David W. Galenson

Age and the Quality of Work: the Case of Modern American Painters

Psychologists have found that the age at which successful practitioners typically do their best work varies across professions, but they have not considered whether these peak ages change over time, as economic models suggest they might. Using auction records, we estimate the relationship between artists’ ages and the value of their paintings for two successive cohorts of leading modern American painters: de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and others born during 1900–1920 and Frank Stella, Warhol, and others born during 1921–40. We find that a substantial decline occurred over time in the age at which these artists produced their most valuable—and most important—work and argue that this was caused by a shift in the nature of the demand for modern art during the 1950s.

The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis

Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use until its abolition in 1917. This paper provides an economic analysis of the innovation of indentured servitude, describes the economic forces that caused its decline and disappearance from the British colonies, and considers why indentured servitude was revived for migration to the West Indies during the time of the great free migration of Europeans to the Americas.

Nativity and Wealth in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cities

This article uses evidence from the manuscripts of the 1860 federal census to analyze the wealth of adult males in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Previous multivariate analyses of wealth from the census have been flawed by reliance on ordinary least squares; we instead use quantile regression. Immigrants fared considerably better in the Midwest than the East: immigrants in the midwestern cities held more wealth than their eastern counterparts, both absolutely and relative to the native-born in their respective cities. We explore the causes of these differences and their consequences for nineteenth-century Americans and their communities.

Economic Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Nativity, Work, and Wealth in Early Chicago

This article uses evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses to investigate the correlates of the wealth of adult males in Chicago. The analysis reveals rapidly increasing wealth with age, a substantial positive effect on wealth of duration of residence in the city, and an absence of any significant impact of nativity on wealth when controlling occupation. Mean wealth rose from well below the national average in 1850 to a level far above the national average in 1860. Together these results suggest that early Chicago was a place of exceptional economic opportunity for settlers.

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.

The Market Evaluation of Human Capital: The Case of Indentured Servitude

This paper examines the market for human capital created by the institution of indentured servitude in colonial America. The indenture system allowed English emigrants to obtain passage to the colonies by selling claims on their future labor. With the size of the debt approximately equal for all emigrants, the length of the term for which a servant was bound is predicted to have varied inversely with expected productivity in the colonies. Analysis of two collections of contracts made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supports the prediction. Age, skill, and literacy were negatively related to length of indenture. Women received shorter terms than men at young ages, while servants bound for the West Indies and those bound in periods of high colonial demand for labor also received reductions.

Old masters and young geniuses: The two life cycles of human creativity

There are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over the life cycle. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. Conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs, usually at an early age. Both types of innovators have made important contributions to art and science.

White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America

The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for servants in skilled occupations. The timing of the two steps can be explained as a function of the changing relative costs of indentured and slave labor in the markets for unskilled and skilled labor.

And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators

Art critics and scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke, three important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. In each case, assuming this behavior to be idiosyncratic, the experts consequently failed to recognize its common basis. But stylistic versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators whose ability to solve specific problems can free them to pursue new goals. This contrasts sharply with the practice of experimental artists, whose inability to achieve their goals often ties them to a single style for an entire career. The phenomenon of the conceptual innovator who produces diverse innovations is an important and new feature of twentieth-century art; Picasso was the prototype, and he has been followed by a series of others, from Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst. Versatility has furthermore been a characteristic not only of modern painters but also of conceptual innovators in other arts, and of conceptual scholars. Recognizing the common basis of this behavior deepens our understanding not only of twentieth-century art but also of human creativity more generally, for it adds a dimension to the contrast between conceptual and experimental innovators.

The Reappearing Masterpiece: Ranking American Artists and Art Works of the Late Twentieth Century

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the source of the pluralism, or stylistic incoherence, of American art since the late 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated. The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, often embodied in individual works, usually made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers. The monumental Spiral Jetty, made in 1970 by a young artist who was killed soon thereafter while in the process of making his art, brought together a remarkable number of the central themes of the advanced art of the time and has become a symbol for that art.