I went to was 1980 in boston. My wife and i were in graduate school. We didnt have much money. My wife and i shared a room with price. [laughter] i said that in the right order. [laughter] and i dont even remember who the president was in 1980, i tried to go online and i couldnt find out. Maybe we should put past president s on the website. And then i thought, i dont need to talk much about price because Everybody Knows who price is. And we had no idea who people were the first time we went. There were three has of us three of us from the university of washington, and none of the faculty was there. We had a raft of economic store historians but nobody was there. ,rice and i and my wife terri it was like being on survivor. We were on this island. The hpa does a better job taking care of grad students. But i realize there is a bunch of you who know who price is, but you really dont know. But thened to do that, when i thought back about president ial addresses, the next year was st. Louis, 1981, john hughes was president , some of you were there. The provost from st. Louis university gave a talk and in themiddle of johns speech, guy passed out on his plate. That is a memorable president ial address. Otherght about president ial addresses. Many 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 it, so i thought, i dont want to give a memorable president ial address, because often what is memorable is the disasters. So i am not going to roast price, i am going to celebrate price. Melissa and his grad students will do that later tonight. I was thinking about what i wanted to say,. Since 1977. Price before graduate school started, we were tas together along with other people, and and robert paul thomas, the rise of the western world, was teaching principles and we were tas in his section. Everybody got a laugh, here is pricefish back was a bigand price 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, he had enough energy to light up atlanta. 1977. As the xerox machine existed but was expensive to use. So when you would go to a class they would give you a ditto reading list, it smelled, there was this blue stuff and there were these articles. Summoner comes in and says, have you read the start article . Comes in and says, have you read the start article . We havent read anything, we are still trying to find our apartments. The scale of energy was so apparent. Sumner is wonderful. He has calmed down a lot. [laughter] aboutr really thought that but in some ways, Prices Energy is and egg verbal. Price graduated from Butler University in 19 77, came to university of washington grad school, phd 1983, went to georgia. He was at georgia until 1990, visited texas for one year, met his wife, no . Yes . Kind of. Up. Hey hooked she was from atlanta. They went to arizona. Pam got a job. He has been at arizona since. Yeah. Sincehas been at arizona 1990. What i want to talk about first is some of his intellectual look complement intellectual accomplishments. We had a really tight group of grad students. We are still friends. We would get together every three or four years, and we basically we didnt live together but every friday and saturday morning we were doing stuff, going out to dinner, doing these things. If you ever heard price talk about this, he will talk about how we saved him in his first year of grad school, but the. Act is we all saved each other the kind of community we had as graduate students is somewhat like the community we have as economic historians. We talk a lot and really depend on each other for the kind of community. Through prices first book. I think it was 1985 at the new york meetings that price gave a paper. Was that the first paper . Maybe. And the great thing about his book, for those who never read years, that in the early there was a struggle not only about competitive markets, but places in the world were people get stranded, like that peonage, or coal mining towns where there is no competition so guys are being exploited. Minors are being exploited. They go to the company store. Price showed very persuasively is that that is not what happened to the minors. Minors worked around a lot and minds that work minds that treated their workers poorly lost their workers. Was in the time when economic history, economics was pasting economics was picking up lessons from history. These people were not just stock there. They were moving around. And that had a big implication for what we thought about the south. And then price and sean can 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. So the framework, im trying to figure out who one. The conclusion to the book is, that is not the way to explain this. Workmens compensation only came about because all three parties figured out an arrangement that made each one better off. But you cant coordinate by beating up on people. And that is the fundamental political economy insight that i think about a lot, the coordination aspect. And they really showed that in that book. It was very important. Prices other book is government and American Economy which about of us wrote together in honor of bob hicks, who wrote about Household Finances in the new deal, now working on the great many of us worked on the 1930s. It is the Great Pumpkin of American Economic history. Periodically it appears. [laughter] 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 dont understand why it happened. 