Transcripts For CSPAN3 20th Century Social Insurance Public Assistance 20240713

Right order. [laughter] prof. Wallis and i dont even remember who the president was in 1980, and i tried to go online and i couldnt find out. Maybe we should make that part of the past president s of eha on both website. And then i thought, i dont need to talk much about price because Everybody Knows who price is. Then i remembered, we had no idea who people were the first time we went. There was the three of us, and we were from the university of washington, and none of the faculty members were there. We had a whole raft of historians, but nobody was there. Price and i and my wife terri, it was like being on survivor. We were on this island. [laughter] prof. Wallis you know. So now hpa does a better job taking care of grad students. That is all good but i realized there is a bunch of you you who , know who price is, but you really know him. [laughter] prof. Wallis so i wanted to do that, but then when i thought back about president ial addresses, the next year was st. Louis in 1981 and 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. [laughter] prof. Wallis ok, so that is a memorable president ial address. [laughter] prof. Wallis and then i thought about other president ial addresses . Many of us 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. So i thought, i dont want to give a memorable president ial often, because they are what is memorable is the disasters. So i am going to give, not quite so i am not going to roast price, i am going to celebrate price. Melissa and his grad students will do that later tonight. And i was thinking about, you know, what i wanted to say. I have known price since 1977. And on the very first day of graduate school started, we were tas together along with Sumner Lacroix and a group of other people, and robert paul thomas, the author of the rise of the western world, was teaching principals and we were tas in his section. Everybody got a laugh, here is price fishback, and price was a in principals. 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 years old, he had enough energy to light up atlanta. In so, we were this was 1977. There was no the xerox machine existed but was expensive to use. So when you would go to a class they would give you this dittoed reading list, it smelled, there was this blue stuff and there were the start articles. Summoner comes in and says, have the start articles . We looked at each other and went no, we havent read anything, we are still trying to find our apartments. We had to sort of the scale of energy was so up here, and sumner is wonderful. He has calmed down a lot. [laughter] prof. Wallis those of you that know sumner, i never really thought about that. Prices energy is inexhaustible. 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, he visited texas for a year where he met pam his wife. No . Yes . Kind of. Kind of. So he was at georgia, she was in texas. So they hooked up. She was from atlanta. He did not come back to georgia except for a year. They went to arizona. Pam got a job. Too. [indiscernible] prof. Wallis yeah. [laughter] he has been at arizona since 1990. Yeah. What i want to talk about first is some of his intellectual accomplishments. We had a really really tight , group of grad students. We are all still friends. We would get together every three or four years, and we just, we basically we didnt live together but it was like 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. And the kind of community that we had as graduate students is somewhat like the community we have as economic historians. We talked to each other a lot. We really depended upon each other for the kind of community and how we learned. We lived through soft, cold choices which was prices first book. I remember i think it was 1985 , at the new york meetings that price gave a paper. Was that your first paper . Maybe. About and the great thing about this book, for those who may not have read it, was that in the early years of metrics there was a struggle not only , about competitive markets, but are there places in the world where people get stranded, like debt peonage, or coal mining towns where there is no competition so the guys are being exploited . Minors are being exploited. They go to the company store. What price showed and showed it very persuasively is that that is not what happened to the miners. The miners worked around a lot and mines that treated their workers poorly lost their workers. That was a real this is a time when economic history was picking up questions from history. It was a fundamental insight that there were not these people being oppressed because they are stuck there. They are moving around. That had a big implication for what we thought about the post bellum south. And that price and sean 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. And so the framework, im trying to figure out who won. The conclusion to the book is, that is not the way to explain this. The workmens comp. Only came about because all three parties figured out an arrangement that made each one of them better off. But you cant coordinate by beating up on people. And that is a fundamental political economy insight that i think about a lot, the coordination aspect. And they really showed that in that book. That was very important. Prices other book is, this is government and american economy, which a bunch of us wrote together in honor of bob hicks, who wrote about Household Finances in the new deal, now working on the Great Depression. Many of us have worked on the 1930s. It is the Great Pumpkin of American Economic history. It is out there, it periodically appears. 