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This book provides the first comprehensive and consistent analysis of vital statistics and migration patterns for the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. It is anchored in the one available source for nationwide estimates, the decennial censuses. It attempts to provide, for black and white populations, a consistent set of estimates of birth and death rates, rates of natural increase, and net international and interregional flows. For the black population, it also estimates the changing pace of manumissions in the antebellum decades. The census estimates are also conditioned by a wide range of historical evidence, both quantitative and non-quantitative, ranging from evidence on slave smuggling to ship traffic during the War of 1812. The results are two-fold: a set of data and a set of questions suggested by the data that promise novel challenges for historians of the antebellum era

AbstractBehavioural economic research has established that defaults, one form of nudge, powerfully influence choices. In most policy contexts, all individuals receive the same nudge. We present a model that analyses the optimal universal nudge for a situation in which individuals differ in their preferences and hence should make different choices and may incur a cost for resisting a nudge. Our empirical focus is onterminated choosers(TCs), individuals whose prior choices become no longer available. Specifically, we examine the power of defaults on individuals who had enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans with drug coverage and whose plans were then discontinued. Currently, if these TCs fail to actively choose another Medicare Advantage plan, they are defaulted into traditional fee-for-service Medicare (TM) without drug coverage. Overall, the rate of transition of TCs into TM is low, implying that original preferences and status quo bias overpower the default. Increasing numbers of Americans are choosing plans in health insurance exchange settings such as Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and private exchanges. Plan exits and large numbers of TCs are inevitable, along with other forms of turmoil. Any guidance and defaults provided for TCs should factor in their past revealed preferences.

Climate change is more uncertain, more global, and more long-term than most issues facing humanity. This trifecta makes a policy response that encompasses scientific correctness, public awareness, economic efficiency, and governmental effectiveness particularly difficult. Economic and psychological instincts impede rational thought. Elected officials, who cater to and foster voters' misguided beliefs, compound the soft thinking that results. Beliefs must change before unequivocal symptoms appear and humanity experiences the climate-change equivalent of a life-altering heart attack. Sadly, it may well take dramatic loss to jolt the collective conscience toward serious action. In the long run, the only solution is a bottom-up demand leading to policies that appropriately price carbon and technological innovation, and that promote ethical shifts toward a world in which low-carbon, high-efficiency living is the norm. In the short term, however, popular will is unlikely to drive serious action on the issue. Policy makers can and must try to overcome inherent psychological barriers and create pockets of certainty that link benefits of climate policy to local, immediate payoffs. It will take high-level scientific and political leadership to redirect currently misguided market forces toward a positive outcome.