hey everyone this is Jeff one of the producers of conversations with Tyler in light of today's Nobel announcement we're re-releasing Tyler's conversation with Claudia golden who just won for quote advancing our understanding of women's labor market outcomes when I was reviewing this episode which aired on
October 6 2021 originally one of the things that jumped out to me is that at one point Claudia says that every one of Tyler's questions is like a PhD dissertation topic and so it's a really great opportunity to review her work what she was working on how she thinks about things including what she won the
Nobel for but also things like whether a Coan solution existed to prevent the Civil War why she's skeptical about happiness research what she learns by reading the New York Times wedding announcement page over time and much much more so congratulations to Claudia and enjoy this re-release of Tyler's conversation with
her conversations with Tyler is produced by the Marcus Center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at radis.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations with tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to
conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Claudia golden who is quite simply one of the leading economists she is Professor of economics at Harvard University has made major contributions to economic history the theory of income inequality economics of Education gender economics and much more
most exciting of all she has a new and excellent book out called Career and family women's century-long journey toward Equity Claudia welcome I'm very very pleased to be here Tyler let me ask a question I've been wondering about why does China right now have so many of the world's self-made Fe female billionaires I don't know I wouldn't
mind being one but it's a big change in the payment of women right and it's happened in one place it hasn't happened in America you know as you well know it's a very large country but let's face it Chinese women became more liberated during the Communist Revolution I mean anyone who went to China During the period After
the revolution saw that women really did work alongside men there is no question that equality has escaped China as it has Escape much of the world I was there in 1975 which is a very long story I met many different people who are in some middle ranks upper middle ranks of the party and there were a lot of women and
let's face it there weren't a lot of women in 1975 in Congress and certainly not in the white house but if we look at a CCP meeting today a photo it's just seems to be all men right there's no Nancy Pelosi in there at the middle level women don't seem to earn that well in China but somehow at the very top there's been
this big breakthrough well kudos for them question about America as you've shown from 1995 to 2008 in the US the gender earnings Gap actually expanded why was that well it didn't expand that much I mean we're talking blips on blips so it expanded more for the higher educated than for the lower educated or
should I say it actually closed for the lower educated whereas it stagnated for the higher educated and the latter a lot of that is due to the enormous expansion of inequality at the top so women paid a relative price for the fact that inequality just zoomed upward how much of that do you think is due to the
growth of super firms so especially in techken finance those seem to be fairly Mal intensive areas and if they're earning much more right at the upper end that would push up the income gap I think it's less that than the distribution itself that men for lots of different reasons tend to be in the way right tail so that's going to be in
finance it's not just in Tech it's going to be in all areas it's going to be in surgery it's going to be in dentistry it's going to be in lots of different self-employment but it seems scalability should really matter so I could be the world's best dentist right I can't serve that many customers or patients I'll
learn well but I won't be the next Mark Zuckerberg right right but finances certainly scalable and let's face it surgeons are you know when we look at the data that's been put together for the upper upper end surgeons to be up there too you've argued in your book and in numerous articles that flexibility of
hours is a critical variable for thinking about the earnings gap between men and women if we look at the literature on firms we seem to see that fixed costs are rising intangible capital is rising lower marginal cost higher markups does that mean that flexible working hours are hard to achieve when fixed costs are high you
would think when fixed costs are high you want to basically take the people you have and drive them as much as possible which in fact you see in finance and in Tech right so should we be pessimistic about gender pay Equity moving forward so the fixed costs here it can also be coming from certain labor
so you're saying that from training but you're saying that the fixed costs are all that Capital per labor has increased or it's branding right Facebook Google are very famous companies they've achieved a certain position right at the margin they want to work the people they hire fairly hard yeah but doesn't seem
that difficult to create a small amount of redundancy to have good substitutes so all of these firms have professionals think about consulting firms accounting firms banks financial corporations lawyers all of them have individuals who are you know quite special quite unique and yet I don't think it takes that much to create a
