The Unassuming Economist

From Noah Smith:

“Immigration is obviously one of the most important and most contentious issues of our time. The sheer amount of confusion, misconception, and misinformation is just staggering. So when I want to know the hard facts on the immigration issue, I go to Princeton economist Leah Boustan.

Boustan’s research covers far more than immigration — she’s incredibly versatile, covering labor economics, urban economics, economic history, and more. But recently, her research on immigration has garnered a lot of (well-deserved) attention. In a series of recent papers, she and her various co-authors showed that 1920s immigration restrictions hurt native-born American workers, that immigrant groups give their kids less foreign-sounding names over time, that immigrants do better economically when they move out of ethnic enclaves, and that the children of poor immigrants tend to be extremely upwardly mobile.

In her new book with Ran Abramitzky, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, Boustan draws from her own research and others’ to weave a nuanced yet compelling story of how immigrants fare in the United States — and how little this has changed between the early 20th century and the early 21st. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

In this interview, I ask Leah about her book, and about the immigration issue in general. Enjoy!

N.S.: I’ve been following your work for years, and you’re my favorite economist of immigration. How did you first become interested in that topic?

L.B.: First, thank you! That is so kind to say and I have appreciated all of your engagement with our work through the years. I will always associate the “before times” (immediately pre-Covid) with being able to meet in person at the ASSA conference in Jan 2020.

So, how did I become interested in immigration? Well, my first book was on the black migration from the rural South to industrial cities in the North and West (the Great Black Migration). I got interested in this topic when reading William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged and encountering a paragraph with what seemed like an aside, but it really is a gem of an idea. Wilson said something like “ironically, European immigrants benefited from the closing of the US border in the 1920s, but black migrants faced a lot of competition because you can’t close the Mason-Dixon line.” (This is a paraphrase!). I thought to myself – wow – I always knew about white ethnic communities in US cities, but I never really thought of the black community as a *migrant* community. So what if we – as economists – really study African-American history as migrant history? My first book was called Competition in the Promised Land, which picks up on this idea.

It was pretty natural after that to turn my attention to studying European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sociologists like Wilson and like Stanley Lieberson explicitly or implicitly compare white ethnic progress with African American progress. So, after working for some time on black migrants, I wanted to learn more about European immigrants as well.”

Continue reading here.

From Economic History Association:

“Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. x + 259 pp. $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1509540235.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University.

Any scholar teaching economic history and wishing for an up-to-date survey of a large and important literature will find it useful to read this book to bone up on the recent research listed in the long and encompassing list of references. Furthermore, they should seriously consider having their students read it for their class. The book is a wide-ranging yet remarkably complete and accessible survey of the Great Enrichment, the emergence of modern and prosperous economies that provide us with a material standard of living that our ancestors could not have dreamed of. How and why modern economic growth occurred when and where it did, and how economists have tried to understand this phenomenon, is the theme of this book. It is written by two of the finest young senior scholars in our field, both with important contributions to the subject matter of this book.

Many of the issues this book raises are highly contentious in our profession, and for good reason: these are hard questions on which learned scholars can disagree and interpret the evidence in different ways. How much did institutions really matter? What was the role of culture in economic growth? Was geography destiny? What was the role of craft guilds in the economic development of early modern Europe? How to think about the role of imperialism and slavery in the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent growth of industrial powers? Were high wages good or bad for technological progress? Was war a positive factor in economic growth? Was the European Marriage Pattern a positive factor in the economic development of the Continent?

The ecumenical and balanced approach the authors take to these questions is much like the Rabbi in a famous Jewish story. According to the legend, a rabbi is holding court in front of a large audience of his pupils. A husband and wife appear before the rabbi, to discuss their troubled domestic life. First the husband gets to lay out his case, and he lists all the sins and vices of his wife. The Rabbi listens carefully and pronounces his verdict: the husband is in the right. Then his pupils appeal to him: you should hear the wife’s case as well. The Rabbi consents and listens to the woman lays out her powerful case against her lazy and violent husband. He then announces his second verdict: the wife is in the right. His best pupil protests: but Rabbi, how can they both be in the right? The Rabbi listens and pronounces: the pupil is right too.

Rubin and Koyama present balanced and fair surveys of made in the literature, but they are reluctant to take strong positions. Such an ecumenical approach sets them apart from Clark’s Farewell to Alms and McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, where the authors take up similar issues but in a much stronger opinionated mode. That thoughtful and measured approach of the survey, its elegant and crystal-clear style, and the authors’ impressive knowledge of a large and complex literature make this book nothing short of ideal for teaching advanced courses on global economic history to economics students.

It is especially refreshing to see a book such as this that pays explicit attention to institutions and culture, two themes that until not so long ago were taboo in our field but now seem to play increasingly central roles. The book contains full chapters on each, and while the discussion is naturally far from exhaustive, the authors do an excellent job summarizing some of the best work in these areas. What remains, of course, unsolved is why different nations develop different institutions and how and why such institutions change over time and how exactly cultural beliefs help determine the institutions that society ends up with.”

Continue reading here.

By: Vrinda Saxena

‘I think we know very little about the changing lives of young women in India because we have stopped studying them for who they are. We know the heroines- the ones who fought against all odds and became leaders, and we know the victims. But the real change is taking place in between- the ordinary women who are dressing differently, who are spending more hours in school than ever before, who are reshaping the rules at home in their marriages, in their relationships with peers, in their relationships with their in-laws and their relationships with the working world.’

– Yamini Aiyar, President, Centre for Policy Research

                                                                         For the book ‘Desperately Seeking Sharukh’ (2021)

Jostling between datasets and academic theories, summary measures and aggregates, the journey to tap into the elusive story of gender and deprivation in India has not been an easy task for economists through the ages. Perhaps, in what could be loosely referred to as a case of inferential statistics, author and World Bank economist Shrayana Bhattacharya has captured stories of diverse women across various social and economic strata of the country to paint a larger picture of the state of affairs in her book, Desperately Seeking Sharukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence.

In Bhattacharya’s own words, the book uses the “construct” of the Hindi film actor, Shahrukh Khan, as a research device to closely peer into the personal lives of migrant women, domestic workers, corporate and public servants, and even urban non-working women. For nearly 14 arduous years from 2006 onwards, she broached conversations with her research respondents, acquaintances, and strangers on mutual love for the actor, realizing over time how each discussion was deeper than just a description of his work and off-stage persona but a close peek into women’s own aspirations and changing beliefs. The reader gets an up-close glimpse into how Indian women perceive work, wages, social mobility, economic aspirations, employment, and other seemingly personal issues, like intimacy, loneliness, bargaining power within families, dignity, etc.  

As a case in point, the book’s first composite character- an upper-class working woman residing in an Indian metro, with a fine education and a well-paying job- peruses over the perils of succeeding in a predominantly male corporate setup, building one’s own fortune in the absence of land and generational wealth like a true “middle class”, and the freedom and perils of not pegging one’s identity to men or marriage. Brilliantly putting it into context, Bhattacharya equips the reader with 6 frameworks within which “middle class” has been defined by economists and how deep the income and wealth inequality fault lines run in the country. Where women’s access to education and employment are as strongly guarded as their ability to access public spaces and even entertainment- in that India she follows the lives of some women who managed to break through from a few shackles but get held back on others. The “hidden tax”, as economist Sendhil Mullainathan terms it, by refusing to acknowledge women’s economic successes or social ostracization forms the underlying theme of many such stories. One is left to ponder then if all the loneliness and unrequited emotional labor women perform in their personal relationships are not personal misgivings but the gift of a structurally unequal society!  Besides, not only does this inequality maim women’s minds and bodies but spills over to numbers and data that economists love most. Bhattacharya takes the reader on a very thought-provoking journey into the lives of women who are majorly, if not solely, invested severely into performing unpaid care work for families but are ironically never accounted for in the economy. This and other ways official data upholds patriarchal dominance by neglecting home-based workers and informal laborers hits you hard each time the same data is invoked as the sole basis on which an understanding of deprivation hinges.

Shahrukh- the superstar who publicly claimed his rags to riches story, publicly admitted to building from scratch and battling feelings like loneliness and anxiety, and also publicly acknowledged the important role women played in his real-life aside from the reel life where his romances are categorized as more ‘interactive’ than of all others, is the combining glue for this oeuvre. Female fans who were interviewed displayed analogous revolutions in their own lives- from sacrificing traditional marriages and roles of damsels in distress for the joys and trials of independent economic life, reclaiming their right over consumption of entertainment and education, or even something that may seem as trivial as making a ‘pilgrimage’ to their icon’s bungalow without male company (yes, in India that is a big deal!).

Thus, in “seeking” Shahrukh, the many women who feature in this book show how with the help of technology, the economic liberalization of India in the 1990s, and the advent of social media India’s young women are slowly departing from the idea of marrying their Shahrukh(s) to becoming their own Shahrukh(s).

Discussions on cultural beliefs, aspirations, norms, and the things that catch the fancy of communities elude very many narratives of the development and evolution of emerging markets. This book fits right in to bandage that void. From the way urban, working women mirrored their fantasies of companionship that is more emotionally and financially equal to rural and immigrant women’s windows into the world outside, this book communicates the changing everyday dynamics of women’s engagement in economies by deconstructing a superstar’s fandom. Pardon me if my review does not appear academic enough- for even the book is not. It steers clear of any dry statement of facts and figures but rather attempts to put them into perspective and uncover the three-dimensional story behind.

The recently published book, India’s Industrial Policy and Performance (2021), by Dr. Nitya Nanda (Director, Council for Social Development- a New Delhi-based think tank) assesses the performance of Indian industries from the perspectives of trade, investment, policy, and development incentives. Excerpts from its abstract:

“The book examines India’s key policy initiatives and economic and institutional plans through many decades and examines their short and long-term effects on industrial environment and performance. It measures India’s strategic policies and efforts to promote industrialization against similar initiatives in countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The volume also contextualizes the performance of different sectors of industry such as automobiles, electronics and information technology, and pharmaceuticals, among others, within the larger framework of global economic scenario and competition.”

It also discusses issues like the benefit foreign direct investment brings to developing countries (Loungani and Razin, 2001), changes in foreign equity norms in India and their role in shaping industrial policy, etc.

Click here to access the full book online.

The IMF’s major book on policies to achieve inclusive growth was just published. The book is available here. 

This and the book, Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth (Ostry, Loungani, Berg; 2019) together make a compelling case for why inequality matters for efficiency and what policies can foster inclusive growth.