The Pay Gap Among Academic Faculty for Higher Education in the U.S Yucheng Wang Author Aditi Bhattacharjya Jason Fu Meruka Vyas Editors Abstract This paper investigates whether academic rank, academic field, and gender account for the pay disparity in higher education in the United States. Analyzing 2,235 faculty in the University of Iowa, I find that pay gaps are primarily driven by academic rank, especially among professors and non-tenured faculty. Male assistant professors earn 23.8% more than females, while non-tenured males earn 31.6% less than females. Within identical academic ranks, there are gender pay gaps between assistant professors and non-tenured faculty. By analyzing 301 assistant professors, this paper identifies the academic field as another factor in pay discrepancies across academia, particularly among business, medical, social science, and STEM disciplines. However, gender doesn’t contribute to the pay disparity problem when faculties are under the same academic rank and field of study. Given this paper does not utilize datasets for any private institutions or colleges in other states, the paper’s findings can only be generalized to public universities in the U.S. I. Introduction In August 2023, five of Vassar’s female professors sued the college for wage discrimination against female faculties. According to the Washington Post, full-time male professors at Vassar earn an average annual salary of about $154,200, while their full-time female professors only earn $139,300. In this lawsuit, advocates for Vassar professors argued that the gender pay gap arose due to substantial differences in starting salaries. In academia, there exists a merit rating system biased against females, alongside a discriminatory promotion process that systematically prevents or delays the advancement of female professors compared to males. This gender bias and stark compensation difference between male and female faculty members does not only happen at Vassar College. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) finds that full-time women professors make up 82% of what their male colleagues earn across academia. Recent lawsuits in Vassar have alleged wage discrimination against female professors, raising questions about the presence of the gender pay gap in academia across the United States. The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has discovered persistent pay disparities for females in staff and faculty positions at colleges and universities across the United States. Academic researchers and policymakers hypothesize that the gender gap in earnings persists because it is hidden intentionally (Trotter et al., 2017). Given that limited research focuses on the gender pay gap for higher education in the United States, this paper aims to provide evidence of how male and female academic faculties differ in their earnings at colleges or universities in the United States. Moreover, this paper also investigates non-gendered factors contributing to the pay gap in academia across the United States like academic rank and field. Using the University of Iowa as its primary data source, this paper examines whether academic rank, academic field, and gender account for the pay disparity for higher education in the United States. Motivated by Koedel and Pham’s research in 2023, I categorize determinants of salary disparity into two areas: conditional gaps and unconditional gaps. Since compensation differences can be explained partially by the level of faculty’s skills and contributions, the conditional gaps include academic rank and academic field. The remaining unexplained portion of the pay gap falls under the unconditional gap like gender. Faculties with higher seniority typically take more responsibility in teaching and administrative tasks, have more years of experience, and potentially make more substantial contributions to research. Therefore, academic rank has the most significant impact on pay disparity in academia. Besides academic rank, the academic field is the second most influential factor. As some academic fields like medicine or business are historically more prestigious or better funded for research, it leads to a greater pay discrepancy when faculty members have identical academic ranks. As a result, I hypothesize that gender is the least influential factor in the pay gap problem. II. Background President Obama proposed the White House Equal Pay Pledge in 2016 to narrow the gender wage gap across the United States. Following Obama’s campaign, academic institutions formed new committees and commissions on college campuses to address the gender pay inequality problems. For instance, Louisiana State University established the Council on Gender Equity to emphasize gender pay equality. However, research still shows a persistent gender pay gap among university faculty across the United States. AAUP finds that a full-time female professor earned roughly $82 for every $100 a full-time male professor earned in 2023. This compensation difference between male and female full-time professors raises questions about the existence of a gender pay gap for higher education in the United States. Does pay depend on the skills and contributions of males and females equally, or does bias result in differential salary solely based on the individual's gender? From the late 1980s to the mid 2010s, previous research indicates that the gender pay gap, a form of unconditional gap, accounts for 20% of wage difference at research universities (Koedel & Pham, 2023). Besides the unconditional gap, the conditional gap contains the unexplained portion of the pay gap in academia. The conditional gap is typically associated with the academic field, years in the position, and peer performance evaluations. In contrast to the unconditional gap, the conditional gap only accounts for 4% to 6% of wage difference, or 20% to 30% of the unconditional gap (Li & Koedel, 2017). Given that the unconditional gender pay gap is almost three to five times bigger than the conditional gap, this sizable difference underscores the substantial influence of gender on salaries within academia. Furthermore, this finding also suggests that the pay gap in academia is more closely tied to gender-based disparities than to intellectual or performance measurements. III. Data My main estimates are based on an analysis of data from the Iowa Legislature for the University of Iowa in 2022. This annual census survey collects data on full-time and part-time teaching and administrative staff at degree-granting public universities and their affiliated colleges in Iowa State from July 1 to June 30 of the following year. The survey covers 14,295 employees in the University of Iowa, including administrative and support staff, librarians, all full-time tenure track faculties, part-time affiliated staff, adjunct staff, clinical staff in teaching hospitals, visiting scholars, and research staff who have academic ranks and salaries similar to teaching staff, for all those whose term of appointment is not less than 12 months. The main objective of this paper is to examine how male and female academic faculties differ in their earnings at universities or colleges in the United States. Thus, this dataset excludes clinical staff, visiting scholars, research staff, teaching assistants, administrative and support staff, and librarians. Since the Iowa Legislature mandates that state employees participate in the annual census survey, confidential pay information is obtained directly from the Department of Administrative Services without additional verification or editing. As the publicly available salary data is directly obtained from this State Employee Salary Book, the accuracy of data and publicly accessible features make the University of Iowa an ideal choice for this paper. Data about demographics, qualification data, and salaries were collected for all tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenured track faculty. Demographic data include each faculty member’s gender and county information. Qualification data include each faculty member’s academic rank and academic field. The salary data is directly obtained from the Iowa State Employee Salary Book payroll records. A limitation of the Iowa Legislature database is the generalizability problem. The database only includes state-funded public universities like the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa. Other private universities or liberal arts colleges are not included in the Iowa Legislature database due to confidentiality concerns regarding wage information. This restriction poses a significant challenge in drawing broader conclusions about pay disparities across all public or private institutions in the United States. IV. Methods Given that the range of faculty’s wages varies from $1,000 to $1,685,834, this paper uses a log specification for salary to normalize the scales of the variables to make it less prone to outliers. To examine whether the faculty’s academic rank correlates with the pay gap, I analyzed 2,235 faculty members among tenured, tenure track, and non-tenured track at the University of Iowa for 2022. Tenured faculty typically secure lifetime professor employment after a six-year probationary period. Tenure track faculty hold positions as Associate Professor or Assistant Professor and are currently in the promotion and evaluation process towards attaining the status of tenured full professor. All faculties besides tenured or tenure track are classified as nontenured track faculties. The tenured faculties include 496 employees as full-time professors. The tenured track includes 415 employees as full-time associate professors or assistant professors. The non-tenured track includes 1,324 employees as part-time Adjunct staff, Professors of Instruction, Professors of Practice, and Lecturers. The general regression model is represented as follows: log Salary= β1AssociateProfessor + β2NonTenured + β3Professor + β4Male + β5AssociateProfessor Male + β6NonTenured Male + β7Professor Male + α + ε where Male is an indicator variable that equals 1 if the assistant professor is a male and 0 if not. AssociateProfessor, Professor, and NonTenured are indicator variables that equal 1 if the faculty member is associate professor, professor, or non-tenured track accordingly, and 0 if not. To test for differential returns for ranking by sex, I include three interaction variables: AssociateProfessor Male, Professor Male, and NonTenured * Male. These interaction variables are equal to 1 if the faculty member is a male assistant professor, male professor, or male in a non-tenured track accordingly, and 0 otherwise. To testify whether the faculty’s academic field correlates with the pay gap, I controlled the academic rank effect and analyzed 301 assistant professors at the University of Iowa for 2022. Faculties are sampled from six academic disciplines: art, business, humanities, medicine, social science, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Once a discipline was selected for sampling, all assistant professors listed on the department website were included in the dataset. The Arts discipline includes 22 assistant professors from the Arts Division in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Humanity discipline includes 21 assistant professors from the Humanities Division at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The STEM discipline includes 61 assistant professors from the College of Engineering and Natural and Mathematical Sciences Division in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Social Sciences discipline includes 41 assistant professors from the Social Sciences Division in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and College of Education. The Business discipline includes 23 assistant professors belonging to the College of Business. The Medical discipline includes 133 assistant professors from the College of Medicine, Dentistry, and Nursing. The general regression model is represented as follows: log Salary= β1Business + β2Humanity + β3Medical + β4SocialScience + β5STEM + β6Male + β7Business Male + β8Humanity Male + β9Medical Male + β10SocialScience Male + β11STEM Male + α + ε where Male is an indicator variable that equals 1 if the assistant professor in the arts field is male and 0 otherwise. Business, Humanity, Medical, SocialScience, and STEM are indicator variables that equal 1 if the faculty member is business, humanity, medical, social science, or STEM accordingly, and 0 if not. To test for differential returns for the academic field by sex, I include five interaction variables: Business Male, Humanity Male, Medical Male, SocialScience Male, and STEM * Male. These interaction variables are equal to 1 if the assistant professor is a male in business, humanity, medical, social science, or STEM, and 0 otherwise. V. Results V.a.1 Academic Rank on Salary AAUP finds that the average annual salary in 2021 for assistant professors, associate professors, and professors was about $83,300, $96,000, and $140,500 respectively. Professors typically have more years of experience and research grants, so they tend to have higher salaries than associate professors or assistant professors. From this result, I hypothesize that academic rank correlates with pay disparity in academia. To test my hypothesis, the regression in Table 1 compared each faculty member’s salary based on their academic rank, with the expectation that professors have the highest wages compared to associate professors, assistant professors, and non-tenured track faculties. The non-tenured track faculty in my dataset consists of adjunct staff, lecturers, Professors of Instruction, and Professors of Practice. In the University of Iowa, the Professor of Instruction and Professor of Practice are instructional faculty solely responsible for teaching and not involved in administrative duties. Since the hiring criteria for instructional faculty is less rigorous in terms of research and scholarship requirements as compared to those for tenured or tenure track faculty, instructional faculty tend to receive lower compensation. In this regression, the adjusted R2 is 54.8%, which is consistent with my hypothesis that academic rank accounts for salary disparity. The β1, β2, and β3 coefficients indicate relative salary differences for female associate professors, non-tenured track faculties, and professors compared to female assistant professors. Because of higher ranks, the predicted signs for β1 and β3 coefficients are positive, suggesting that female associate professors or professors receive higher salaries compared to female assistant professors. However, the β1 coefficient is negative and not statistically significant at 0.01 level, suggesting pay is not increasing for associate professors. The β3 coefficient is positive and suggests that female Professors earn relatively 26.3% higher than female assistant professors. Since non-tenured track faculties are part-time basis or instructional faculty, they receive lower compensation than their tenured or tenure track colleagues. Thus, the predicted sign for β2 is negative. The β2 coefficient is negative and suggests female non-tenured track faculty earn relatively 173.7% less than female assistant professors. Given both Professor and NonTenure variables are economically significant and statistically significant at 0.01 level, I conclude that academic rank accounts for wage discrepancies only in the professor and non-tenured track faculty levels. V.a.2 Gender Effect on Salary Within Same Academic Rank AAUP found that full-time women professors earned 82 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in 2023. This compensation disparity motivated me to investigate whether gender influences salary within identical academic rank conditions. In Figure 1, male faculty members earn much more than their female counterparts under professors, associate professors, and assistant professors levels. However, female non-tenured faculty members receive higher salaries than their male colleagues. Therefore, within the same academic rank, I hypothesize that gender accounts for pay discrepancy. To test my hypothesis, the regression in Table 1 compares each faculty member’s salary based on their gender when they have identical academic ranks. The β4, β5, β6, and β7 coefficients indicate relative salary differences for male assistant professors, associate professors, non-tenured track faculties, and professors compared to their female counterparts under the same academic rank condition. I expect males to earn less at the non-tenured level while earning more at the professor, associate professor, or assistant professor level. The predicted sign for β6 is negative while β4, β5, and β7 are positive. However, both β5 and β7 coefficients are not statistically significant at 0.01 level, suggesting that the pay gap for the associate professor and professor level cannot