Philanthropy and the Great Depression: what historical tax records tell us about charity

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As part of my ongoing investigation into early 20th century tax policy, I recently compiled a data series to track patterns in charitable giving during the 1920s and 1930s. As a result of tax code changes in 1917, the IRS began allowing federal income tax payers to deduct up to 15% of their taxable income […]

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Different Measurements of Income Inequality – the interwar Wisconsin Example

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I have a new paper, co-written with Vincent Geloso, on the measurement of inequality in Wisconsin between 1919 and 1941. The discussion’s geography may initially seem obscure, but there’s a method to this investigation. In the early part of the 20th century Wisconsin had a stable state income tax system and, more importantly, generated high quality

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How the AAUP bends statistics to create an adjunct crisis

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Earlier this week the American Association of University Professors released its annual report on the economic status of academia. Repeating a theme from prior years, this report heavily emphasizes the position of adjunct faculty and makes a number of bold empirical claims about the alleged growth of the part time academic workforce. For example, the statement

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Why Piketty-Saez yields an unreliable inequality estimate before World War II

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Next week I will be co-presenting a paper at the APEE conference on the reliability of historical estimates of income inequality in the United States. Our paper examines and offers a number of corrections to the widely cited income inequality time series by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2003). This series provides the baseline for

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The English Department attacks academic freedom again

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A Faculty Senate report at Wake Forest University adopted the following resolution at a meeting last week: “Motion 2: To freeze current hiring by the Eudaimonia Institute, and cancel any internal (e.g. Eudaimonia conference) or external presentations related to the IE, and to restrict publication of material from EI until the COI committee is established

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The Paranoid Style of the Illiberal Campus

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In 1964 historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” His thesis was a simple one – that American politics was “an arena for angry minds,” and that this anger often fomented “a sense heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” among small but vocal groups of the

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