The call for papers for the next annual meeting of the Society of Labor Economists is now available!
The meetings will be in Denver on May 1-2, 2026. They will include, among other fine entertainments for the mind, a presidential address by yours truly.
You can find the call for papers here.
Smith, Jeff. 2017. Mr. Smith Goes to Prison. St. Martin's Press.
So, yes, of course I read this partly because the author shares my name. This other Jeff has a doctorate in Political Science and got involved in state politics in Missouri. He (as the dust jacket says) "lied to the feds about seemingly minor campaign malfeasance" and ended up spending 366 days in a minimum-security federal prison.
The book alternates between telling the author's own story and linking it to broader social science literatures on various aspects of incarceration. The literature surveys, aimed at a sort of intelligent lay audience -- think the audience for the Freakonomics books -- were not perfect to my academic eye but surely fit for purpose. And other Jeff is clearly correct that we could do a lot (a lot) better than we do at incarceration. The current system seems mainly about acting out revenge fantasies on the inmates and providing comfy union jobs for corrections staff rather than about actually changing anyone's behavior upon release.
I especially enjoyed the parts about prison education, which provide a useful reminder to quantitative social scientists busy estimating the difference in outcomes between those who do and do not receive some treatment that implementation matters a lot. Prison education that no one in charge puts much thought or effort into is unlikely to work. Prison education that someone actually wanted to work might possibly work. The material about prison sociology fascinates as well. Other Jeff is obviously a rather odd duck in prison but manages to find ways to fit in and not constantly get pounded on.
Recommended.
N.B. I read this one a while ago but am catching up on these posts.
Lipman, Andrew. 2024. Squanto: A Native Odyssey. Yale University Press.
In the traditional telling that was common in my youth, Squanto was the friendly "Indian" (no quotes back then) who helped the pilgrims survive their early years in North America. This book takes on the task of telling Squanto's tale as academic history, which is very much not what I got as a child. Though an academic book, the writing is clear and fun, with occasional wordplay and some clever turns of phrase. Probably that helped it win the Bancroft Prize.
I was surprised by the extent of Squanto's travels -- hence the "Odyssey" in the book's title. He spent time not only near his home in the area near what is now Plymouth, MA, but also in Spain, England, and what are now Newfoundland and Virginia. Not bad for the early 1600s! The material on Squanto's youth is mainly generic, which is to say it simply describes what we know about what life would have been like for a young man in his community in those times. But after that, there is a surprising amount of documentation specifically about him, including in particular writings by various members of the Plymouth colonies, as well as by or related to the people who held him in Europe. I also learned quite a lot about the early colonial period more generally, including the (generally involuntary) travels of other Native Americans to Europe, interactions both positive and negative among different indigenous communities along the Atlantic coast, and the interactions among the various early European settlements and between the settlements and their sponsors. The book also has a welcome epistemological side, as the author talks explicitly about the quality of the available information on various topics and about how he and other historians interpret and learn from it.
Recommended.
I found this book at the delightful Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe, NM.
An addendum: An alert reader points out that while Lipman did indeed win the Bancroft Prize, it was for an earlier book.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh. 2025. Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Princeton University Press.
As the title suggests, this book provides a mighty overview of how different institutions -- state, market, community, religion, family, and medical guilds and associations -- influence how societies react to epidemic disease from the Black Death in the 14th century through COVID-19 in the 21st. Ogilvie carefully delineates the strengths and weaknesses of each institution, illuminating each with numerous historical examples. For example, markets produce wealth, which is useful in a whole bunch of ways when fighting contagion, but markets also encourage interaction while failing to price in the social externalities associated with contagion.
I found the bits about the history of variolation and immunization particularly new and interesting, Who knew that many medical guilds initially opposed one or both for dubious reasons both economic and epistemological? The material on the so-called "European marriage system" and whether or not it helped societies in epidemic times also stood out to me. My one complaint might be the occasional absence of a "denominator" to give me a sense of, when reading one of the many lists of diverse examples of particular points, whether the list contained all of the available examples on that point or just some tiny fraction of them. The final chapter of the book offers some wise thoughts on particularly effective and ineffective institutional combinations, while carefully noting that the very limited historical data as well as obvious identification problems (i.e., more theories and institutions than historical epidemics) severely limit the boldness of any conclusions.
Recommended.
Full disclosure: I have reached an odd place in life where I could spend all my reading time reading books by people I know and still not read all of the books written by people I know. In this case, Sheilagh is an old friend from graduate school days. As I remember it, she came to Chicago in the midst of her doctoral studies to do a Master's degree in economics, with her main interest being interacting with Gary Becker. You can listen to her lively interview with Tyler Cowen, mostly about this book, here.
Marifian, Elise, Jeffrey Smith, and Sarah Turner. 2024. "Bucky, Becky, and Student Financial Aid Policy Design." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 711(1): 200-224.
Abstract
Bucky’s Tuition Promise (BTP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison offers generous financial aid to low-income, in-state students. Unlike many similar programs at other public universities, financial eligibility for BTP depends solely on a family’s adjusted gross income (AGI), rather than on the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or some function of the poverty line. This program design aims to make eligibility simpler and more transparent for students and their families and thereby to encourage application and matriculation. We investigate the implications of the program design for who does and does not receive additional institutional aid, with a particular focus on the marginal group of BTP-eligible students who lack federal Pell Grant eligibility. With this analysis, we aim to motivate a broader discussion of different notions of equity in financial aid administration and the tough trade-offs implicit in simplifying eligibility criteria.
Published version on journal webpage (open access)
This paper is published in a special issue of the ANNALS in honor of former UW-Madison chancellor (and former Ford School dean at Michigan) Becky Blank. I first met Becky when she was an assistant professor at Northwestern and I was an assistant professor at Western Ontario. We were on at least one dissertation committee together at Michigan. And, perhaps not surprisingly, she was the only university president who sent me a recruiting email when I was on the job market back in 2016, though she carefully noted that she was not writing to me in her capacity as chancellor, because the chancellor did not meddle in the hiring decisions of individual department, but rather in her capacity as a member of the economics department. She is very much missed.
Davis, Lydia. 2023. Our Strangers: Stories. Bookshop Editions.
An unusual but very engaging book of very short to really, really short "fictions". It has the feel of notebook, jumping from topic to topic, sometimes humorous and sometimes somber, and with many of the very short "fictions" consisting of simple observations, such as:
Fun
As we pick up the invitation and read it again,
the morning after,
the party still looks like fun,
even though it was not fun.
Not everyone's cup of mead, but I quite enjoyed it and have ordered another of her books.
Note that at the author's insistence, the book is sold only at independent bookstores. I got mine at Paragraphe in Montreal.
Hat tip: Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution
