, we still have a tiny amount relative to gdp. The real spending is unemployed insurance, Social Security, medicare. People put their money in their. My mother told me, i earned that medicare because i paid for it. She reminded me of that every week. [laughter] prof. Fishback she was a dyed in the wool democrat. I was a huge his appointment. Brendan has done work on massachusetts. Massachusetts collected data about what was going on, private charities and public activity. The numbers are hard to see, but in 1920 you can see private charity was. 5 relative to gdp, public relatively small. Over the 1920s it rises. By time you get to 1930, private charity is above 1 . You can look at the public. The public is above so the previous number was too small and we dont know enough. Steve looked into this process. His brother at university of kentucky has done a lot. There is a lot more we are beginning to do and i need to get on brendan to publish what he was doing. The thing about the u. S. Is most people talk about the rise of the welfare state but it is the rise of social insurance. Unemployment insurance medicare, Social Security, workers comp. People are the employer pays a premium or tax and that benefits occur. You can do it with private accounts. A lot of things, workers comp. Is a mandate. The government has little to do with it unless there is a state insurance program. They are telling employers they have to buy insurance to cover workplace accidents. Social insurance is a easier way to sell things. It it is not a transfer from the taxpayer, less stigma. Stigma is huge talking about Poverty Programs. There are all these things about moral hazard and people not being worthy, undeserving, things like this. As soon as you pay for it there is no more stigma. When Franklin Roosevelt was selling Social Security, he explicitly talked about these programs were supposed to be selfsustaining. These are not coming out of general taxes. The committee on Social Security sent him a version of the bill where it would have a deficit in 1965. He sent it back. He sent a lot of nasty things about it. Thought they had but it they had not. I wanted to make the point selling this, selling the social Insurance Programs is easier than otherwise. Taking care of the only poor was something set aside for old age assistance built on prior stuff the states had been passing in the early 1930s. There was a Poverty Program for the elderly, attacks along with a tax along with a Pension Program when people were working. I dont think people realize this. That system is still there. It is called supplemental security. What can you get from supplemental security . It was meant to be funded from general taxation. It did a lot. I hardly anybody was funding old age assistance type stuff aside from houses until the early 1930s. They had laws before that in the 1920s, but they said it was a county option which meant nothing. The federal government and Social Security act starts funding and providing matching grants, it opens the door for all states to do it. They are spending a lot of money on oldage assistance in the 1950s instead of Social Security. Point two is tax law determines social welfare. Workers comp. Is for people to buy insurance. We know a lot about it. We talk about workers comp. Spending. It the workers comp. People give information to the government and published as if they spent the money. Social security, you put that in private accounts as a mandate, would not be on the government budget area government run, administered by the government, Administration Costs are paid. This is based on employers making contributions unless there is a major recession in congress will extend the benefit. Tax breaks provide health insurance. Melissa is back there because she wrote a paper about this. The ei tc is a major component of the antiPoverty Program. They could be called spending, but mandates are actually important and i think it is important to keep those in mind when you are thinking about these programs. Another reason is you look at the early days of european programs, they were mandates to employers. Here is bismarck. I was talking to here today. He told me bismarck was late. Other people were doing it before. The teacher with the kid with the pension plan, they did that when i was a kid. They dont do that anymore. I wanted to start off with the thing about being local. Everything was local. One of the biggest problems discovering this information was city and county courthouses burned down. You can look for things, but they burned down. No way to find out what happened. A lot of stuff was charities and things like this, so you have to look at a wide range of things. Thats the beauty of this. It with brendan they recorded nearly all of it to the massachusetts board of charities. Social insurance in 1929, say before but they added mothers pensions in 45 states, workers comp. In 44 states, oldage pensions, about half of them before 1934. Poverty and social insurance in 2000. They took a bunch of these things and formalized it. That is important because it takes stigma out of what is going on. It moves the moral hazard situation from some boss deciding you are worthy or