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 in the end i did states, and you look at that graph, which i use in the United States, and you look at that graph, which i use with my students, and the only major thing there is the Great Depression. What stands out is that. Price has become one of the experts on the Great Depression, not on the macro part of it although he had a great paper on multipliers in the Great Depression and won the prize for best article in jda to couple of years ago, but on labor markets. Talk about public assistance. Many of you who have worked on the 1930s have gone to prices website and collected data. He has provided a real service. Handsd ask for a show of of retail sales at the county level, that kind of data was important. Significant had a impact on the profession not a very high level of scholarship. Price is a sports not. This is shifting subjects. Can you get me that water . I will get it. There is no water in there. [laughter] basketball,played tennis, 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. Price was also a swimmer at butler. He was an announcer at the 2000 olympics here in atlanta. This is the only thing i did on the internet, which was from 2013,lam magazine in which said, what happens when professor, economics one wild swim meet and 4000 points . It is swim geek heaven. Arizona professor of economics price fishback brilliant things as his calculation on how much scoring matters. I dont know what that means, but it matters. [laughter] whoback is a former coach has been serving as a meat announcer for the better part of 30 years. We would hear about the olympics and the ncaa. One irony of this is that after the olympics, he lost his voice. He had stuff on his vocal cords. For a while he couldnt talk, which would be a trial for any of us, but it was seriously a trial for price. [laughter] we were at nvr Summer Institute and price couldnt talk. He had this notepad, and he would write comments on the notepad and pass it to who he was sitting next to, which meant after a while, people got wise and did not want to sit next to price. [laughter] at one point, price passed the note to derek and he turned and said, fishback, shut up. [laughter] ok. This is going to be memorable. We are headed for disaster. if you visit price and go ,o arizona in basketball season price tapes them but doesnt watch them and then place them on speed. We watched a game, patriots and raters, many of you the raiders, many of you it may not have been born. So sports is prices life. At his service is enormous. This gets to me. People ask me to organize a oneday conference for five people ended overloads my capacity. Price was the Conference Organizer for cleo from 1996 to 2008. Melissa. E pi with that is a long time, 1996 tut 2000 date. He was the editor of the journal of economic history from 2008 to 2012. He was the executive director of the eha. The thing about being an executive director, you are thinking about what . Arent you tired . I want to go on vacation. And he did that from 2012 to 2017, then mike took over. And 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 we have all enjoyed. We have all benefited from what price did. I have a question. How manypeople know oots forll teams price r during the ncaa tournament . Hold your hand up with fingers. Nobody has got the right number of fingers. Ok, you give them the book. Sumner had it up first. It first. Er had this is government of the u. S. By price and me and 25 others. Four was the answer. I think five is the answer, but he is the authority. You can tell me which teams he roots for . Not sumner. Butler. Kentucky. Arizona. Louisville. Is that what you said . Got three. This isnt horseshoes. This is scholarship. Washington. This is a book called well worth saving. You win that, maybe because you were sitting in front. How many of you have gotten a prize from price at a cleo meeting or a book from price . Stand up if you have gotten one. That is a lot of people. It is a lot of people. I meanns is that that is something that didnt start with price, but it is something that we do, and that we recognize each others accomplishments. Sometimes the accomplishments are silly things. Sometimes the accompaniments are serious things. Lastsaving the best for price is a great teacher. When we were in graduate school, ing and there was a spiderl player named gains. Spider had flunked econ two or three times and we knew he was byways, passed hmmmmm. So price went oneonone with spider. He was a dedicated teacher. He won three Teaching Awards in the years he was in georgia. Then he went to arizona. The economics apartment is in the business school. Mbas have lots of awards. But price one the faculty member of the year, the distinguished faculty member, the outstanding faculty member in 1999, 2003, 2004, 2 thousand nine twice, 2010, two thousand 11, 2000 13, 2 thousand 14, 2000 15, 2 thousand 17, 2018, when he got an honorable mention. [laughter] i dont know what happened in 2012. Were you away . Was it a bad year . Ok. So i would win the award when i was gone. That was outstanding. You werent teaching this year. 41 dissertations that he supervised. So if you have a phd with price, stand up. [applause] there have been some superior dissertation advisors, and in my generation there has been joel, margo, can and there is price. Price new by no means is by no means the least of that group. Some people are innately gifted at doing that. They care, work hard at it and they are fantastic. Enormous impact on economic history, oath through his own work and the service that he has done. But also because we are populated with students, and they are really good and they have learned a lot, and it is an incredible contribution. We recognized that in 2015 with the use prize which at that with the hughes prize, which i thought was welldeserved. Price loves music. Still all the time. He would read papers because you have to. Guess where he would read them . Does anybody know . In the bathtub. [laughter] paper,give price the scrawled comments hard to read, but oftentimes the edges of the paper are wrinkled. That is because he was reading it in the bath. That