be explained by gender reasons. In contrast, the β4 coefficient is positive and suggests that male Assistant Professor earns relatively 23.8% higher than female assistant professors. The β6 coefficient is negative and suggests that male non-tenured track faculties earn relatively 31.6% less than female non-tenured track faculties. Since both Male and NonTenure * Male variables are economically significant and statistically significant at 0.01 level. I conclude that gender bias accounts for wage disparity only in assistant professor and non-tenured levels when both female and male faculty have identical academic ranks. V.b.1 Academic Field on Salary Within the Same Academic Rank Under the same academic rank, is gender the sole factor contributing to the wage disparity at the University of Iowa? Previous research suggests that academic rank and academic field account for 4% to 6% of wage difference in academia (Li & Koedel, 2017). To examine whether the academic field impacts wage differences, I analyzed 301 assistant professors across six academic departments at the University of Iowa in 2022. The regression in Table 2 compared each assistant professor’s salary based on their academic field. I anticipate that medical, business, and STEM assistant professors will have the highest wages relative to other disciplines. Professions like doctors, investment bankers, and software engineers are known for their lucrative salaries. As a result, students are more likely to declare majors in medical, business, or STEM subjects. To meet the growing demand for these majors while providing a more robust academic curriculum, universities, and liberal arts colleges offer competitive salaries to attract top-tier talent for teaching positions. Therefore, I hypothesize that the academic field accounts for wage discrepancy at the assistant professor level. In this regression, the adjusted R2 is 32.9%, which is consistent with my hypothesis that the academic field accounts for salary disparity. The β1, β2, β3, β4, and β5 coefficients indicate relative salary differences for female assistant professors in business, humanity, medicine, social science, and STEM compared to the female assistant professors in the arts field. Since the business, medical, and STEM fields provide lucrative salaries, the predicted signs and values for β1, β3, and β5 are positive and mathematically larger. It suggests that female assistant professors in business, medicine, or STEM receive higher salaries than those in the art department. Since the β2 coefficient is slightly positive and not statistically significant at 0.01 level, it suggests the salary difference for female assistant professors between humanities and art disciplines is negligible. In contrast, the β1, β3, β4, and β5 coefficients are positive, which suggests that female assistant professors in the business, medical, social science, and STEM fields earn a relatively higher proportion of salaries than those in the art department. Given that the β1, β3, β4, and β5 coefficients are positive and statistically significant at the 0.01 level, I conclude that the academic field accounts for wage disparity for assistant professors in business, medical, social science, and STEM disciplines. V.b.2 Gender Effect on Salary Within Same Academic Rank and Field In Figure 2, I observed the average annual salary between male and female assistant professors separately within the Arts, Business, Humanity, Medical, Social Science, and STEM fields at the University of Iowa in 2022. Within the same academic field, the greatest gender gap is $110,510 in the Medical department while the smallest is only $558 in the Humanities department. Given that the gender pay gap exists among all six departments, I hypothesize that gender accounts for pay disparity when female and male assistant professors are within the same academic field. To test my hypothesis, the regression in Table 2 compared each assistant professor’s salary based on their gender when they are in the same academic discipline. The β6, β7, β8, β9, β10, and β11 coefficients indicate relative salary differences for male assistant professors in Arts, Business, Humanity, Medical, Social Science, and STEM compared to their female assistant professors under the same academic field condition. Since the β6, β7, β8, β10, and β11 coefficients are economically insignificant at the 0.1 level and statistically insignificant at the 0.01 level, I find that there is not any gender pay gap under the assistant professor level within the Arts, Business, Humanity, Social Science, and STEM departments. However, the β9 coefficient suggests the relative salary difference for male assistant professors is 32.4% higher than for female assistant professors within the medical field. As the β9 coefficient is economically significant at 0.1 level while statistically insignificant at 0.01 level, I identify that there is no gender pay gap under the assistant professor level within the medical field. In sum, gender does not account for wage disparity at the assistant professor level within the same department condition. V.b.3 Gender Effects for Assistant Professor in Medical Field Previous research suggests that women may encounter greater pay inequality in which they are underrepresented within a field (Casad et al., 2022). In Figure 3, I find 23 more male assistant professors in the Medical department, while the faculty number difference is less than 10 for each Arts, Business, Humanities, and STEM department. The economically significant relationship is present only in the Medical department due to the underrepresentation of female assistant professors. In the University of Iowa case, there are 58.6% male and 41.4% female assistant professors within the medical field, which implies that females are underrepresented in the medical department. As the β9 coefficient is economically significant at 0.1 level while statistically insignificant at 0.01 level, it partially confirms my hypothesis that the mismatch between male and female faculty numbers leads to the gender pay difference. Historical reasons point to why the medical department has more male faculty members than female. Typically, students need to take three or four years of education in medical schools along with three to nine years of medical training before they enter hospitals or academia. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) finds that the average age for assistant professors in United States Medical Schools is 45.5 and 43.2 years old in 2023, which suggests the current assistant professors received their M.D. or D.O. degree from medical schools between 1997 and 2004. According to the AAMC records, from 1997 to 1998, 58.3% of medical school graduates were males while only 41.7% were females. From 2003 to 2004, 54.1% of medical school graduates were males and 45.9%were female. Even though the medical department still has high male representation, the rise of advocacy for women in STEM and the increased proportion of female medical school graduates from AAMC records imply that the gender pay gap in the medical field is likely to narrow in the future. VI. Conclusion I use the University of Iowa in 2022 as my dataset to investigate factors accounting for wage disparity in higher education in the United States. The findings show that academic rank explains wage differences in professors or non-tenured track faculty levels. Within the same academic rank, the gender pay gap only exists for assistant professors or non-tenured track level. Besides academic rank, the academic field also accounts for the wage discrepancy when I limit my dataset to only focus on the assistant professor level. The pay gap arose among business, medical, social science, and STEM disciplines. However, when two faculty members have identical academic ranks, there is no gender pay gap within the same department. To improve and expand on this research, diversifying the dataset must be a key focus by adding more public and private universities or colleges. A large dataset would provide a comprehensive perspective on whether the gender pay gap in academia is a nationwide inequality problem or a local inequality problem inside Iowa. If the study reveals stark differences between male and female faculty, it would be advisable to inform policymakers of the severity of the issue and propose equity focused policies such as implementing pay transparency laws to reduce pay inequality and associated gender gaps. Bibliography Gabriel, D. (2023). Female professors sue Vassar College, alleging wage discrimination. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/30/vassar-college-wage-discrimination-lawsuit/ American Association of University Professors. (2023) “Annual Faculty Compensation Survey.” American Association of University Professors, June 2023, https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup reports-third-consecutive-year-faculty-wages-falling-short-inflation Koedel, C., & Pham, T. (2023). The Narrowing Gender Wage Gap Among Faculty at Public Universities in the U.S. SAGE Open , 13 (3), 21582440231192936. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231192936 Li, D., & Koedel, C. (2017). Representation and Salary Gaps by Race-Ethnicity and Gender at Selective Public Universities. Educational Researcher , 46 (7), 343–354. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X17726535 College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (2024) “Representation and Pay Equity in Higher Education Faculty: a Review and Call to Action.” College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, April 2024, https://www.cupahr.org/surveys/research-briefs/representation-and-pay-equity-in-higher-ed faculty-trends-april-2024/ The Iowa Legislature. (2022) https://www.legis.iowa.gov/publications/fiscal/salarybook Casad, B. J., Garasky, C. E., Jancetic, T. R., Brown, A. K., Franks, J. E., & Bach, C. R. (2022). U.S. Women Faculty in the Social Sciences Also Face Gender Inequalities. Frontiers in Psychology , 13 , 792756. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.792756 Trotter, R. G., Zacur, S. R., & Stickney, L. T. (2017). The new age of pay transparency. Business Horizons , 60 (4), 529–539. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2017.03.011 Wiedman, C. (2020). Rewarding Collaborative Research: Role Congruity Bias and the Gender Pay Gap in Academe. Journal of Business Ethics , 167 (4), 793–807. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551- 019-04165-0 Association of American Medical Colleges. (2023) “U.S. Medical School Faculty Trends: Average Age.” Association of American Medical Colleges, Dec 2023, https://www.aamc.org/data reports/faculty-institutions/data/us-medical-school-faculty-trends-average-age Association of American Medical Colleges. (2019) “Percentage of U.S. medical school graduates by sex, academic years 1980-1981 through 2018-2019.” Association of American Medical Colleges, August 2019, https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/faculty-institutions/data/us-medical-school faculty-trends-average-age Appendix Figure 1. Average Salary for Female and Male Faculties in Each Academic Rank Figure 2. Average Salary for Female and Male Assistant Professors in Each Academic Department Figure 3. Number of Female and Male Assistant Professors in Each Academic Department

In the Augenblick, Not the Moment: A Heideggerian Critique of Temporal Inauthenticity Lukas Bacho Author Gabriel Gonzalez Alexander Gerasimchuk Matthew Wong Editors “Be in the moment!” In our chronically online and attention-deficient age, this admonition is a constant refrain. It usually means: “Focus on neither the past nor the future, but rather the present—what is happening right now. ” A favorite instruction of guided meditations, it may also be heard as a protest against the impulse to sully a beautiful view with a photo shoot. Too often, our minds are clouded by remorse for past events or anxiety about future events that we are unable to appreciate the present for what it is. Clearly, there is some truth to this. However, the normative force of “Be in the moment!” relies on the misleading descriptive claim that we are only ever in the moment (so why try to exist outside it?). This, in turn, rests on a conception of time as a series of punctual moments, as on a timeline, that seem linked only because we perceive them as such. Martin Heidegger had a name for this understanding: “now-time,” or the “ordinary” (Vulgär ) conception of time. I seek to argue, with Heidegger’s help, that the admonition to “be in the moment” obscures essential features of our temporality, thereby diminishing our potential for authentic living. My primary aim is to reconstruct Heidegger’s accounts of now-time, world-time, originary temporality, and the authentic mode of relating to all of these. What emerges is the foundation for a more authentic way of relating to time whose explanatory priority lies not in one’s present situation but in one’s future possibilities. Now-time (Jetzt-Zeit ) is the most proximal conception of time according to which we humans, as Dasein , live our lives. On this understanding, Heidegger writes, “time shows itself as a sequence of nows which are constantly ‘present-at-hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of nows, as the ‘course of time.’” The language of “sequence” and “succession” indicates that time is here understood as a series of discrete moments so short that their continual coming and going seems to constitute a flow, but in fact does not. Each moment, or “now,” is “present-at-hand” in the sense that it has an objective (and thus constant) duration. One can quibble about how long exactly the “now” is, but most would say a fraction of a second. Heidegger calls this conception “now-time” because it views time as nothing but these infinitesimally short “nows,” linked by nothing but one another; for “the sequence of nows is uninterrupted and has no gaps.” Now-time resembles a popular position in contemporary philosophy known as the cinematic or snapshot view of time, which holds that “neither our awareness itself nor its contents have temporal extension.” But now-time is also the idea we live by in our everyday lives, most obviously in our use of clocks. The convention of designating the current “now” with clock-time reflects our conception of time as a series of discrete moments: 4:17 comes after 4:16, the fourth second of a minute comes after the third, and so on. Heidegger emphasizes that now-time existed far before the invention of clocks, for Dasein has always measured its time, whether by the sun or some other means; the only difference is that the units of measurement have changed. If time were divided into sufficiently short instants, the logic goes, there would be nothing between them. Indeed, now-time is so integral to our everyday existence that it is hard to imagine any other way to conceive of time. Now-time is implicit in our telling someone to “be in the moment.” To show how, let us begin by acknowledging that the imperative asks one to exist in the present, at the exclusion of both the past and the future. What is the present? Although the word “moment” seems to leave the present’s length ambiguous—it could be a split second, or the multi-hour duration of an activity—the statement’s exclusion of the past and future actually requires that the “moment” be infinitesimally short. If one were to “be” in the next minute or even the next second—that is, anticipate or worry about what will happen then—one could not claim to be in the moment. Thus, the perception of time as a succession of constantly fleeting nows underlies “be in the moment.” But that is not all: the insistence upon the singularity of the moment betrays the idea that there is only ever one moment to be in. In fact, the moment has no duration: like the instants of now-time, the moment is a point . Thus, “be in the moment,” as a statement of now-time, objectifies the present in such a way that there is nothing significant about it except the fact that it is the present. Why should we be in the present? Because it is the present—because it is all that is. Heidegger complicates this picture by introducing the notion of world-time (Weltzeit ). If now-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s punctuality, world-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s universality, and is thus explanatorily prior to our conception of now-time. As Heidegger puts it, world-time is “that time ‘wherein’ entities within-the-world are encountered.” In other words, it is the kind of time that enables us to encounter things in the world. We can clarify what world-time is by examining its four constitutive aspects in turn: publicness, datability, spannedness, and worldhood. The most accessible of world-time’s four aspects is publicness (Öffentlichkeit ). Indeed, Heidegger often calls world-time “public time.” Publicness