small amount of redundancy so you can have people hand things off that doesn't mean that you're creating cadres of individuals who are lookalikes and who are sort of driving down their own price but flexibility isn't that difficult to achieve for the individuals who are at that upper end whose earnings you were
going to have to increase even more if they put their foot down and say I am not working during my vacation you're going to have to increase their earnings even more I don't think it's that heavy a lift as skill levels rise doesn't it get harder to hand things off rather than easier so in a pharmacy there's
skill required but it's not extreme well that's what you think to substitute in another Economist for an hour of your time that's very hard to do I don't think so I know one I live with one who I as my substitute yes first of all I don't think think it's in the training as much as it is in and I think most
people in the business would agree with me that yes there's a lot of training for many different fields accountants lawyers Consultants but most of the problem most of the problem that they would claim there is is in the handing off of information in the passing off of information with high levels of fidelity
and with trust I think that one of the things that the zoom world has done is it's led me to trust you even though I can't touch you do you think there are scenarios where marriage makes a meaningful comeback for lower socioeconomic groups and what might those scenarios look like well as someone who got married five years ago
after living with someone for 26 years I would have to sort of get out of my own life into someone else's but I think that for many people marriage creates more stability either because they've made a commitment to themselves or those around them see them as more committed and I think the main a main benefit is
to children so that children have more stability sure but for people without a college degree marriage rates have fallen dramatically in the UN States and rise in single parent families can you see economic forces that might reverse that or is that just going to keep on going I don't know if it's going to keep
on going there was a really great piece in the times the other day about mainly women with less than a college degree who said I don't want to get married or have kids right now I want a career I want to be financially independent I don't know whether that means that they are isoing marriage all together and
that in in fact we have a new group of women who even though they don't have higher degrees are wonderfully financially independent and can raise children in good environments obviously the big issue and is the one I think in back of this question is what's happening to the men and if we can lift the economic opportunities of men who
don't have college degrees then some of the problem I think will be solved that's a big problem how do men and women respond differently to narrow Financial incentives in the workplace or is it just the same to narrow meaning you give people bonuses do they work harder would be one of many questions do
men and women respond the same to that or differently I really don't know it's a very very good question did they respond in terms of working harder that's a good question to ask some consultant I think my answer would be that they both would respond the same but that women have greater constraints
who are parents and so I can be in a law firm and have phenomenal incentives I can be an En counting firm with phenomenal incentives we know what those types of bonuses look like but if a parent says I cannot work Thursday mornings and therefore gives up that benefit that isn't because she's a bad worker and she's not responding to the
benefit it's that her needs are inconsistent with the firm's demands my intuition would be that whether women work at all depends more on incentives but how much they work at the margin if they work depends Less on incentives that's a good point but of course that initial margin is the big Merchant the one that you into the workplace and so
then you have the issue of selectivity so the women who are in the workplace and in certain types of workplaces are going to be selected either on the basis of personal characteristics or the characteristics of their spouses why does the wage Gap flip for black women versus black men these are great questions these
remind me of you know questions that that you might get in some generals exam what is the wage Gap flip the black male wage Gap is a very difficult statistic because it's a highly selected statistics so as we know from lots of very good work if we take the population the entire population will get one
number if we take the population that's not incarcerated we'll get another number if we take the population that's never been incarcerated will get another number so I think that deep in that calculation are some of the nation's largest ills when I read non-economists un wage caps I see the word intersectionality very often the notion
that there's some nonlinear effect created by combining different types of discrimination what is your take on intersectionality and does it play a role in your argument I would like to take a small course on intersectionality because I'm not certain if I model this as a theorist where the sections are going to be and
how I figure out how many sections I want someone has a gender at Birth they have a decided gender perhaps they have a race they have where they grew up they have a religion they have their education of their parents and many of these coary they're correlated in fact this would be a great PhD thesis and for
all I know someone would tell me sure when Rose wrote it 40 years ago or something or maybe Eddie lazir I don't know quite frankly what to do with intersectionality what do you think of this as a simple model so we all know the standard economic model there can be too many tolls on the medieval river