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 still dont understand exactly why it happens. We have stories and we teach people what appears to be the truth, but in fact, you know, there is a wonderful graph of per capita income or logged income, and i look at which i teach every semester to my students and the only major thing on it is the Great Depression. There is lots of bumps. What stands out is that. Price has become one of the primary experts on the Great Depression, not on the macro part of it, although he had a great paper on multipliers in the Great Depression that won the prize for best article in jda 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 in some part have gone to prices website and collected data. The data i collected i gave to price. He has provided a real service. Many of you i could ask for a show of hands of retail sales at the county level, that kind of data was really, really important. Price has had a really Significant Impact on the profession at a very high level of scholarship. Price is also a sports nut. This is shifting subjects. Can you get me that water . I will get it. Great. There is no water in there. [laughter] we played basketball the time in graduate school. Price and i played basketball, we have played tennis together. We play a lot of golf. A regular thing, we get together every july with dicken tower then 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. [laughter] prof. Wallis but 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 swim swam magazine in 2013, which said, and i dont understand all the references here. What happens when you take an economics professor, one wild 4508 points . It is swim geek heaven. Arizona professor of economics price fishback brings us his calculations on how much scoring matters. I dont know what that means, but it really matters. [laughter] prof. Wallis fishback is a former coach who has been serving as a meet announcer for the better part of 30 years. We would hear about the olympics and the ncaas. One irony of this is that after the olympics, he lost his voice. He had stuff on his vocal cords. And so for a while he couldnt talk, which would be a trial for any of us, but it was seriously a trial for price. [laughter] prof. Wallis and so we were at nvr Summer Institute and price couldnt talk. I mean literally he could not talk. He had this notepad, and he would write comments on the would pass then he it to whoever he was sitting next to, which meant after a while, people got wise and did not want to sit next to price. [laughter] prof. Wallis at one point, price passed the note to derek and he turned and said, fishback, shut up. [laughter] terrible. Prof. Wallis ok. This is going to be memorable. We are heading for disaster. If you so, that is go visit price, if you go to arizona in the basketball season, you can watch three basketball games in that time would normally watches one because price tapes them but doesnt watch them and then plays them on speed. We watched a game, patriots and the raiders, many of you it may not have been born. So sports are a big part of prices life. His service has been enormous. This gets to me. Someone is asking 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. Ok . He was the cop. I. With melissa. Melissa and caroline, just stepping off. We have a new group. That is a long time, 1996 to 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 the boston meeting the thing about being an , executive director, you are thinking about what . You know arent you tired . Know, i am tired of doing this. I want to go on vacation. And he did that from 2012 to 2017, then mike took over. And then 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 that we have all enjoyed. Right . We have all benefited from what price did. So i have a question. How many people know how many basketball teams price roots for during the ncaa tournament . Hold your hand up with the fingers. Nobody has got the right number of fingers up. Four. Prof. Wallis ok, you give them the book. Prof. Wallis who had them up first . Ok, sumner gets the book. This is government of the u. S. Economy by price fishback and me and 25 others. I didnt want to pick sumner because he has 15 copies of this book. There you go. Now but we are going to come back. [indiscernible] prof. Wallis 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. Prof. Wallis butler. Kentucky. Arizona. Louisville. Prof. Wallis louisville. Is that what you said . Somebody got three. This isnt horseshoes. This is scholarship. Kentucky, louisville, arizona and possibly washington. Prof. Wallis washington. Well here. This is a book called well worth saving. And your memory, there you go, mike. They because you are sitting in front. How many of you have gotten a prize from price at a cleo meeting or a book from price at an eha . Stand up if you have gotten one. That is a lot of people. Right . That is a lot of people. Ok . What happens is that i mean that is something that didnt start with price, but it is something that we do in which we recognize each others accomplishments. Sometimes it is accomplishments for silly things. Sometimes it is accomplishments for serious things. I am saving the best for last here. Price is a great teacher. When we were in graduate school, we were taking from bob thomas and there was a Football Player named spider gains. I think he got drafted. Spider had flunked econ 200 two or three times and we knew he was trying to pass by ways, hmmmmm. So price went oneonone with spider. He was really a dedicated teacher. I need to put my glasses on to do this. He won three Teaching Awards in the years he was in georgia. And then he went to arizona. They have he teaches in the the Economics Department is in the business school. Mbas have lots of awards. But price has won the faculty member of the year, the distinguished faculty member, the outstanding faculty member 2004, 2009 twice, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018 where he got an honorable mention. [laughter] prof. Wallis i dont know what happened in 2012. Were you away . Was it a bad year . I was. Prof. Wallis ok. So i would win the award when i was gone. That was outstanding. You werent teaching this year. Price has had on his vita 41 dissertations that he supervised. If you have gotten a phd with price, stand up. [applause] prof. Wallis so there are have been some superior dissertation advisors and we know in my generation there has been joel, margo, ken and there is price. Price is by no means the least of that group. Bob has 11 students on the program this year. Some people are just innately gifted at doing that. They care about it, they work hard at it and they are fantastic. Price has had an enormous impact on economic history with through his own work and the service that he has done. But also because we are populated with his students, and they are really good, and they have