not, now you show paperwork, you get the money. You may sit for 15 hours waiting to get in to the meeting. Basically all of these programs formalized what was going on and makes it easier to discover what is going on. Spending is only part of the story. Spending is not how they worked the public assistance program, the oldage assistance, mothers pension. They have a target level. This is what john brought me. That is why his picture is up here. You look in the Great Depression, wpa, they had a target. Here is the budget level we want you to have. Here is how much you are earning. This is what they are shooting for. Everything i will talk about you now, they are intended benefit levels. Doesnt mean they are always met. Disappointment from government, university, life itself, just get used to it. The idea, finding commitment, i dont think there is a word like that in the dictionary. The averages dont tell the full story because in a good time the averages will be low because the target is easier to reach because there is less of a gap. In a bad time the average will be bigger because there is a bigger gap to fill. A person could end up with the same amount of money in both times. I want to talk about this target. After the Social Security act of 1935, the targets were greatly influenced by the federal matching grants. Like the old age assistance and any dependent children, imagine 15 a month as long as you match 15 a month per recipient per month, that gives you a target for the state to do that as well. A lot of the benefit levels are 30. 15 from the federal and 50 from the state. It expands the system where almost every state has incentive to get involved, until states that dont always meet that target during the Great Depression they didnt have enough money in tax. Even now, budget problems will influence those payments. I will focus on four programs, mothers pension which is age dependent children, aided temporary assistance for needy families. I will talk about old age assistance for the elderly poor, Social Security income in the 1970s, and Insurance Programs with benefits covered by employers, workers comp. This is sam allen. He is a vmi. They refused to put his picture on their website. They have pictures of everyone else. This is my proxy. I dont think he has ever had a mustache but this guy is handsome. Employment insurance, the same kind of thing. All of the benefits are set by state governments. Call of them are set by state governments. You have to really look across the entire country. This has been driving me nuts for the past 30 years. The past month has been difficult. I am assuming these people have zero income and they are renting. A family of three has an adult, child under five. The elderly has one child living by themselves 65 or over. The other feature is, these are the resources where this is what they are trying to get them to, the bare minimum. You start earning money, resources rise but slowly start taking things away from you. They give you more than what is showing up here. Target incomes, look at National Trends to show you the population. I will show you what goes across the state. I will discuss the state variation and cost of living adjustments for particular times because these are the years where people did cost of living studies and compare things across states. Now i will examine this correlation. I had to run a regression somewhere. He gave me nothing except this. This is an interesting feature. A lot of people have been talking about the cpi, what the true level will be. There are multiple measures of the cpi that i used to think they said the same thing, but turns out bls has a Research Project where the used techniques they have developed to measure quality of goods in the 20th century and have gone back and used them for the previous 30 years. The line is the black line is 14 higher than you would have been in 2000 with the regular cpi. You want to read a great thing about poverty lines, read Linda Barrington and eric fishers piece, it is glorious. It is a great piece and she describes it. I picked up on oscars estimates for the earlier timeframe. He pretty much did the same thing trying to be as consistent , as possible with the poverty line. There is no also the personal consumption they spend it shares price index which the b. E. A. Put out. You use it, the income is 31 higher than in 2000 the official poverty line since 1970 is basically rising at the rate of the cpi but it doesnt mean per capita income has stayed the same. It depends on how well you have adjusted for other things. Employer hiring manufacturer, weekly hours and weekly earnings, but i realized they are deceiving a cousin tell you deceiving because they tell you the wages. They dont tell you about benefits. It is important to include benefits listed here. Bill the good job and others including this in historical statistics. I cant adjust them at the state level but only at the national. This includes contributions of employers for Social Security and also for the other kinds of things the governmentbased because if you are not earning and not in their you cant be a part of that system. That is a big feature of being involved and being working