right it's double marginalization that can be a nonlinear impact too many TOS the river is just unusable there's negative externalities one predator on another so think of discrimination as a kind of tax right which it is and then you have multiple taxes from different directions and they interact like the tolls on the river and maybe
intersectionality makes a lot of sense no yes I think that that's very very good way of thinking about it thank you for giving me a little bit of theory Tang my hat on but the problem is whether these are multiplicative whether they're less than that there really is some issue having to do with functional form and I don't
know whether they are separable I mean the way in which you said it they would be separable I don't know it's both a very interesting thank you for the idea I will pass it on to one of my really good graduate students to model and then test that's a very very good point another question another PhD
dissertation that's what we should call this PhD dissertations coming from when I speak with high achieving women I know they tell me something frequently more or less the same that there's a fear of sexual harassment and this leads women to choose more careers where they don't put themselves out there so much and as a result will'll
earn less or quite likely they'll be less famous suffer other penalties and that this is a major factor in career choice and earnings what's your take on that well I think it can be I in no way shape or form want to minimize that and my sense is that gender differences and earnings are not in the majority due to
factors like that however those factors we really want to root out you know there's obviously a difference between dating and romance and sexual predators and sexual harassment the fact that we have so many front page cases about sexual harassment both heterosexual and homosexual harassment shows that it
exists and it should be rooted out how much it is affecting the choices that women make and men make I think is not that gigantic if we're trying to explain gender pay gaps or inequities and we think there's at least two factors one is for a given job women might be paid less right yeah another factor is that
women may end up in jobs or in Majors or with interests that pay less in the longer run yeah how do you assess the relative proportion of those two factors we do all sorts of calculations to try to figure out you know what's happening within versus between of course one of the problems that we always face is the
issue of aggregation you know so the more you disaggregate occupations or firm occupation the more you're going to sort of minimize the problems that are happening within so my sense from the work that I've done that the issue of Occupational segregation for example has been vastly reduced over time what's happening within occupations the real
challenge there is to understand whether individuals are being paid less for absolutely equivalent work within the same firm and that is the standard um federal guideline that one is looking for that's the Smoky gun or whether individuals are getting paid less for example because they're working at the
boutique Law Firm where they have amenities that they want or whether they're working at the Madison Avenue Park Avenue Law Firm where they have fewer flexible amenities I think that those are the challenges and the data challenges that we all have now as you may know there's a debate in experimental economics and also field
experimental economics as to whether women are more averse to competition than men one doesn't have to think this is intrinsic it could itself be the result of discrimination but what's your view there so you know I know all the experiments they're done by extraordinary Scholars I myself have no idea how to do experimental economics
because you could do just about anything and you just have to be incredibly clever at designing these experiments and I know that there's lots of evidence that women take fewer risks they are less pushy they are more insecure or at least we think that they are more insecure you know there's very very
interesting experiments on stock Brokers of course there's the flip side that individuals who are highly risk-taking often lose a lot so I think that more and more as women are educated at lower levels to realize that they can be anything that they want to be if we look at younger women versus older women I
think that we do see that women are more competitive now than they certainly were when I was a kid you know it's interesting that there's the Great Book women don't ask by Linda Babcock and Lasher and I remember when that first came out and I said how can you say women don't ask go to any department store and see who's standing there
screaming about the fact that the toaster doesn't work as you know if we look at undergraduate Majors the ratio it's like 3 to one men to women right it's not obvious that is budging if we look at faculty I read one estimate that the ratio for women hasn't really improved since the 1990s the ratio you're saying
in economics or in the gender ratio I'm not sure what level they were counting you know or are I junks included but it wasn't obvious you're saying 3 to one for a particular major for economics Majors oh okay I believe the ratio is three to one and not really budging well it did B I put those numbers together
okay how is it evolving so was more like four: one then 3: one now about 2: one so it has increased by quite a lot one of the problems that we have as a field is that when students before they even come into their freshman year and they're asked what do they want to major in women if they want to major in the