learned a lot, and it is an incredible contribution. And we recognized that in 2015 prize which is thought was really, really welldeserved. Price also loves music. Price actually doesnt he sits still all the time. When he comes to our house or we go to his house, when he was editor of the he would read papers. That is what you have to do. Guess where he would read them . Does anybody know . In the bathtub. [laughter] prof. Wallis so you give price the paper, and he gives it back, it has gotten these scrawled comments hard to read, but oftentimes the edges of the paper are wrinkled. You are like, why oh, because he was reading it in the bath. That happens all the time. It is not like he has got to keep moving all the time, but 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. [laughter] prof. Wallis ok . That is kind of how i do research now. [laughter] prof. Wallis just sitting and thinking his research as bob said. So price also loves music. If you have ever been anywhere with him, you will notice we were we went to london together for a conference organized on the lessons of the Great Depression. So they invited American Economic historians to go to england. And we took depended on where you took off but the night before, the day before the conference started, a volcano in iceland blew up. My wife and i were on the runway at dulles 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. So we waited on the runway for about an hour, then they let us take off, we were going across, were coming we down to get 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. So we went to de gaulle. That our was that was a really expensive hour. So we did three cars, three trains, three taxis and a boat to get to london that day. And then some of the people are here. We couldnt get back. Mike was there, chris was there, greg is here, we couldnt get back to america. The planes were stuck. And so we were staying in this hotel that was like 400, there was a conference rate, and also you can say like 450 a night. 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 one day. Constantly. So i was in oxford in june, and with steve bright very, and a guy says price, when he comes here, he goes to the theater, he goes to music, everywhere price goes, i got to go here the music, i have to hear some stuff. 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. So prices mother passed away, and he talked about it. When he and i talked about it we , spent the whole weekend just listening to the beach boys, good vibrations. I love price. And i got lots of good vibrations about him being president. Price fishback. [applause] prof. Fishback it is a real pleasure to be here. What i am going to talk about today is social insurance and public assistance in the 20th century. You are going to see the main things i am talking about aid to , dependent children, aid to families with dependent children, supplemental security income, also old age assistance, we are going to talk about workmens compensation, we are going to talk about Unemployment Insurance. A variety of other things but those of the main things we are going to talk about. One of these days i will get to move. Here we go. Is that going to do it . This is typical. There we go. There are a lot of people how come that is not up there . Oh. Ok. Well we are on tv, a good way of , starting. [indiscernible] prof. Fishback ok. Im not exactly sure. Welcome, thank you. [indiscernible] prof. Fishback there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Donnie, right . How about another hand for donnie . [applause] these are the people who are directly involved in my talk. I wanted to particularly thank richard and susan. They are the ones who got me into this when they talked me into doing my social welfare statistics in napa valley for the historical statistics in the United States. I have a lot of students on here. I have got john on here, i need to talk about bob and doug to say they were my chief advisers and they were amazing. And if you asked doug if he thought i would become he would of the eha, have said there is no way that is going to happen. I would like to think sean cantor, my colleague, gary, lee, i particularly have thank sean, thisho does not look like at all anymore. There he is back there. I didnt have time to draw the beard on or anything else, but sean was the one who talked me into working on workers compensation, working on the the new deal. He started us down these paths and he has been my coauthor on a bunch of these things. I have a bunch of coauthors and friends. I want to mention peter, he wrote this great book called going public. Growing public. But all these people had big impacts. You will see them throughout the talk. Major findings i am going to talk about today the rise of the , welfare state. Everybody talks about the rise of the welfare state, what they really mean is the rise of the social insurance state. The programs that have grown so much have been programs were programs where people make a contribution are employers make contribution or the employers made a contribution. These are not your transfers to the taxpayer. One reason is that is it is easy to sell it to taxpayers and less stigma because people feel like they earned it so they should be able to accept it. Stigma was a big factor to control how much people took public assistance before. Another thing i want to point out is mandates and tax subsidies, they are not spending, but they have a big impact on the american system. They also have a big impact historically on other systems. You dont want to just focus on spending, you want to focus on the mandates as well. The other big feature of american situation like this, and it is true of other countries is that most programs , start at the local level and particularly with charities, then there is assistance from the state, then there is the statefederal version of things and then there are some federal things that come up as well. The pre1930s are almost entirely local. We dont know 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. At some point during the 1890s they were running a lot of these local welfare systems. I have a lot of major findings. Public assistance programs, a lot of people talk about spending but really what the public assistance