is you get access to benefits from the government you cant get a less you are working. Unless you are working. Here is the minimum wage, got you cant get unless you are working. Here is the minimum wage. Here are the data sets. Minimum wage, the reason this doesnt look like a saw where everything is dropping dramatically, it is because im using a handful of years. If you look at typical minimum wage, it goes up and then just goes like this until they change it the next time. Here is what we are looking at. The National Average over time relative to the poverty line. I adjusted for whoever we are looking at here. There are several key points i want to make to you. There is a National Average rises over time, relative to the poverty line. It rises dramatically if you look at this. It goes from a mean of. 35, up to 1. 6 1990 and then something cuts into those benefits. The benefits are including the various things, School Lunches i should mention that because Richard Russell is the name of the School Lunch Program in 1946. He grew up in georgia. I should mention them. I include School Lunches, wic one thing i dont include is housing subsidies because i dont have a way to assign them to various people. You can see a substantial rise over time. You can also see the minimums rise over time but look in that redline on any line, you can see a huge variation across the states in what these targets look like. Later, what you will see is some competition. I will show you who you should root for, who you should boo. Pick your favorite thing and compare countries. You can pick your favorite country. I spent time trying to lead cheers at the olympics. That was a very good experience or whatever. World records was the best way to lead a record. There are no records being set here. These are the changes in the components for the family benefits. One of the things you see is after 1958 there is a rise in the ratio of the poverty line because of rising medical payments. It was a substantial rise. One thing to realize is medicaid is not the first time the government got involved providing medical benefits. They were known as medical vendor payments. The official statistics get reported in 1952. You see that in the 50s. Surprisingly hard to find the targets in the data that is in there. Usually you find them in mimeos that are deeply hidden. That was a painful process. One of the things between 1958 and 1971, increasing food and benefit, then a big drop between 1990 and 2000 in the average, related to one program. The ratio of failing various family measures, steve, this is a great picture. If you know him, this is what you would expect him to put on his website. He suggested over the course of a long time where he studied these things, the ratio was supposed to be. 4 what people were paying. It fits in until after 1930. It looks at that pretty closely. The other thing too is in 1990 and in 2000, the minimum for all of these things is equal to the minimum wage. Which is kind of surprising. So here is the ratio to poverty line for a Single Person over 64 living on their own. Andrew goodman make then doing this, sherry is writing a book, Caroline Maynard has done a lot of work. One of the things you can see is seniors are treated better than families. Add up the medical care, that mean in 2000 is higher. The kids get education and stuff. Im not sure it offsets that. The ratio is holding all the way throughout the timeframe. We seem to love the elderly. I love the elderly because im about to become the elderly. Everybody thinks i am the elderly because people keep asking me, are you retired . What . I am never going to retire. Who knows, but it is embarrassing when you go to the Movie Theater and they say, arent you eligible for the senior discount . No . [laughter] prof. Fishback all of these people who say they are eligible, they dont look like they are eligible. Oh thanks. [laughter] prof. Fishback that is really nice of you. On to elderly medical payments. They rose but not like the elderly medical payments. These took off. One thing to realize, this is what medicaid is spending so these are the medicaid prices. This is not the big rise in Health Care Costs everybody keeps talking about because medicaid has low prices. This is a substantial rise in medical care being received. Looking at everything else, comparing it to medical cpi, looks bad in terms of service. Look at the big jump between 1971 and 1983. It is not just a model phenomenon. This was happening in the 1970s. Then 1990 and 2000. It took another big jump. This is not happening for kids and adults under this program. There is a lot of stuff that is going on, older age groups where they are spending more money. You have access to hip replacements and things like that. It is vastly improved. That is good news. I am looking forward to my first hip replacement. [laughter] prof. Fishback i have got a lot of friends in this room who have got hip replacements. I have had friends with both knees and both shoulders. Steve the bionic man, they are doing really well. Lets look at workers comp. Sean and sam again. One of the things to note about this, relative to the employer cost, workers comp. Went up between 26 and 34. Why could that be . Wages fell, benefits did not change. Between 1940 and 1950, you wanted to improve workers comp, you needed legislatures to pass stuff. 