social sciences will put down psychology and men will put down economics so we lose them before they even unpack their suitcases so I ran an RCT called undergraduate women in economics Challenge and we had 20 universities and colleges liberal arts colleges begin a program for freshmen to explain to them that economics is not just about the
things that their parents have told them about which they find boring which don't involve people but economics is a very people oriented subject it involves quality it involves children it involves obesity it involves health it involves everything and we move the needle a bit I mean we're still trying to figure out
exactly how much we move the needle but the problem is that we do very very poorly in our PR ourselves so if you read the textbooks and they are changing and there are a number of recent textbooks that understood these problems that economics is X and Y it's agents and most young people don't want to deal
with agents they want to deal with humans and particularly it seems as if women more than men would like to deal with humans and so women will tend to go into this field called psychology or sociology which indicates in their writings that it's about people we indicate in our writings that it is about agents or or Greek letters and so
we just have to do a lot better how is the gender ratio for tenured economics professors evolving I mean cep that is the American economic Association committee on the status of women in the economics profession puts together those data and they are creeping upward as one would think they would now in some very
interesting work we can see that they are I you said said the word creeping up you know they're not bounding up and the reason that they're not bounding up at first we thought was a pipeline issue but now it's pretty clear that it's less that the pipeline issue while it was there and still is there that there's
also an issue with the fact that women did more than men will leave Academia and use their economic skills extremely well but outside the tener track should we either abolish tenure or fundamentally change it so as not to penalize women but also for other reasons right it seems grossly unfair
yeah I certainly wouldn't do it because it's a penalty for one group or another I mean it is an issue that arose it solved potentially an issue from some time ago I don't know if the fundamentals are the same that would support it it is is clearly a difficult problem in the sense that individuals have higher productivity when they're
young and then lower productivity and so I think that having long-term contracts is useful for individuals in fields where they're you know so we think about sports clearly those people just clean up at the beginning then they become used car salesmen or whatever they become so the question is you know do we
have another completely changed academic environment in which the superstars clean up at some point and then they go into something else I don't think that that would work either I think that a very important thing to think about is that we produce a large number of products you know we produce knowledge and that's really the hardest thing to
figure out how to do but we produce the dissemination of knowledge and teaching and people who are older probably do that better and that is not generally what tenure is given for I'm sure you know the Stevenson and wolfers paper 2009 why haven't American women gained more in happiness I'm not a great fan of
that I remember Betsy was interviewed on Mother's day one year and she was a new mother and the person interviewing her said your work shows that mothers are less happy than they had been before they became mothers and the person said that was a great question for Mother's Day and Bessie was stuck and Bessie said
well yes but they would never give up their baby for me as an economist that says it all there's some problem you think it's not true that American women are less happy than they had been I'm not sure what your stance is my stance is that I'm not happy with the happiness measures you think through something
else they're not picking up yeah and that's a kind of ordinal Choice thing rather than like stress in the moment yeah and that if people are choosing something out of a greater set of opportunities they probably are happier that's right it's very hard to do that sort of in general sometimes we rile up a group and get them to remember the
things that they're less happy about and sometimes we show them where their lives are safe and secure and wonderful and plentiful and then they get happier so I remember when Dick easterland first began the happiness literature I remember very very well it was a very long time ago having dinner with him in
Madison Wisconsin and talking about it and I was enthralled with trying to understand this happiness literature and that was across countries it seemed sort of interesting from my Chicago Theory point of view that people reenter their happiness so you can be in a place in which if you were plunk down there from
somewhere else you'd be miserable and yet you're there and you re-calibrate yourself just like people recalibrate themselves when they have a bad Health event it takes a while so I'm not certain what to do with the happiness literature what best correlates with women keeping their maiden name after
marriage you've written on this right so for the period in which it increased enormously which was in the early 70s there were several things that were important the first one was that they were given an appalation so rather than being called Miss or misses they could be called Miz and that just meant that