programs set programs did was set minimum targets. My goal in this talk is to talk about what was the target they were setting and how does it compare to all sorts of various measures. That is the primary thing i am going to do. Averages are often much lower, but one of the reasons for that is because they have this budget principle, they are trying to fill the budget. So a lot of people 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 also another thing to note intentions are not always met. , im showing you the intended target. It doesnt mean they always meet that target. I am going to make comparisons to the poverty line manufacturing earnings, employer hiring workers, compare it to the minimum wage, which is another way we deal with problems of poverty. Im also going to focus on costofliving adjustments across the United States. Those are important. Turns out a significant amount of work has been done on this but it has not shown up that much. When you adjust cost of differences it squeezes , distribution as you might expect unless there is only one benefit across the country. Then, the south rises again. Ok. But it also greatly weakens the correlations being programs. What i means is, you could be a high Unemployment Insurance some of these correlations are zero, which is something i would not have dreamed would happen. How does the bottom fare . The good news is in terms of consumption, they have done ok. There is great work by jim sullivan and bruce meyer, i will show you their work. The high income quintile has increased its income share even after taxes and transfers at the expense of the others. At the consumption level which , is what people are targeting, the consumption has stayed stable for the various groups. I will also compare the u. S. Spending internationally. 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 to it. I will talk about that. 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. At the bottom of the distribution, there are problems with takeup rates and all sorts of issues. At the very bottom, we are not doing very well. It is like the poor safety net. I announced the Olympic Games in 1996. I also announced the trials that year. One thing i wanted to do was make comparisons. We have olympic trials in the u. S. , and then the olympics where we fear internationally. That is my goal. Sounds like a lot of stuff so i better talk fast. Thomas thomasin 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. [laughter] she is very funny. Im looking forward to this and hope i survive until tomorrow. Here is situation. 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. Fat 1964, that was mostly a tax cut as well as a few programs designed for training. Not much spending. The spending went up with medicaid. Medicare is the redline. Line. Id is the blue that is where things take off. The other thing to notice the , yellow line, there is a lot of private spending on welfare type issues. If you look at just pure transfers to the entire United States, that is what welfare is. It is not a social insurance thing. We are still distributing a tiny amount relative to gdp. The real spending is Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, medicare. People have put their money in. Earned thatld me, i medicare because i paid for it for all those years. She reminded me of that every week. [laughter] prof. Fishback she was a dyed in the wool democrat. I was a huge disappointment. Brendan livingston worked with me. He is now at uc davis. He has done a lot of great 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 . 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 of great stuff. 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. Employer pay a premium or a tax and benefits follow. 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 politically. Its paid for by the participant. It is not a transfer from the taxpayer, less stigma. Stigma is huge talking about Poverty Programs. Moral hazard and people not being worthy, undeserving, things like this. But i 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 said a lot of nasty things about it and then they fixed it. They thought they fixed it, although it turned out they hadnt. We ended up with the system we have today. But i will not castigate Social Security for the problems today. I want to make the point that selling this, selling the social Insurance Programs is easier than otherwise. Taking care of the only poor was elderly poor was something set aside for old age assistance prior stuff the states have been passing in the early 1930s. There was a Poverty Program for the elderly, a tax along with a security, a Pension Program for people who were working. Social security income, i will talk about the target for what happens if you get nothing. What can you get from supplemental security . It was meant to be funded from general taxation. It actually did a lot because hardly anybody was funding old age assistance type stuff aside 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. Mandates and tax laws determines social welfare. Workers comp. Is for people to buy insurance. It is a mandate. We talk a lot about it. We talk about workers comp. Spending. 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 anymore. You is government run, administered by the government, Administration Costs are paid. This is run based on employers making contributions unless there is a major recession when congress will extend the benefit. Tax breaks provide health derived employer provisional health insurance. Melissa is back there because she wrote a paper about this. The eitc is a major component of the antiPoverty Program. All of these things, they could be called spending. They could be called spending, but mandates are extremely important and its important to keep that 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. How well they are enforced, hard to say. But here is bismarck. Peter today 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. That is the beauty of what happened with brendan. They recorded nearly all of it to the massachusetts board of charities. Social insurance in 1929, say same before but they added mothers pensions in 45 states, workers comp. In 44 states, the blind in oldage pensions, 1929, about half of them before 1934. Poverty and social insurance in 2000. They took a bunch of these things and formalized it. Formalization is important. 