is the characteristic of world-time whereby we take ourselves to be in the same “now” as one another at any given time. Publicness allows me to say to another person, “Now it is twelve o’clock,” knowing that if they are in the same time zone, it is now twelve o’clock for them, too. If they are not in my time zone—if we are talking on the phone, for instance—I still understand that while it is currently another time for them, we are fundamentally in the same now . And publicness extends beyond the now: only because we understand time as public, as shared, as out there in the world, can we say that we “use,” “buy,” or “borrow” time. Publicness is perhaps the aspect of world-time that is least concealed in now-time, since the measurement of time with clocks and timeliness obviously presupposes that any quantified time will be intelligible as the same “now” by everyone. Still, the fact that we take ourselves to be in the same now remains hidden in now-time. We take for granted that “now” is simply now —that when one person says “be in the moment,” the other will know what time they mean. A second aspect of world-time is datability (Datierbarkeit ), the structure by which Dasein assigns a temporal structure to its experience. In practice, datability refers to our assignment of times to events and events to times, even “before” we impose the numerical values of now-time (like “November 8” or “9:15 a.m.”) on those events. For example, when we say “It is cold,” we mean “It is cold now ,” just as when we say “It was cold,” we mean “It was cold formerly .” Conversely, time has content for us, for “When we say ‘now,’ we always understand a ‘now that so and so.’” Although datability includes the word “date,” it has nothing to do with numerical dates. Instead, datability simply means that all that happens is happening at a time, and every time is a time when something is happening. Clearly, datability enables the conception of now-time, since interpreting time as a sequence of nows makes sense only if Dasein has an intuitive idea of its existence within a structure of past, present, and future. If Dasein could not date itself, time could not seem to be a “flowing stream,” since Dasein would not be fixed in relation to it. In this admittedly murky way, now-time reveals datability as a feature of world-time. Mostly, however, now-time covers up datability, for the now of now-time is not understood to be “now, when x ,” but rather simply “now.” This is especially glaring in “Be in the moment!” In the moment when you are doing what? The admonition suggests that the moment is a space where you need not do anything, when in fact every moment is always a moment when you are doing something. The aspect of world-time which may be most obscured by now-time is spannedness (Spanne ), which affords every “now” the property of duration. Heidegger introduces the concept of spannedness by observing that we understand there to be a length of time—not just a series of nows—between any “now” and a future “then.” This liminal length is itself datable with expressions like “during” and “meanwhile,” which shows that we can conceive of a future “now” (and by extension, any past or present now) with a duration we ourselves have determined. Spannedness accounts for how I can simultaneously say “Now I am writing,” “Now I am a student,” and “Now I am alive,” even though these nows are of vastly different lengths. In fact, no now to which we refer is ever punctual; every now is temporally extended. Even the clock, our paradigmatic instrument of now-time, reveals the spanned nature of world-time by designating as an hour an arbitrary number of minutes and as minute an arbitrary number of seconds. Seconds may be in turn divided into milliseconds, nanoseconds, and so on—there are infinite nows between one second and the next—though the clock does not show this directly. Assigning numbers to time requires that we pin down the now as if it were punctual, when in fact it is spanned. Much like a clock obscures the spannedness of seconds, the statement “be in the moment”—in its exclusion of anything that might be called past or future—obscures the spannedness of said moment, despite the fact that “moments” are by definition variable in length. The fourth aspect of world-time is worldhood (Weltlichkeit ), which situates every time in a normative structure of significance. As Heidegger explains, “The time which is interpreted in concern is already understood as a time for something. The current ‘now that so and so…’ is as such either appropriate or inappropriate .” He returns to the sun for a primitive example: depending on the context, the now of dawn is understood implicitly as the time for waking up or the time for going to work. The clock, as an instrument of now-time, obscures this aspect of world-time by seeming to give every “now” equal status. But it is in light of the worldhood of time that clocks are useful to us: 8:00, for example, is not just a string of numbers—“the time it is now”—but “the time for waking up,” or whatever the case may be. Moreover, the design of a clock—which assigns the hour and half-hour to the extreme points of its vertical axis, and the fifteen-minute intervals between these to its leftmost and rightmost points—reflects our taking certain numerical times to be more appropriate than others as times for anything. For instance, 9:00 is a more “appropriate” time than 9:03 or 9:10 not by itself, but rather for setting an alarm to wake up, holding a meeting, etc. The statement “be in the moment” similarly covers up the worldhood of time by suggesting that the moment is not “for” anything but itself. When someone leading a meditation says it, they want the one hearing to “forget” that they have made the moment significant as a moment for meditating. When a photo-averse person says it, it is because they have designated the moment as a moment for enjoying the scenery, not a moment for taking photos. The worldhood of time entails that by doing anything, I am implicitly asserting that now is the right time to do it. As we have seen, the admonition to “be in the moment” covers up all four aspects of the kind of time (world-time) from which we derive our ordinary conception of time (now-time). Yet Heidegger shows us that world-time is in turn explicable only by an even more basic kind of time, originary or primordial (ursprünglich ) time. Primordial time is the kind of time that Heidegger has been working to uncover throughout Being and Time ; it is “the condition which makes the everyday experience of time both possible and necessary.” In Division II, Chapter 6, he gets primordial time into view by observing that Dasein is not just Being-towards-the-end (i.e., death), but also Being-towards-the-beginning (i.e., birth). To see this, we need not look further than Dasein’s characteristic activity of thrown projection, by which Dasein claims the circumstances it has been thrown into from birth , even as it reinterprets them by projecting its own possibilities until death. Because of the bidirectional gaze of thrown projection, “Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear.” In other words, Dasein does not exist exclusively in now-time, for Dasein is not just the sum of its experiences at a series of present-at-hand nows. Rather, Dasein is also its past circumstances and future possibilities. As Heidegger puts it, Dasein “is stretched along and stretches itself along ” primordial time via its own activity. The scope of primordial time is Dasein’s entire lifetime, without which the four aspects of world-time could not exist. The now could not be public, datable, spanned, or worldly without the finite being that discloses the now as public, dates the now, relates the now to the broadest now of its own life, and renders the now a time for something in light of its finitude. Therefore, primordial time is the kind of time that makes Dasein a whole and undergirds its Being as care (cf. ). Encouraging someone to “be in the moment” obfuscates primordial time, thereby exemplifying an inauthentic relation to time that Heidegger calls “making-present” (gegenwärtigen ). Making-present describes a state of “falling into the ‘world’ of one’s concern”—the everyday realm where Dasein’s perspective is confined to the objects it encounters as equipment for fulfilling immediate ends. In making-present, Dasein’s attention becomes myopic: it seems to forget its Being as thrown projection, which