more and more women could do it but more importantly and this gets to the title of the article that I wrote with one of my undergraduates it was that they've already made a name so if you publish or you're a lawyer or a doctor or a yoga instructor or a hairdresser and you were known as you know Tula Bankhead the big
a great name it's going to be hard to change it it became your identity it became calling card so then the question is well okay fine keep your name but then there were some barriers to that and the barriers then began to be taken down there were barriers institutional barriers there were legal barriers in
terms of having to change your name with social security system on your passport on your driver's license there were retrograde states that weren't letting women who got married not not change their names I remember I was at Princeton at the time and I was married to a Princeton Professor I was no longer a professor Princeton and the library
insisted that I used his name on my card despite the fact that I had been an assistant professor there with my name that was one of the greatest AFF fronts okay but all of that disappeared and so that became once again a great enabler and then finally it's want to do when your kids are in school and you have a
different name it's very easy when the plumber comes to the door to tell the plumber I am not Mrs Catz but it would be much harder it's often hard still unfortunately to pick your kid up at school when you have a different last name than they why is the title Miz more or less disappeared from the scene I
don't think it has where has it I heard it a great deal in the 1980s it feels today that I hardly ever hear it I also hear Mister less often to be clear but Miz seems to have vanished viewed as almost condescending I don't know I'm asking I genuinely don't know Tyler what do you hear people avoiding the designation
altogether okay but on forms forms the list of potential appellations will always include Miz yes I think that one reason that it may disappear and I think that it's nice if we actually get to know our first names particularly in communities there may be a sense that you don't want to use any indication of gender that gender has
become a no no that we have I'm mon a committee now we're used to a National Committee in which we're very used to talking about two genders and now so we have two genders X races y ethnicities you multiply them together and you get the number of cells and now we're into more genders so I think that may be one
of the reasons how much do you think the trans movement will in fact disrupt feminism by breaking down the two traditional categories men women so if someone wants to say well the ratio of men to women in this area is that trans movement could say well we can't quite presume that right and blur the entire
comparison is that going to matter moving forward or is that temporary I don't know I don't think any of this is temporary if anything I would applaud the fact that we are sort of smoothing over gender and moving I would think that in the greatest scheme of things that is a move towards greater equality in the sense that individuals
that there is fluidity in who they are and I sort of applaud it I'm not quite certain what to do with it but I applaud it when you read the New York Times wedding announcement page like what honestly do you think so I tend to think like two things like my goodness these Elites are remarkably creative and
self-replicating and then it strikes me how much people who are not religious at critical points in their lives actually want to invoke religion for the ceremony but then it's often just discarded again like that's what I actually think when I read that page but what do you actually think the first thing is that I've been
reading that page for a very very long time and for those viewers who don't know when I did the piece on name changes one of the data sets that we used was the New York Times style section now called vower would list whether the bride was or was not changing her name so we used that as a data set but to be perfectly Frank the
New York Times in their own mysterious ways has changed that page to be very non I shouldn't say very but relative to what it was non- Elite single sex education for women underrated or overrated what do you think of it I have a personal stance that it's highly overrated but I wouldn't want to get into an argument
with my friend colleague person I have enormous admiration for Amy frelin who believes thoroughly in it when I was a kid growing up in the Bronx I couldn't imagine a world that I wanted to be in that didn't have boys at the time girls were I think far less assertive far less serious I had girlfriends but I enjoyed being around
the boys a lot more I went to Bron science which was about 2third boys when I applied to college I just could not imagine going to an all girl school now I know the arguments in Reverse I respect them but it was certainly not for me why does for-profit education seem to fail so badly like some parts of the
learning sector are for-profit your books are put out by for-profit Publishers textbooks are berlit seems to do okay relative to language classes at your local state college but for-profit education as a whole seems to implode like what's the model there I think that it's some for-profit education it's certainly not all for-profit education
but I think the the problem is that the part of for profit education that sort of expanded the greatest was for Bas and particularly in fields like Business Administration Management and they became more ba Mills when I was studying for profit education I really wanted to be able to look at the materials that