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. Taught me. Thats 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. [laughter] ok, the idea of 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 period, the averages will be low because the target is easier to reach because there is less of a gap. In a bad period, 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 periods. 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 at the matching grant was set, we will give you 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. 15 from the state. That influences things. Also, it expands the system where almost every state has incentive to get involved, until obamacare and only 31 states picked up medicaid. States that dont always meet that target, particularly during the Great Depression, because they dont have any money. 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 aid to dependent children temporary , assistance for needy families. I will talk about old age assistance for the elderly poor, and which becomes supplemental security in the 1970s, and two social Insurance Programs with benefits covered by employers. That is workers comp. That is why sean is sitting there. This is sam allen. He is a vmi. They refused to put his picture on their website. They have pictures of everyone else. So this is my sam allen 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. 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. It child under five. The elderly has one child living by themselves 65 or over. This is an amount work for someone with no income. 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 they slowly start taking things away from you. Thats with this picture is. They give you more than what is showing up here. Targeting comes, i will look at National Trends to show you what population waited Natural National average is. I will discuss the state variation impact of costofliving adjustments for particular periods of time because these are the years where reppo people did actual costofliving studies to compare across states. Now i will examine this correlation. I had to run a regression somewhere. I ran a regression and it gave me nothing. This is an interesting feature. 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 up bls has a research cpi they have been using, the techniques used were they developed quality of goods in the 20th century and have gone back and used them for the previous 30 years. The blackdoes is, line, that puts you at 14 higher than you would have been in 2000 with the regular cpi. I am using, you want to read a great thing about Property Lines read linda , barrington and eric fishers piece, it is glorious. It is a truly great piece and she describes it. I picked up on oscars estimates for the earlier timeframe. Oscar did pretty much the same thing as molly did in the 1960s. 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. It seems to do a better job, apparently about quality. If you use it, the poem in, or the Property Line is 21 higher than the official poverty line. The official line since about 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 the other things. I regionally just had weekly earnings, but those are deceiving because they just tell you the wages. They dont tell you about the benefits. Its important to include all the benefits listed here. Thats where the employer cost comes here. Bill did a 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 unless you are working. Here is the minimum wage. Here are the data sets. This occludes the state minimum wages as well. Minimum wage, the reason this doesnt look like a saw where everything is dropping dramatically, it is because im using a handful of years. They change it and then it 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. 16 in 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 include School Lunches, wic when that comes in place, i include energy subsidies. One thing i dont include is housing subsidies because i dont have a good way to assign them to various people. You can see a substantial rise over time. 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. You will see 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 substantial 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. Its hard to tell exactly when they started. 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 increases. Then a big drop between 1990 and 2000 in the average, related to one program. The big increases in the expectations are going to work. The ratio of various family measures. Steve, this is a great picture. This is what you would expect him to put on his website. He suggested that over the course of a long period where he studied these things, the ratio was supposed to be about. 4 of what people were paying. It fits in that, most of the blue line. After 1930, it looks like that pretty closely. The other thing is in 1990 and in 2000, the minimum for all of these things is equal to the minimum wage. Which is kind of surprising. Which is kind hears the ratio to poverty line for a Single Person over 64 living on their own. Goodwin is doing a lot of good things. Sherry is writing a book, Caroline Maynard has done a lot motherswork on pensions. One thing you can see is seniors are treated much better than families. Add up the medical care, that mean in 2000 is higher. 2. 4 compared to 1. 