is to say it forgets that it goes about all its everyday tasks in the context of broader priorities. Of course, the most global context Dasein forgets in making-present is its own finitude, in virtue of which all its priorities matter. The imperative to “be in the moment” epitomizes making-present because it disallows making sense of what one is doing now in light of anything futural; thus, it stands opposed to the maxim “live every day as if it were your last,” even though similar sentiments may motivate the two statements. To “be in the moment” is to forget not only that one has priorities, but also that everything one does is an implicit articulation of those priorities. Consequently, one’s experience of time becomes “an inauthentic awaiting of ‘moments’—an awaiting in which these are already forgotten as they glide by.” Time seems never to arise, but only to pass away; one conceives of oneself not as stretching oneself along time, but rather passively lost in its flow. What making-present makes present, then, is primordial time itself, whose past and futural aspects are subjugated to the cult of the present “moment.” Heidegger reveals our potential for a more authentic relation to primordial time and world-time by contrasting making-present with his concept of the Augenblick , in which Dasein recognizes its past, present, and future as inseparable aspects of its own wholeness. The Augenblick is “the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern.” Bearing in mind both its possibilities (projection) and its circumstances (thrownness), Dasein does not lose sight of its priorities amid the world of its concern, but sees those priorities themselves as objects of concern to be constantly actualized and reevaluated. In the Augenblick, Dasein understands its Being as care and itself as finite, but not in such a way that it is afraid of its own death; its rapture is resolute , at once unflinching in its acknowledgment of mortality and steadfast in its commitment to living. The Augenblick is an “ecstasis” in the sense that it allows Dasein to stand outside the world of its concern—outside the punctual present of now-time—and grasp world-time and primordial time, if only implicitly, as the grounds of its temporal experience. Crucially, the Augenblick does not mean an escape from the present—where all experience occurs—but rather expands the present to include one’s whole life. If we translate it as “moment,” we had better bear in mind the English word’s other meaning of “importance,” from which we get “momentous.” The Augenblick renders the present important—i.e., consequential—precisely by being the “gaze of the eye,” for it is in the present (both right this second and during one’s life ) that one judges practically what is worth attending to by focusing on certain things rather than others. The Augenblick, then, could not be more different from the “moment” of “be in the moment,” for while the former imbues the now with momentous stakes by maximally dilating it, the latter deflates the stakes of the now by maximally contracting it. Even the English word “moment” obscures the essential relation between Dasein and time, whereas the German word Augenblick identifies Dasein’s caring activity—its gaze—as the precondition for temporal experience and Dasein’s sense of continuity from one moment to the next. It is an inevitable consequence of the Augenblick’s expansion of the now that the future acquires explanatory priority over the present in the question of Dasein’s Being. While the inauthentic understanding of one’s potentiality-for-Being “temporalizes itself in terms of making present,” Heidegger observes, the Augenblick does so “in terms of the authentic future.” This means that while making-present confines the implications of one’s activity to the punctual now of now-time, the Augenblick discloses those implications as primarily futural. Thus, the Augenblick is explicable not in terms of the vulgar “now” (dem Jetzt ), but in terms of future possibilities: as the “gaze of the eye,” it “permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.” In the Augenblick, Dasein discovers itself in the equipment that constitutes the world of its concern, which in turn leads it to recognize that it is the one responsible for stretching oneself along and projecting itself toward certain possibilities rather than others. The worldhood of time becomes particularly apparent, for the current “moment” no longer seems trivial; every “now” becomes significant in terms of what it is a time for , which is to say in terms of its bearing on the future. So while “be in the moment” suggests that the present is all that matters, the Augenblick insists that the present matters only because the future does. In Heidegger’s categories of inauthenticity and authenticity we find the foundation I promised for a more authentic way of relating to time. “Be in the moment” exemplifies an inauthentic mode of relating to time—i.e., making-present—that obscures world-time and primordial time as the fundamental structures of our experience. To be in the Augenblick, on the other hand, is to relate to the now authentically : it means to own up to the present as datable, public, spanned, and worldly; and to understand it as inseparable from the past and future. In the inauthentic mode, one is lost in one’s immediate concerns rather than seeing the “big picture,” and passively awaits the future rather than owning it as the ground of one’s priorities. Thus, although “be in the moment” seems to inflate the status of the present, it actually diminishes the present into a kind of hollow shell. But in the authentic mode, one owns up to both the past and future—stretching back to one’s birth and forward to one’s death—as constitutive of who one is and what one does. Heidegger’s authenticity is proto-ethical in that it denotes appropriation of one’s own temporality as the ground of one’s reasons for doing this rather than that in any given case. Yet authenticity is not fully ethical, for while it describes a relation to one’s reasons (the “subjective ought”), it fails to prescribe specific actions (the “objective ought”). The extent to which one could derive the latter from the former is doubtful, at least within the framework of Being and Time. Yet authenticity, if proto-ethical, is far from irrelevant. We could retort that relating authentically to time is further than most people get in life—never mind living ethically. By saying things like “be in the moment,” we evacuate ourselves from the now, only to reinsert ourselves in it as passengers. We say that time is a flowing stream, forgetting that we are the ones stretching ourselves along. At worst, we pretend indifference, when in fact—as being in the Augenblick reminds me—there is nothing more fundamental to our experience than that we care. References Hägglund, Martin. “Lecture 25: Now-Time, World-Time, and Originary Temporality.” Lecture. PHIL 402: Being and Time, Yale University, 24 April 2024. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . 1927. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial, 2008. Phillips, Ian, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience . Routledge, 2017.