were given to people what were they studying and I was never able to break into that the problem is it's twofold one is that there's a huge profit incentive for the company that's of course not always a problem as we know but the other one is for the individuals are not as aware as they should be of what they're getting
themselves into so they are often very needy they're lowincome their first generation College some is dangling in front of them something that they really want they desperately want something that's going to get them out of the hole that life has put them in and that person who's dangling it is not giving
them sufficient information and sufficient amount of time to get out of this contract I think we saw that very very clearly in the GAO audit studies of the for-profits I think that that's the problem the for-profits that give Short courses that give onee certification in let's say medical technicians those what we've shown in
our work are not the big problem the big problem is what I just said and let me just say that I have taken short for-profit courses on dog training and they work really well for nonprofits I've seen estimates that maybe no more than 40% of the people who try finish to doeses that just mean we have too many
people trying to attend college isn't the true rate of return on education actually pretty low at the median at least well let me just back up and say that when we were just talking about for-profit education that the non-for-profit The non- Selective portion could use a bit of change as well I mean it's not as if they're
charging as high an amount or as recruiting using techniques that are as extreme and exploitative as the for-profits but they also may not really wake up individuals and tell them exactly what they have to do and how much time they need to spend so I think that we do know Tyler there is incredibly good really superb research
on that marginal student and that the marginal student you know this is Seth Zimmerman's phenomenal work the marginal student does gain a tremendous amount by getting into a good college but is that true for the marginal student on the side of the margin where they don't finish your own work with cat suggests
there's this discontinuity some people who simply can't leap the hurdle into having a college degree it's somehow too hard for them temperamentally possibly I'm trying to go back we have to go back to Seth's work to know the point of identification I thought the point of identification was the individual who
was graduating from high school so he's in fact including in that the probabilities that they don't finish okay and the rate of return for that person who was able to go to this Florida International was incredibly High if you look at a school you know say like duke or Emory is it a longrun problem that if they admit people on
their merits that they'll be too many women in the school relative to men and some kind of affirmative action will be needed for the males these are private institutions and they can generally accept whom they would like to accept for various reasons of diversity should they do that or should
they just take in 76% women say I'm PR back to the original issues that were raised by a small number of liberal arts colleges and universities in the 50s and the 60s about why they should become co-educational institutions and those reasons were that their marginal student was leaving was not going to Princeton
but going to Harvard not going to Princeton but going to Penn not going to Princeton but going to Cornell because that student wanted an education that was more balanced in terms of what the world would look like when they got out and that more balanced then was not necessarily blacks Hispanics Jews but
the one major thing that was missing from Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth and Amherst and Wesley and whole bunch of places was women and so those institutions in a process that I've described on the origins of co-education LED these institutions to move in the direction of accepting more women now what's going through your mind
I think is yes but they weren't lowering quality in fact they were increasing quality but diversity in any Dimension can be thought of as a plus for everyone so it was about 10 years ago that some Dean in a small liberal arts college in the midwest admitted to the fact that they were accepting men with lower sat
act and grade point averages to increase diversity but you know men probably are not less intelligent than women on average right so what's the pipeline problem is it too much homework and too many extra curriculars in high school or something else where are we failing our young boys we can go back as early as we
have data as early as we have data on high schools and know that girls attended high schools graduated from high schools at far far greater numbers than boys so if there is an issue here it's certainly not extracurriculars it may have to do with what's going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double
X the value of an Ivy League degree what percentage of that value do you think comes from signaling as opposed to learning very little I think that it's not signaling it's probably networks networks so it's something you get from having why is there a sheep skin effect then which is quite strong because you
could meet people there for three years and then just not finish I don't know what the numbers are for the sheep skin effects I'm always very dubious on anything having to do with real signaling but in terms of sheep skin effects I'm willing to read up on it but I don't know what it is the networks are enormously important you know sometimes
