Clayne L. Pope

The Economics of Mortality in North America, 1650–1910: A Description of a Research Project

No abstract is available for this paper.

Household Wealth in a Settlement Economy: Utah, 1850–1870

The economics of David Ricardo and the contemporary evidence for the economic importance of information suggest that time of entry into an economy should be an important determinant of wealth. This hypothesis is validated for nineteenth-century Utah, since time of entry into the economy had a larger impact on the level of wealth than did occupation, birthplace, sex, region of settlement, or age. This finding suggests that the effect on wealthholding of variables often given a discriminatory interpretation such as foreign birth may be overstated if time of entry into the economy is ignored. It also helps to explain the increase in inequality as the settlement process continues.returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Economic and Geographic Mobility on the Farming Frontier: Evidence from Appanoose County, Iowa 1850-1870

This paper investigates the characteristics of the early settlers on the midwestern farming frontier, the correlates of their geographic mobility, and the determinants of their wealth. Using evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the federal censuses of 1850-1870, we find average rates of growth of wealth over time that were considerably above the national average, a steeper cross-sectional relationship between wealth and age than those found for populations drawn more broadly from throughout the United States at the same time, and a substantial positive effect of early arrival on the frontier on wealth levels. These results suggest that very high levels of economic opportunity may have been a characteristic of the nineteenth-century farming frontier.

Unobservable Family and Individual Contributions to the Distributions Ofincome and Wealth

This paper uses combinations of full brothers, half brothers, and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a households income and wealth. While the data are drawn from a nineteenth-century population, the intraclass correlation for income ranges from .13 to .18, which is similar to that found in modern samples. Intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher (.18-.35) than are those for income. Intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect. When unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects, the individual effect dominates the family effect for income, while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth.

The Life Cycle in Economic History

The life cycles of income and wealth form important traces of the economic history of households. Comparisons of cross-sectional estimates of the age-wealth profiles from 1774 to 1962 reveal little change in the basic pattern although crosssectional age-income or earnings profiles peak later in modern periods because of the increased investment in human capital.The wealth-income ratio appears to be declining. Multivariate regressions for Utah households show wealth-income patterns consistent with a life cycle model based on smoothing of consumption with little interaction between age and other determinants of economic position. Foreign birth has a positive effect on income while reducing wealth.

Inequality in the Nineteenth Century

THE THREE GREAT QUESTIONS Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Simon Kuznets have set out the fundamental questions that dominate consideration of inequality in the nineteenth century. Their questions, posed in 1835, 1893, and 1955 respectively, have not yet been definitively answered. Nor are answers close at hand, for these questions pose difficult methodological issues, relate to changing values concerning inequality and economic opportunity, and require quantitative evidence on poorly measured distributions of income and wealth as well as information about economic opportunity. Yet each of the questions retains its interest and relevance to judgments today about economic equality in the nineteenth century. From May 1831 to February 1832 Alexis de Tocqueville, in the company of Gustave de Beaumont, made his epic journey through North America, traveling west across New York to the frontier in Michigan, then northeast into Canada, down to Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, west to Cincinnati, Nashville, and Memphis, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, overland to Washington, and back to New York City. Tocqueville and Beaumont were entertained by various levels of society, which they interviewed extensively, and observed with dispassion and insight the structure of this strange new democracy.

Mobility and Distribution

This article examines the mobility of Utah households as measured by their wealth holdings reported in the census manuscripts of 1860 and 1870. Substantial mobility is observed though there is a tendency for the households to remain in the richest decile. Control for age, nativity, or dichotomies such as urban-rural or farm and nonfarm does not substantially reduce mobility. The lack of association of characteristics with the observed mobility, combined with high levels of cross-sectional inequality, highlights the importance of measuring mobility as well as wealth or income dispersion in order to make valid normative inferences. S UBSTANTIAL effort has been devoted to analyses of distributional inequality, whether measured by individual incomes, earnings, or wealth holdings. As a consequence, we know a good deal about dispersion at various points in time for measures of economic position and hence about the changes in dispersion across decades and even centuries: income, earnings and wealth distributions evidence considerable dispersion and the dispersion appears to have narrowed somewhat in the twentieth century after earlier increases in inequality. However, the small changes happen slowly so that the stability of measured dispersion over decade or longer intervals is remarkable (Williamson and Lindert, 1980). We know a good deal less about economic mobility-the movement of individual households through these disperse distributions (cf. McCall, 1973, or Schiller, 1976). This paper considers evidence of mobility for a panel of households with a relatively stable distribution through time sampled from an economy with increasing inequality in wealth holdings. We find substantial mobility over a two-decade interval. Mobility of the sort we observe poses some difficulties for normative judgments when distributional dispersion is an element in welfare evaluations of a society or of policies likely to have distributional impacts. We return to this issue briefly in a concluding section. I. The Distribution of Wealth in Utah,

Wealth Mobility: The Missing Element

We consider the problems that may arise when cross sectional data alone are used for inferences about individual welfare, the existence of elites, the possibilities of class boundaries, the openness of a society, etc. We also consider problems with alternative measures of socio-economic position. We then use a sample of 2400 households observed over one or two decade intervals together with data on the population of households at each observation point to examine mobility within the distribution of wealth for an almost closed economy, Utah, 1850-1870. We use information on households to examine those characteristics that contribute to mobility. We find considerable mobility, much apparently stochastic, within quite highly skewed distributions of wealth that also exhibit increasing inequality through time.

Experimental and Conceptual Innovators in the Sciences: The Cases of Darwin and Einstein

Abstract During the past decade, analyses of artistic creativity have demonstrated the contrast in creative life cycles between experimental old masters and conceptual young geniuses. This article extends the analysis to scientists. Charles Darwin was a great experimental innovator, who spent decades accumulating evidence on evolution and its mechanisms, and made his greatest contributions late in his career. In contrast, Albert Einstein was a great conceptual innovator, who made discoveries through highly abstract reasoning, and made his greatest contributions early in his career. The careers of these two great scientists are thus consistent with the thesis that, as in the arts, conceptual creativity is associated with youth, but experimental creativity increases with age.