40 to 50, wages take off, benefits dont follow. Finally after the burton report, what sam allen did a lot of work on, the burton report pointed out flaws in workers comp. It is the most successful federal report in history because every state adopted like two thirds of recommendations they put in. One was an index to the wage. You can see what has happened to workers comp. Benefits. They have gone up as a share of the poverty line, employer cost and minimum wage and they are still rising. I went to a session on workers comp. Where they said it was being destroyed. I was listening so i could point out benefits are rising rapidly. Accident rates are dropping so it is looking great. I did work with andy, one of the graduate students at arizona who is also a law degree. We discovered, he started looking at burden of proof and how they treat you with an alcoholrelated accident. When you look at those things, they are eating into workers comp. By 8 . That is substantial. Small things people dont think about that are eating away. Oklahoma is trying to get rid of it completely. That is just oklahoma. Here is workers comp. , relative to minimum earnings. Lets skip that one. Unemployment, she did some work on the Unemployment Insurance. Larry should be there somewhere but i am not sure where. Same problem with lack of updating for unemployed insurance as with workers comp. Im not sure they are doing things with the indexing but it looks like they are in this context. So here is the effects of adjusting for crosssectional differences. I always thought this was really important. I am from the south, everyone tells me the south stinks, but the south, i kind of like it area people that grew up in the south feel they have been blessed. When they moved they move west in the south or move to a city because they like being warm. They like not having to buy one of those big coats. It turns out there is a lot more work on this than i ever realized. The Works Progress administration did these maintenance things. People used to do this in 1982. I dont know why they stopped. The chamber of commerce was collecting all sorts of data but edgar olson and paul carino put together the data set where they combined all sorts of information from the hud. Really detailed information on the quality. They could make adjustments for every little thing you could think of. 30 or 40 different variables you would like to know about when you are studying this. They combined with the American Chamber of commerce and developed a panel data set which shows variations and cost of living across various cities, metro areas and states. Take a look at this. It runs from 1983 to 2012. Go to edgars website in virginia. It is really some great stuff. Here is a typical pattern. The standard deviation falls in most cases. The minimums rise, maximums fall. I have to point out that alaska is not on this part. It is over to the right because it had big benefits but then it gets cut by the high cost of living. One of the things is the lowest cost of living place is the south, Southern States at the bottom stay at the bottom after you adjust for cost of living. Elderly benefits relative to the poverty line, alaska still to the right, minnesota and new york fall but they are still high. States at the bottom, california, that was a shock. I guess they dont like the elderly. Maybe they are smart enough to focus on the kids. This is the unusual one and it happens in every system when you see it, they adopt the first law. What they will do is pick the same number. 25 or 31 observations, first Unemployment Insurance act was 15 for week. You can see the south really rises in this. Alabama takes off. They are leading the pack as a result of the cost of living adjustment until everybody adjusts their benefits. Here is what happens when you adjust for cost of living to correlations between the various benefits. I did work with the sam allen and jonathan fox and Brent Livingston where we look at what is the correlation between the same program, didnt adjust for cost of living . You are looking at in new york city if you were high on Unemployment Insurance, doesnt does that mean you will be high on workers comp. And oldage . Do all four mean you will be high . When you adjust your cost of living it goes away. You can see on the right you will see minus. 