I look at my undergraduates and I think I would just be such a better person if I could live with these people these are the most accomplished people and so you would be able to listen to someone playing the cello you could be listening to someone teaching you about verie operas they're just an incredible group
of individuals so in some sense not the same networking that Teddy Roosevelt would have been able to do or John Kennedy it's instead an ability to grasp just an enormous amount in a mere four years I went to Cornell which of course is an Ivy League school too and I had a phenomenal experience but nothing like I
would have if I went to Harvard right now that's why I want to go back to college you're there now right you could take I know but I'm on the giving end not the receiving end the literature un returns to skill so there's a piece by bodri empirical work by Rob Veta which argues post 2000 or so that the returns
to skill are in general collapsing do you view that as stepping outside of your model with cats in your book race between education and technology or do you dispute the result how do you see that yeah I would have to go back over that the returns to which skills most skills they suspect it may be due to
automation artificial intelligence yeah well I read the work of David Deming in which we now the set of skills that are in enormously great demand are a set of social skills and the question is how do you up Social skills that it seems as if we know a lot about the demand for social skills we know a lot less about
the supply of social skills so it may be that when we think about the skill of the past we're thinking about first you know manual skills then motor skills then mental skills and now we're moving into the range of social skills our last segment on economic history why wasn't there a cian solution to Civil War
namely just buying out the slave holders this is going back to your work from what 1977 well I mean Lincoln wrestled with that one thinks about what went on in the White House during the Civil War I mean one just thinks about Lincoln just wrestling physically wrestling with all of these difficult issues and in fact the slaves were purchased in the
district of Colombia so he was doing calculations about how we could pay slave owners for their property you know for the longest time that one of the central issues in Lincoln's mind was that property was extremely important to protect and slaves were property and so we would have to buy out the slaves and
he made lots of different calculations and of course there were many different emancipation programs that preceded that in fact you may know that the North had slaves New York did New Jersey did and by acts of the legislature slaves were freed as of a certain age and so that was what was called gradual emancipation it wasn't
very good emancipation and it could have had some horrific effects and in fact one of the effects was that slaves were shipped from these northern areas to the South so there were lots of different potential programs and I mean one of the things that Frank Lewis and I did when we computed the cost of the Civil War
was we were essentially telling Lincoln oops you know you should have done it what best predicted anti-immigration sentiment in the 1920s what probably best predicted it was it was sort of a combination it appeared from some ancient work I've done of areas that got immigrants and reduced the opportunities for others in
the area and For Whom The Immigrant groups that were there already were not the ones who were flooding in so one could think of the various parts of the country ironically The South was really pro-immigrant for the longest time because it viewed these immigrants as a wonderful subst subtitute for a labor
force that was migrating North and had for decades not been slave and so the South was pro-immigrant and they became anti-immigrant only when they realized that immigrants weren't going there and when they were going there they were Italians and they were dark and these were you know pretty racist people in
the north the places that began to shift being anti-immigrant and and I was looking more at the shifts of voting for legislation that would put in place rules for literacy those places were places that did not have large numbers of people from eastern central and southern Europe and so the people there in slamming the door were not slamming
the door in the face of their relatives and very last question your book is coming out again that book is career and family women's Century long journey toward Equity by Claudia golden but other than promoting your book what will you be doing next oh wonderful so I'm working on a couple of projects one is
this is a lot of fun so there was something called the Lama act that was passed in 1940 that was for infrastructure for America lots of money and by 1942 43 it was pretty clear that America needed to in fighting this war at home in producing Goods for the Allies that we needed to have women employed and so
the Lama funds were repurposed for nursery schools and after school programs and what we're doing with Joe Ferry and Claud aletti is finding out exactly where these lenam schools were and through the amazing ability that exists now we can figure out whether individuals who were 3 to six years old during some period had some high
probability of going to atlantum school what happened to them 50 years later so that's one of the things I'm doing another thing is trying to figure out why men who are fathers do so well relative to women who are mothers and that's another piece of the puzzle Claudia golden thank you very much it was a real pleasure to meet you almost
in person Tyler same here till next time thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show [Music]