happens all the time. Thats kind of how i do research now. Also loves music. If you have ever been anywhere with him, you will notice we went to london together for a conference organized on the lessons of the Great Depression. They invited American Economic historians to go to england. The day before the conference started, a volcano in iceland blew up. My wife and i were on the runway at dallas 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. We waited on the runway for about an hour, they let us take off, we were going across, we were coming down 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. That was an expensive hour. We did three cars, three trains, three taxis and a boat to get to london that day. And then some of the people here, we were stuck, we couldnt get back, mike was there, chris was there, greg is here, we couldnt get back to america. The planes were stuck. This hotelstaying in that was 400, there was a conference rate, and luckily nick at the British Academy 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 in one day. A i was in oxford in june and guy says price, when he comes here, he goes to the theater, he goes to music, everywhere price goes, i have to go to the music, i have to hear some stuff. Aprile goes to chicago in , when you were in graduate school you would never associate price with opera. But he is going now. Prices mother passed away, and he talked about it. Spent the whole weekend just listening to the beach boys, good vibrations. I love price. And i got lots of good vibration about him being president. Price fishback. Professor fishback it is a real pleasure to be here. Im going to talk about social insurance and public assistance in the 20th century. The main things i will talk about, aid to dependent children, families with dependent children, supplemental security income, old age assistance, workmens compensation, Unemployment Insurance. Those of the main things we are going to talk about. There are how come that is not up there . Ok. We are on tv, a good way of starting. Ok. Im not exactly sure. Welcome, thank you. There were a cow. Thank you. [applause] donnie, how about another hand for donnie . [applause] i wanted to particularly thank richard and susan. They are the ones that got me into this when they talked me into doing social welfare statistics in napa valley for historical statistics in the United States. I have a lot of students on here, i have john on here, i need to talk about bob, they were chief advisers and there were amazing. He thought idog if would become president , he was that he would say there was no way he thought that was going to happen. I would like to think sean cantor, my colleague, gary, lee, i have to think sean, he does not look like this at all. There he is back there. I didnt have time to draw the beard on or anything, but sean was the one who talked me into working on workers compensation, working on the appeal. He started us down these paths and his bind and has been my coauthor on a bunch of these things. I want to mention peter, he wrote a great book called going public. Growing bigall these people had impacts. Major findings are the following, the rise of the welfare state. What people really mean is the rise of the social insurance state. The programs that have grown so much have been programs were people make a contribution are employers make a contribution. These are not your transfers to the taxpayer. One reason is that is it is easy to sell to taxpayers and less stigma because people feel like they earned indentured accepted. Stigma was a big factor to control how much people took from public assistance before. Mandates and tax subsidies are not spending, but have a big impact on the american system. Have ahave evan big impact on other systems. You dont want to just focus on spending, you want to focus on the mandates as well. The other feature of american legislation is that most programs start at the local level and there is assistance from the state, then there is the statefederal version of things and there are federal things as well. Are almost30s entirely local. We dont know enough about what is going on, only a handful of studies on this. The state comes late during these things and Charities Plan outside role. During the 1890s they were running a lot of these welfare systems locally. I have a lot of major findings. Public assistance programs, people talk about spending but public assistance programs set minimum targets. My goal in this talk is to talk about the target they were setting on how it compares to various measures. That is the primary thing i am going to do. Averages are often much lower, but one reason is because they have this budget principle, they are trying to fill the budget. 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 intentions are not always met. Im showing you the intended target. Meetesnt mean they always that target. I make comparisons to poverty lines, manufacturing earnings, employer costs hiring workers, compared to the minimum wage, another problem another way we deal with problems of poverty. Focus ongoing to costofliving adjustments across the United States. Those are important. A minimum amount of work has been done on this. When you adjust cost differences , it squeezes distribution unless there is only one benefit across the country. Then, the south rises again. It also greatly weakens the mean . It could be higher employment insurance state but you will not be a high public assistance state. Some of these correlations are zero which is something i would not have dreamed would happen. . W does the bottom fare in terms of consumption, it is ok. There is great work by jim sullivan and 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 which is what people are targeting, the