03 for the family. The kids get education and stuff. Not sure it offsets that. You can see the ratio is holding all the way throughout this timeframe. We seem to love the elderly. I like the elderly because i am about to become the elderly. Actually, everybody thinks im the elderly. People keep asking me, are you retired . What . I am never going to retire. Who knows if i retire or not, but its embarrassing when you go to the Movie Theater and they say, arent you eligible for the senior discount . No . [laughter] prof. Fishback that is really nice of you. There are all these people who are eligible, but they dont look like they are eligible. Nice of you. Ok. O 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 medicare being received. If you look at the regular medical spending from everyone else, it looks bad compared to how much service you are getting. The thing is look at the big jump between 1971 at 1983. This is what was going on in the 70s as well. Betweenanother big drop 1990 jump between 1990 and 2000. This is not happening for kids and adults under this program. There is a lot of stuff that is going on near the end of life and older age groups, spending a lot more money than they did before. Your access to all sorts of isngs like hip replacements vastly improved. That is really 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. Here is 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 . Because wages fell, benefits did not change. Then between 1940 and 1950, you wanted to improve workers comp. , then you had to get the state legislatures to pass new law. How easy is that to do . Particularly when the Mining Industry and Manufacturing Industry says, we cant afford that. 40 to 50, wages take off, benefits dont follow. , this is 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 almost every state adopted two thirds of the recommendations they put in. One was an index to the wage. They started doing that. You can see what has happened to workers comp. Benefits. They have gone up as the sheriff 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 sat there going i was discussing it, so i could point out that no 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 has a law degree. One thing we discovered is andy started looking at things like 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. It is all these small things people dont think about that are eating away. Oklahoma is trying to get rid of it completely. Ok, here is workers comp. Relative to manufacturing earnings and minimum earnings. I didnt realize that was there, lets skip that one. Claudia goldin did some work on Unemployment Insurance. Larry should be there somewhere but i am not sure where. Same problem with lack of updating for unemployed insurance as you have with workers comp. Im still not sure if they are doing things with indexing, but it looks like they are in this context. Here is the effects of adjusting for crosssectional differences and costofliving. I am from the south, everyone tells me the south stinks, but the south, i kind of like it. People who grew up in the south feel like they have been blessed to grow up in the south. When they move, they always move west in the south or to a city, because they like being warm. They like not having to buy one of those big coats. So it turns out there was a lot more work on this than i realized. The Works Progress administration did these maintenance budgets in 1935 in 1940. They stopped in 1982. 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. I recommend you to take a look at this. It is 1983 to 2012. Go to edgars website in virginia. Great stuff. Here is what typically happens. Here is a typical pattern. The standard deviation falls in most cases. The minimums rise, maximums fall. 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 still stay at the bottom after you adjust for cost of living. I thought this may raise it, but it doesnt. Heres another one for 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. They are focused on the kids. Focusing 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 per week. You can see the south really rises in this. Alabama takes off. Almoste leading the pack as a result of the costofliving 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 programs, but we didnt adjust for cost of living . Basically, you are looking at in new york city, if you were high in unemployment, does that mean you will also be high on workers comp. And old age assistance . Thats what youre looking for. Do all four mean you will be high . Turns out when you adjust for costofliving, that almost completely goes away. Right,. 07on the is the correlation. That was a stunner. I did not anticipate that. Heres what happens in 2000 when you do the same thing for the correlations are training relative to what you would have expected otherwise. They are even weaker during that timeframe. This was a big surprise to me. Is i try to dogs correlates for costofliving adjusted benefits. Some of these are things that look good, high wage elasticity and things like that before. Oh well. [laughter] at fixed effect. 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. How did they fare . This is the work done by bruce meyer and jane sullivan. They have been doing this for 20 years. The amazing thing is they do it for like a 50 year period, or actually up to 60 because they are going up to modern day. One of the things 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. It looks kind of flat in a lot 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. That is a picture you do not typically see. They have been doing this for years. I dont know whether it is completely right to do it this way. 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 price differences. They have a paper called winning the war on poverty, which angers everybody. Conservatives are mad because they have been telling us we are losing the war on poverty and we should not bother doing these programs, the liberals are mad because there is no more poverty. The big thing is they get to poverty rates and consumption with 3 , and they are claiming they are winning, but there are probably people not answering. Hese questions here is the consumption income for the bottom percentile. 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 actual per capita income of people in cap poverty is not the same yeartoyear. Income has been rising. For that group. 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. That is a truly great book. Read the second book which goes through the details. He has done new work with lane kenworthy. Told me today he has got a new book coming out march or april. I highly recommend you read what peter is doing. The u. S. Analysis was based on building from data sets 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. 