07. That was a stunner. I did not anticipate that. Here is what happens in 2000 with the same thing. I tried to do these correlations for cost of living benefits. Some of these look really good. Add that, everything goes away. My colleague at arizona told me that is what fixed effects are for. Ok. What you see here, these are the fixed effects for the state, the states that are low. You can see it is Southern States, the corridor of mountain states and california for Unemployment Insurance. This is the work done by bruce meyer and jim sullivan. I have been doing this for 20 years. They do it for like a 50 year timeframe or up to 60 because they are going up to modern day. One thing they look at is adjusting for family size and poverty rates preand posttax transfer. The official rate, the official income poverty is the blue line which is going along. Ways,ks flat in a lot of from. 19 down to a lot of bouncing in between. Aftertax money income and it has benefits, you see a huge drop in poverty, people below poverty from. 31 to less than. 1. It is a picture you dont see. I keep wondering why dont we see this because they have been doing it for years . I dont know whether it is right to do it this way but it is part of the conversation. This is something people need to see. Another way to measure poverty, the fraction below 50 median income. The money keeps rising over time but others are more flat and you see consumption falling below 1 . They make adjustments for rice differences. They have a paper called winning the war on poverty which angers everybody but conservatives are mad because they have been telling us we are losing the war and should not bother doing these are grams. The liberals are mad because there is no more poverty. If they get to poverty rates and consumption, like 3 , they are claiming their winning but we know from other things there are people who are not answering these questions who are out there. Here is the share of consumption income. New numbers james sent me. All of the income measures are dropping, and we know where the money is going. It is going to the top quintile. Consumption is flat. The income of people in poverty, not the same year per year. Per capita income has been rising. This is the share for the top, grabbing everything at the expense of everybody else but not for consumption. To make international comparisons, this is the social welfare stuff with melissa. One thing i discovered i would update these numbers in the Social Security Administration Stopped doing it. I thought it was a pretty useful thing to have so i am disappointed in the Social Security administration. These are the things they include in social welfare. A lot of Times Education is included. It is not here. It is transfer programs or social Insurance Programs. Peter did a nice job collecting a lot of these data. It is a great book. Read the second book which goes through the details. Told me today he has got a new book coming out march or april. I recommend you read what peter is doing. The u. S. Analysis was based on building from data sent by melissa, becky, brendan and jonathan fox. Here is what the spending in denmark, finland, norway, United States looks like between 1880 and 1930. I put everything on the same scale. You are going to see how it changes over time. Virtually nothing. It is better than that actually i believe but it is virtually nothing. Here is what it looks like between 1993 and 2005. This is the headline we always see. Growth Public Welfare spending as a percent relative to gdp. We know gdp is final goods and services. This is transfers or payments which dont mean final goods and services. Sweden is like 40 percent to 77 . Denmark and the United States looks pitiful 15 . If you go deeper into the statistics, you discover they have all sorts of numbers behind in a bunch of documents. Here is the picture when you adjust for particular the 28 tax in sweden. They tax the hell out of benefits. I should not have said that. They tax their benefits a lot. That is mild for me, you got to admit. They have over 20 consumption tax for the nordic states, the u. S. Is 5 to 7 . You have the eitc in america. Sweden before, sweden was up about 40 . Now they are down to 30 or 20 . Denmark falls quite a bit. Finland is up, the u. S. Sneaks up, getting near finland. And then public and social welfare spending because we spend 9. 5 for health care for the elderly, the poor and veterans, then another 9. 5 and everybody else spends. If we dont include that, we are not including half of our health care spending. It is worth including because you want to see what you are doing overall. We jump up into the middle. Now we look like we are like everybody else but we do it differently. We spend it but privately and publicly. They are primarily sending it publicly. Here is what it looks like with a bunch more states. The net public looks kind of low except for korea. Korea over the last 20 years is making a jump up. Net total we are pretty far above other countries across the world, which everyone things of being social democrats and doing things. Here is one of the problems. A germans amount of work on poverty, he is at the university of wisconsin. He was at syracuse before. We got to educate his son at arizona. What you can see is what happens when sweden makes adjustments for taxes and transfers, when the u. S. Does, when sweden does it, the number of people are 40 below the minimum drops to virtually nothing where we still have 10 still sitting. That is not so good. If you look at the very bottom the 10th percentile and try to , adjust for per capita jobs, purchasing power parity, we know how difficult that is, but they are in the same boat. Around 9300, 9,500. If you look at the very bottom, we dont look so good. That is the picture for all income. You can see the u. S. Has much higher is at the top. The bottom is looking that is the 10th