The Captain and the Doctor: On the Enchantment of Modern Men George LeMieux Author Alexander Gerasimchuk Fatima Avila Editors Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England. Introduction Modern man is lost. He is not home to himself. He lacks the longings that great men once had. While Nietzsche, Rousseau, or Burke might better articulate or explore this problem, I intend to explore how it might be remedied, a possible antidote to our modern poison. From the Western canon, I have identified three such antidotes or rather three figures who might re-enchant the modern man, the man of the democratic age. They are the vanguard of Marx, the conqueror of Nietzsche, and the disciple, which is first constituted Biblically but later in Toqueville among others. I shall conduct this search through the metaphor of a ship’s captain, in this case, Captain Jack Aubrey as depicted in the celebrated series and film Master and Commander , which I will briefly outline. Before that outline is given, I will first justify this metaphor by the virtue of captaincy itself (despite the fact I would shoehorn this favorite film of mine into anything). Then in the aftermath, I will examine these three figures as our “captains.” In this examination, I hope to reveal that modern man may only be enchanted, or at least enchanted to humanity’s benefit, by a disciple. For our captain, only the disciple offers a path that does not self-destruct and looks beyond worldly motivation. A Metaphor Since there is a long and storied history of philosophers making use of the ship and other nautical nomenclature as metaphor for their sophisticated views on man, government, and what other nonsense comes to their minds, I see no reason to deviate from the tradition. For what is better than a ship with captain and crew? She, like her nation, must suffer through trial and tribulation, storm and battle. She must adjust her sails so that she catches the wind but not let loose so much as to rip her masts apart. She must have a rigid hull built to withstand cannon and carronade, but she must also have flexibility, lest the changing temperatures and humidity crack her hull. She must be led by a captain, strong and decisive in his command. Yet he must not be a tyrant. He must court the hearts of his men so that he may win their will. If not, his men will mutiny. The uninspired crew would have no other reason to entertain the otherwise insufferable conditions of life at sea. Indeed, I do think this will be a fitting metaphor. The Captain Captain Jack Aubrey of His Majesty's Royal Navy is a man caught between two worlds, between two times. Behind him is the aristocracy of old: kings, queens, lords, ladies, and government by the few for the many, at least ideally. In front of him stands modernity: merchants, naturalists, revolutions, counter-revolutions, Napoleon, the new world, America, and democracy. Such is the world of Captain Aubrey as depicted in Patrick O'Brian's novel and Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Jack is a man of tradition. He respects the Crown. He reads his scripture. He loves his country. Jack’s hero is none other than Duke and Admiral Horatio Nelson, a brave and sturdy man who dies defending his love of king and country. And yet Jack sees his idols, his pillars crumbling. He has witnessed the chaos of the revolutions in France. He holds the Burkean sentiment that it is the modern radicals that “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; [...] they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’” It is this modern threat with its rights and revolutionaries that is epitomized by the two foils of the film. The first foil is the Acheron —the ship of the modern age. She is at the forefront of naval technological advancement. Her hull is braced by three layers of live oak and white oak, making her near impenetrable for any ship of her class. She is the largest of any frigate built, able to carry more guns, yet also more aerodynamic, “heavier, but faster spite it” (Weir, Collee). In every way, she outclasses the H.M.S Surprise , Jack’s nimble but aging frigate. And where is the Acheron built? Boston. While Peter Weir had the financial sensibility to make the antagonist of the film French, i.e. Acheron , Patrick O’Brian’s ship was called U.S.S Norfolk . It is with this name that the dichotomy O’Brian intended is much clearer. It is the new world and the old world, His Majesty and Mr. President. And the new world is winning. The second foil is not a figure of oak and iron but of flesh and bone. Doctor Stephen Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and a savant of a surgeon he is. He is also a naturist, collecting, diagraming, and recording the various species he encounters on the ship’s voyages. Upon the ship’s travel to the Galapagos Islands, the parallels to the young Darwin are evident. More important, however, than any of this, he is Jack’s best friend. Despite sharing little common interest, much less a common worldview, Jack confides in Stephen what he confides in no one else. Stephen, in turn, voices his dissent to Jack, when no crew member nor officer would otherwise dare. He is both his greatest ally and greatest challenger. He is the check to Jack’s ambition and the prosecutor of his reason. He is the liberal to Jack’s conservatism. He echoes the voices of democracy, of the social contract, and the danger of tyrants. His respect for Jack comes not from his title or station but from how he leads, how he governs. It is Stephen who most quickly becomes the radical, the revolutionary, when Jack steps out of line. The Jack we see at the film’s beginning is willing to die on the hill of order and naval tradition. He is unable to see anything but the objective of his mission. Stephen and even the other officers are unable to go as far. To Jack’s credit, it is his daring and force of will, despite insurmountable odds, that makes him a great captain. In his pursuit of the Acheron , Jack takes risks that make his moves unpredictable and effective; his crew calls him Lucky Jack for a reason. But those risks do not come without their costs, even if Jack is lucky more often than he is not. Eventually, Jack carelessly pursues the Acheron into a storm and loses a man and a mast in the process. Still, Jack does not turn tail, despite Stephen’s pleas. He refits and refocuses. Only by the film's end does Jack reform and he does so not through reasoning but out of his friendship with Stephen. When Stephen is injured in an accident on board (a marine shoots him while aiming for a bird), Jack sends his ship ashore to one of the Galapagos islands instead of continuing his pursuit, likely to his detriment. This act of compassion, as it turns out, is the saving grace of the Surprise. Not only is the Acheron spotted on the far side of the island, but Stephen inspires Jack on how to capture her. While Jack's act of compassion does not separate him from his ideology, it reveals a complexity in his nature. In not letting his warrior-like nature subjugate the other parts of his conscience, Jack demonstrates his command of self, making him a good captain in more ways than one. His compassion for Stephen, despite their differences, allows him to occupy a middle ground between old and the new, between those of high and low station, between those conservative and radical. Despite their differences, Jack and Stephen end their days together with music, with a duet, playing the cello and violin as the Surprise sails into the sunset. Looking at this time and this day, in this new world, one must wonder if such bonding, such good feeling, such balance between the conservative and the liberal is possible. Every day the position of the radical, of the accelerationist, becomes more compelling even to the conservative. In America, the rigging and line that once held hull and sail together have frayed and torn, not in the harshest winds but in their daily use. The physical lines that once held men together are now virtual, connections in the cloud and the internet. These lines between men were once tangible things; now, there are few of these left. The conservative now must ask himself what he intends to conserve and if he is capable of such conservation. With conservatives far to the right, liberals far to the left, and a confused chasm in between, can those old ropes hold society together any longer? Perhaps, it is time to cut the rope. Perhaps, it is time for both right and left to become radical. Or, perhaps, there is faith to be had in those old ropes. Perhaps, there could be a man to renew their strength, reorganize them, and apply a fresh coat of tar to protect them. Perhaps, there might be a man who could tie new ropes without cutting away the old. Is there such a captain for this ship of modernity? Is there a Jack who can reason with the moderns, take heed of their desires but not be dragged off course? What does such a captain look like? The Captain’s Virtue Before one can talk of any mystical quality a good captain must have, one must first talk about his primary obligation, his duty, his vocation. For if this station is not sound in virtue, the metaphor is not fit for its goal. A captain, such as Jack, is the leader of a warship and of its crew. He would not be a good captain if he could not sail, navigate, or command the ship in battle. He must understand every part of his command and responsibility. It was for such reasons that those men who became captains most often started their time at sea from their early teens as Midshipmen, who were responsible for commanding gun crews of sailors twice their age. It is this good practice, of physical strain and tangible purpose, that makes the vocation