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. These are payments, which dont necessarily mean final goods and services. Sweden is like 40 to 37 , it that yellow line. Denmark and the United States looks pitiful 15 . If you dig 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 and subtract out 28 . Ax and sweden they tax for 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 nobody else spends. That everybody else spends. If we dont include that, we are not including half of our health care spending. Like thats worth including because you want to see what you are doing overall. So we jump up into the middle. Else. Look like everybody it is just we do it differently. We spent it, just privately and publicly, where they are primarily spending it publicly. Here is what it looks like with a bunch more states. The net public looks kind of low relative to all these other people except for korea, but korea over the last 20 years is making a big jump upward. Total, we arenet looking at a lot of these countries across the world where everybody thinks we are social democrats and doing all these things. Here are some problems. Tim at the university of wisconsin is doing a lot of great things on poverty. He was at syracuse before. We got to educate his son at arizona. What happensee is when sweden makes adjustments for taxes and transfers and what happens when the u. S. Does. When sweden does it, a number of people are 40 before the minimum, it drops to virtually nothing, whereas we still have 10 still sitting there. That is not so good. If you look at 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. All around 9,300, 9,500. But if you look at the very bottom, we dont look so good. This is the picture for all incomes. The u. S. Has much higher at the top. The bottom is looking like a lot of these things. That is the 10th percentile. The bottom percentile, we 2005, while800 in finland and norway are much higher. Something is going wrong at the bottom end. Foray be we made it hard people to get it because it seems like we have millions of programs, but people dont seem to get access to them all. Do we do that on purpose . I dont know. Maybe over social welfare is not good at getting people involved. They could be there are people out there who dont want to be involved in the system, they have reasons of their own for not doing these things. If you are a drug addict who is 30, dont have kids, you are in deep trouble in america. You might be much better off in one of these other countries. Targets, imput my running out of time because john took my time but thats ok. [laughter] i was happy just to describe me. He was saying such nice things. To compare the targets to the National Average per capita gdp. This is like my announcing days. You have the olympic trials, and then in america, then you go to the world and look at the competition. I am using madisons estimates for per capita incomes. This is the u. S. Target. The reason it is biased against it is its not including the extra stuff in gdp for education, national events, that thing. It is biased a little bit against us, but you know americans, no one really likes us because we brag all the time. Heres the situation. Workers comp. In 1919 is ranked 27 out of 43 countries. Medicine and all these other people had not done that many. Right above us is italy, below us is panama. In the u. S. , the olympic trials in the state of West Virginia is at the bottom and New Hampshire is at the top. Anybody from New Hampshire . There we go. You are a winner, mike. Mothers pensions, winners are rhode island, massachusetts. If you are rooting for them, you should be cheering. At the bottom is new jersey. Oh well. Actually, this is unusual because new jersey is pretty high on these things. We are between ecuador and the former ussr. I dont know how they got that number. Everything was a total mess at that point. Lenink madison called of at home and said, well, what is it . [laughter] target, 1934. The best year before Social Security. New hampshire, still a winner. The greats that that state of tennessee, rocky top not looking so good. Then switzerland spain is below , us. Workers comp. In 1934, wisconsin at the top, usually it is high up. West virginia is still down there. I spent a lot of time in West Virginia. Doesnt seem that bad. Close to ireland and finland. In 1930 four,ons connecticut and oklahoma at the in the middle between costa rica and bulgaria. Basically, old age assistance, this is the story. Old age assistance, if you are old and you are in the median of you are doingtes, pretty well. You are therebetween israel and saudi arabia. I dont think you are an oil baron in saudi arabia. There is a big, bimodal distribution actually there are a few people 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. Adc and workers comp. In the 60s relative to 151 countries. You can see what those states are. Insurance doesnt rank very well. It is shortterm. This is just the weekly benefits. We are basically at the median for the world. Let me summarize. I ran through a lot of stuff. Let me make the key points once again. The rise of the welfare state, when we are making just pure transfers in the general taxation to the poor, really has much anded that almost all of that is medical care. You are seeing, all the things going on, is social insurance where we pay for it in some way and our Accounting System for government at the federal level is somewhat insane. You really want to think about these as, here is how much we have, here is in the lockbox. Look at those as separate entities. They are not the same as typical 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. Higgs made this when talking point 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 what we do with 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 , but 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 have we done at illuminating property at the bottom . If we look at consumption, we have to a reasonable job based on the meyer and sullivan work. Could probably do better. The headline things, in terms of income even after taxes were the where actually the top group is 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 we need to work on. The target benefits, old age , more doing really well families and workers comp. Are ranging in this 60 , 60th percentile. Ui ranks in the middle. 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 profession to be in. Thank you. [applause] prof. Fishback i think we have some time for questions. We are little over time, but we have some time. They want you to use the microphone. I am usually a bad violator of this. 