percentile at the bottom, but at the bottom percent, below the bottom we are 5,800 in 2005 while finland and norway are higher. Something is going wrong. Some of it may be we made it hard for people to get it because it seems like we have millions of programs but people dont seem to be able to get access to them all. Did we do that on purpose . I dont know. Maybe our social welfare system is not good at getting people involved or it could be there are people who dont want to be involved in the system and have reasons of their own not doing these. If you are a drug addict who is 30, dont have kids, you are in deep trouble in my be better in one of these countries. I am running out of time because john took my time. But that is ok. I was happy for him to describe me and all sorts of things. He was saying such nice things. What can i say . I will compare the targets to the National Average capital gdp. This is like planets in days. The olympic trials and then in america, you go to the world and look at the competition. Im using madisons reasons for per capita incomes. The reason it is biased against, it is not including gdp and stuff with national defense, education and all sorts of things. It is a little bit against us but no one likes us because we brag all the time. A and here is the situation. Workers comp in 1919 is ranked 27 out of 43 countries. Madison had not done that many. You can see they are above us, italy and panama. In the u. S. The olympic trials of West Virginia is at the bottom and New Hampshire is the top. Anybody from New Hampshire . There we go. You are a winner. Mothers pensions and whatever, rhode island, massachusetts. If you are rooting for them, you should be cheering. At the bottom is new jersey. Oh well. This is unusual because new jersey is pretty high. We are between ecuador and the former ussr. I dont know how they got ussr numbers because everything was a total mess at that point. I think madison called up lennon and said, well, what is it . The last year before Social Security comes in, New Hampshire at the top again. You are still a winner. If i had it prizes, i would give them away. Rocky top is not looking good. Sweden is just above us. Spain is below us. Workers comp. In 1934, wisconsin at the top, usually it is high up. West virginia is still below. I spent a lot of time there. Doesnt seem bad. We are close to ireland and finland. Mothers pensions in 34. Connecticut and oklahoma at the bottom. We are in the middle of costa rica and bulgaria. Old age assistance, if you are old and you are in the median of the United States you are doing well. You are up there near israel and saudi arabia. I dont think you are an oil baron in saudi arabia. There is a big distribution there is a few people over here and a lot of people down here. You are doing well. I forgot to do the maximum. Louisiana is at the bottom. Here is workers comp. In the 1960s, relative to several countries, you can see what those states are. Here is on implement insurance. It doesnt rank very well. It is shortterm. This is the weekly benefits and we are at the median for the world. Iran through a lot of stuff very let me make some points. I ran through a lot of stuff very let me make some points. The rise of the welfare state, when we are making just transfers from the general taxation to the poor, it really hasnt changed much. Almost all of it is medicaid, medical care. All of the rise you are seeing, the things going on is social insurance, where we have paid for it in some way and our Accounting System for government at the federal level is somewhat insane. You want to think about these as, here is how much we have, the lockbox and look at those as separate entities. They are not the same as federal spending. You need a different way of looking at what is going on with those numbers. Another thing i want to make a point about is mandates and tax subsidies, they made that point when talking about government. Government spending havent changed much but the number of mandates and limits people face has changed and increased. Relative to what you saw in 1930s, 1900 and things like that. They have big effects. Our Health Care System has driven a long way by tax subsidies or benefits out of the employer, the way we run that system. Also the u. S. And other countries, we started state and local, became state. It was relatively small in massachusetts. That is true everywhere, then became the federal state and that evened things out in terms of access but not the benefits because states determine those. There is large benefits large variation at the state level. The income targets for what is going on with income targets they have risen over time relative to other measures. We need to take your of those kids. We need to take care of those families and do it better than what we are doing now. This is my personal opinion, not an analytical thing. This is my own personal opinion. They have been rising but we treat the elderly so much better than it seems like we should be thinking about the kids. I talked about the elderly doing well. Workers comp. , the goal is to put you close to where you were. There are hazard issues so you dont want to pay full benefits what you want to keep people comfortable. Once you adjust for the cost of living, it reduces correlations and squeezes distribution but it changes the rankings but not enough to make a huge difference. How well we have done it and they have poverty at the bottom, you look at consumption, we have done a reasonable job based on the meyer and sullivan work. We could do better. The headline things, in terms of income even after taxes were the top group is really doing much better at the expense of everybody else. The reason that is important is it is not just about consumption but the ability to save and invest and do things like that. It is a big disadvantage. We are doing ok on consumption but not these other things. The u. S. Safety net system, we do more than people thought because most of the time they are filling out the private when is a huge part of what our system is about. We have a big problem in the sense there is something at the bottom, there is this whole in the safety net holes in the safety net. Target age, old elite the elderly are doing well. I really want to finish, this is the people who are directly involved in all sorts of data and things like that for this paper. This is an experience you all have for almost every paper you write as well. It is important. They had a big impact on my thinking. If i could put up all the people that influenced my thinking about various things, it would cover all of this room. There is so many things. This is a great question to be in. Thank you. [applause] prof. Fishback i think we have some questions. They want you to use the microphone. I am a bad moderator so i am trying to do a good job people dont do what i do. I dont want people in the back for me but i still do it. Are we going to have questions . I was wondering, i dont know but anecdotally my impression is that subsidies to a variety of interests are actually transfers. They may or may not have public goods benefits. Do you have a sense whether or not those are growing relative to the kinds of social insurance you are describing, and if so, is that because the groups are well defined and targeted compared to the group of the poor and elderly . Prof. Fishback the tax system and things like that, every system in the world i think has subsidies going to kind of elites in a variety of different ways. I was trying to focus on how we are doing for the very bottom. That is a difficult question. You have spent most of your life and i have spent most of my studying it. I dont have a good way to measure it. Hold on. My question is about tax incidence. We teach students that to believe in the theory that who is legally responsible for taxes is not necessarily taxes can be shifted. Studies are no from Social Security suggest almost all of the employers share the shifted to the workers. I suspect it is true for almost all of these as well. I wonder how these things would look if you paid more attention to tax shifting and who is paying for these things . Also this question of politically, how well can we sell this thing to various people based on, it is probably Social Security, it made sense to say 5050 so maybe the employers employees would get on board. Prof. Fishback i agree. I give the tax lecture, one of my favorites to give. It makes the point Even Stronger that people have paid for it. Sean and i did this work on workers comp. And found nonunion workers paid for the extra that if the form of lower wages. Most people agree Social Security and medicaid taxes, being passed to the employee in these kind of things, it makes the point Even Stronger, easier to sell this because you expect they are paying for everything. It is they are better insured. Sean and i would try to make this point, that the workers themselves, even though they bought it, they are better off because they could not get decent workplace Accident Insurance without having this mandate. That was the story. It makes your point stronger. Thank you for bringing it up. Other people . You need to run over here. Phil is a good swimmer. He was a breaststroke are breaststroker and things like that. Dont know how will you run. I know you got a lot of the politics at the national level. There is more to do. How about the state votes because a lot of this is implement it at the state . Prof. Fishback i know a lot about workers comp. From the workers, and so, the things we found in workers comp is even though, not everybody gained the Interest Group but it seems like the majority of people in each group were dating. Gaining. They fought like cats and dogs over the football, the inner meaning thing where everyone is gaining but there is stuff to fight over . We found whether or not you had a state insurance system, the examples you found work, if you had like instead of the courts administering and had industrial commission, they seemed to tilt things. If you had a lot of employers who had dangerous jobs, it tilted against the workers. A lot of those things made sense. You can get situations where everyone is benefiting but still fight because there is rent to gain. You can fight over that. Should i stand . Are you sure . Good. I am an assistant professor of economics. My question is related on the kind of political motivation or drivers of this subnational social spending, particularly by race. I am wondering how racial diversity or the distribution of the population can affect each of those categories. You mentioned old age assistance. Those numbers are the same over all categories . Prof. Fishback the targets, they are the official targets. I dont think they are affected by race within the state. The choice of the benefit level is i think is being determined by whether you believe the poor deserve it or they are cheating, because it has been a huge debate in america for a long time. It shows up today but it was bigger i think in the 19th century, 20th century. I have a feeling race and ethnicity and things like that had big effects. I am in the middle of doing work about the benefits, the access to relief for blacks and whites during the 1930s. So my colleague at claremont, and i have been working on this thing where those benefits, who gets work relief in those kind of things are determined at the local level in the county. We ran a bunch of regressions trying to control for all of the features and individuals and look at what they did. We found some interesting things. I was surprised. If you are outside the south it was almost uniformly the case, if you were africanamerican you are more likely to get benefits at the controlling fees correlations than if you are are not. Foreigners were not doing as well. Inside the south and about 30 of the counties, it was still true but in the rest of the south which i think tended to be rural, they didnt fare as well. We have this amorphous model about the economy of what is going on. We can find segregation measures john and logan put together. They are correlated with this. Another feature is the whites are dominating the south in terms of politics. Africanamericans have some voting strength pretty much in the north. What we are finding is if you have a Significant Group of more skilled workers, it seems among the whites, it seems to be there likely to give work relief to be favorable to blacks in terms of work relief. This was a surprise. I thought they were not doing so well but it has taken us forever. We have been doing it two years. It was really interesting kind of seeing these patterns. I dont know as much about what happened afterwards, but you can see the patterns not just in 1940 but we have county averages, you can see it in 1933. That is good news. Blacks and a lot of people in the jobs, they got left out of Social Security. Domestic workers were left out until the 1950s. It is not unusual for the social insurance systems. Workers comp. , they left out agriculture workers and small farms and it things like that. This is our last question. One thing that is unique about the United States in terms of its welfare system or social insurance system is that there is a multiplicity of jurisdictions and different political level systems interacting with the federal one. To what extent do you see learning going on and jurisdictions taking on board the experiences of other places . So you mentioned that in the case of one of those targets you have clustering where the states would just copy the levels of the other states did. Can you talk more about that endeavor . Prof. Fishback there is a little bit of that going on, not as much as you might think. We found a lot of states pretty much matched what the states next door did. A lot of times, there are National Groups negotiating and they will set up the standard bills, model bills and send them around the country and benefits get set. I think there are some relationships that show up with migration patterns because you see clusters. We need to do work on that thing. John always tells me there are like 100,000 governments in america. You dont like government, you are in trouble. I think that is it. Thank you all for coming. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] aton American History tv, 10 00 eastern on real america, the film the whole world is watching. The antivietnam war demonstration washington which resulted in the largest mass arrest in u. S. History. 1000 more in georgetown. Sunday, harvey pratt shares his vision for the national theve american memorial on national mall. That is abase of fire. Lightn use that fire to your sweet grass and your sage and things you use. You can touch the water and use the fire. We call that the drama. Monday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonja Sotomayor discuss the impact of the first woman on the supreme court. Quacks if you read between the want to improve the status of women in the nursing profession, the best way to do it is to get men to want to do the job. The pay inevitably will go up. Nations past on American History tv, every weekend on cspan3. Next, a visit to the Smithsonians National portrait gallery. Kate clarke lemay gives a guided tour of an exhibit marking the centennial of the 19th amendment, using images of early suffrage leaders, she shows how the movement intersected with the abolitionist and temperance movements. This is the first of a twopart program. Kate hello, everyone, welcome to the National Portrait gallery at the smithsonian institution