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 . Garrett . 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 more Amorphous Group of 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 not to believe in the five favor 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 employees would get on board. And maybe the employees employers also would get on board. Prof. Fishback i agree. I gave the Tax Incidence lecture earlier this week. It is one of my favorites to give. It makes the point Even Stronger people have paid for it. Sean and i did this work on workers comp. And found nonunion workers paid for the extra benefits in the form of lower wages. Most people agree Social Security and medicaid taxes, they are being passed to the employee in these kind of things, so i think it makes the point Even Stronger, easier to sell this because you expect they are paying for everything. It is they are better insured. That was the point sean and i were trying to make in the workers comp. Book. The workers themselves, even though they bought it, they paid for it, they couldnt get decent works like the mandate. I think 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 breaststroker and things like that. I dont know if he really runs. 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 . Or the funding is left the state . Prof. Fishback i know a lot about workers comp. From the work sean and i did together and that sam has done, so in workers comp. , not everybody gained in any Interest Group, but it seemed like the majority of people in each Interest Group were dating, but they fought like cats and dogs over the football. The intervening thing where everyone is gaining but there is stuff to fight over . Or notound that whether you had a state insurance system or whatever, the examples you found where that if you had instead of courts administering, they seemed to tilt things in favor of the workers. If you had employers with dangerous jobs, it tilted against the workers. Things made sense. You can get situations where everyone is benefiting but still fight because there is rent to gain. You can fight a lot over rent. Yes . Should i stand . Are you sure . Yes, hello. Good. I am an assistant professor of economics. Columbia university new york. 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 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 even today, but it was much bigger in the early 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 and those things are determined literally at the local level in the county. We ran a bunch of county regressions trying to control for the features and individuals and look at what they did. We found really interesting things. I was surprised by it. If you are outside the south, it was almost universally the same. If you were africanamerican, you were more likely to get benefits after controlling for these correlations than if you 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 political 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 whats going on in the south in terms of politics. Africanamericans have some voting strength in the north and the west, pretty much in the north. What we are finding is if you have a Significant Group of more skilled workers, it seems as though they actually tend to be more likely to give work relief, be more favorable towards blacks in terms of work relief. This was a surprise. I thought they were not doing so well, but this has taken us forever. We have been doing this for two years. It was really interesting seeing these various patterns. I dont know as much about what happened afterwards, but you can see the patterns not just in 1940, but you have county averages and you could see it even in 1933. That is good news. Blacks and a lot of people in the kind of jobs that got left out of Social Security. Domestic workers, Agricultural Workers were left out of Social Security until the 1950s. It is not unusual for the social insurance systems. Workers comp. , they left out Agricultural Workers routinely and small firms and things like that. Yes. This is our last question. Ok. 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 when we were doing the workers comp. Things that a lot of states initially pretty much matched what the states nextdoor did. A lot of times, there are these National Groups step setting up standard bills around the country and then the benefits got set. I think there are some relationships that show up with migration patterns. You do see these kind of clusters. We need to do a lot more work about that kind of thing. John always tells me there are like 100,000 governments in america. If you dont like government, you are in trouble. [laughter] i think thats 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] this is American History tv on cspan3, where each weekend, we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Campaign 2020. Watch our live coverage of the president ial candidates on the campaign trail and make up your own minds. Cspans campaign 2020, your unfiltered view of politics. This weekend on american rosenfeld, sophia author of democracy and truth a short history, talks about tensions among citizens in history to determine what the wha is rather than relying on an elite class to determine the truth for them. Heres a preview. Before we conclude, i think, that we are really post anything and that democracy itself is exceptionally at stake, we need to ask a little more about what came before. It is hard to figure out what has changed if you dont know what existed at an earlier moment. My subject today, which is the subject of my new book, democracy and truth, is a problem of historians, i ask, how did we get to this point . How did the marriage of democracy and truth, which looks so good from the outside, go so astray . See her entire talk about american democracy this sunday at 6 30 and 10 30 p. M. Eastern. Youre watching American History tv only on cspan3. Annexed a visit to the Smithsonian National portrait gallery. 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. Welcome to the National Portrait gallery at the smithsonian institution. Im the curator of votes for women