virtuous. Virtue is not found in sophistry or the professing of morality but in good works and deeds. Both Rousseau and Marx recognized that the “sensible” men of the world are not the magistrates but the “workers” and the “people.” In this way, the captain is a unique station. It is a position that reaches downward to the grit and servitude that is required but reaches up toward order and inspiration. On one hand, a captain must stand amongst his sailors and with his marines facing the enemy, taking with them every shot fired, equally as likely to be impaled by shrapnel and splinter, equally as likely to take grapeshot from a swivel gun, equally as likely to take a cannonball straight through his gut. On the other hand, a captain must reach upward. He must engage in strategy, diplomacy, and negotiation. He takes his orders from admirals, parliament, and the King. He must, with his officers, stand apart and govern the crew, making sure he does not fraternize with them or become too social. He must whip those who are insubordinate. And it is he who gives the parting sermon after his men die in battle. The captain is both above and below, a man who mediates between king and country, between God and his men. Vanguard For Marx, the nature of our captain is clear. He must be a vanguard, a man who can reach from the high to the low, from bourgeois to proletariat, a man who has the means to lead the proletariat to “acquire political supremacy” and “ constitute itself the nation” (Marx 488). The vanguard can not be of the lower classes as they do not hold the means of production or own sufficient property. The vanguard will not be the bourgeois socialist who wants “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them.” That man would not lead nor fight in the “impending bloody conflicts” that the revolution requires. But the captain might. He, by virtue of his practice, gains access to the epistemic standpoint of the working man. He can call his men into battle because he will be in that battle himself, because he will stand in front, with pistol and cutlass in hand, because he knows their plight and their struggle. Yes, the captain might be the perfect vanguard, if he had the disposition and the courage required to lead the revolution. But no vanguard will heal or reinspire the whole nation. He will take the radicals he agrees with and burn the rest. The ideal vanguard may be the captain, the general, or some other man of higher but not so noble station, that comes down to act on behalf of the proletariat. But the unifying captain is, in the root of his position, opposed to such a severing. More fit, would be the treasonous first officer who leads a mutiny against the captain and the remaining loyal officers. To be a vanguard is to be a “slash and burn” farmer who wreaks devastation on the present vegetation so that the soil may be made fertile again. There will be no healing, under the vanguard. Conqueror Then perhaps the captain, who must fight to re-enchant our new world, must be a conqueror. The conqueror does not require a revolution, or at least not an ideological one, for the conqueror has no need for the traditional radical who operates on moral principles. He is not the vanguard who cries out to the poor that they must liberate themselves. The conqueror only asks for good men, inspired to fight for their home and fatherland, inspired to make something more of what they have been given. The conqueror rises in rank and comes to lead a nation because of his proven success on the battlefield. This captain inspires not because of his pleasant sailing or wise words but because he sinks ships. Nietzsche asks “[m]ust the ancient fire not some day flare up [...] More: must one not desire it with all its might.” Is it not blood that would surely wake the modern man from his slumber, wake the animal instinct inside of him? Perhaps the true conservative can only believe that “antiquity incarnate” arises through a conqueror, a superman, a Napoleon. And yet one must ask of Nietzsche, what is to happen after the conquest? What is to happen after one has conquered all he can or has been defeated? What was Napoleon to do, having failed in Russia? What was Alexander to do when he lay sick and dying in his bed? What is left to hold a nation together when the expansion has stopped and the wars have come to an end? How is a conqueror to at last govern his people? If the measure of man’s vitality is only to be strength and victory, then there will be no man who finds purpose in times of peace. When the soldier again becomes the carpenter after his service is done, he must now aspire to be the superman of carpentry. He must strike down all other table builders and door makers in his path if he is to achieve vitality. He will feel not for his fellow man, now that he does not need him to protect his flank or cover his advance. He will be a frustrated and lonely man, who, in his attempted rationalization to maximize his will and vitality, will frantically look around every corner to become the carpenter of all carpenters, betraying every man who gets in his path. Nietzsche might retort that one should not care for the carpenter, for all carpenters are weak men who failed to rise to a higher station. But if one is to build a society, does one not need the carpenter? Would it not be better to be his friend so that he may more willingly and caringly craft one’s furniture? Perhaps Nietzsche thinks that forcing the carpenter to build a chair would be better to maximize the will than to engage in normal transaction or to politely ask him. Society needs carpenters; a ship needs sailors. Neither will run well if every request is made out of threat or a difference in power. Sure power may be unequally distributed among men, and men will surely wield that power to their advantage, but every interaction need not be a Melian Dialogue . No unification of society, no mending of wounds, could ever take place in such a one-dimensional existence. Even if, for but a fleeting moment, conservative and liberal may be united by the fires of war, such a state is only temporary. While the ancient fires may rise again, they may just as quickly die. For all Napoleon was, how many more revolutions and fragile republics followed? There was no remnant of antiquity to build upon. Instead, it was democratic man who, upon the rubble of Europe, raised his new throne. In his time, Tocqueville correctly surmised that democracy would be here to stay: “I think that in the long run, government by democracy shall increase the real strength of society.” While “slave” in its morality, democracy is dominant in its presence. Its practitioners are no longer just the carpenters or even the priests; they are the captains, the generals, the senators themselves. While European antiquity lay unaware, the strength and size of America, of democratic power, grew. “Something that passed unnoticed a century ago now strikes the attention of all.” Now, antiquity not only lacks the popular momentum to overcome the democratic age, but it lacks the strength. If there is to be a man who rekindles the flame of the West, he will not be a conqueror who slays democratic man. He will be a democratic man himself. And What for God? Purposely absent from the mind of Marx’s vanguard and Nietzsche’s superman is the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche and Marx are the archetypes of, as John Courtney Murray would categorize them, “the postmodern atheist”. The post-moderns not only leave God out of their government, philosophy, and science as the moderns do; they actively strike Him out, act against Him, and demonstrate how He cannot exist. The postmodern is offended that a God could exist and (in Marx’s case) allow for so much scarcity, so much evil, or (in Nietzsche’s case) deprive man of his freedom, the will, that makes man human. God, if he exists, is either a tormenter, imprisoner, or both. Nietzsche further declares that the morality man claims to have derived from God, the morality of the Christian and the Jew is the greatest perversion of the natural order: strength and weakness. Good and evil, concepts of vengeful weaklings, invert the true “morality” by which man once lived and should live again. Of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s cases, Nietzsche’s is the stronger. When one eliminates God from the worldly equation, one must also eliminate the morality that came with Him. Marx may claim scarcity is the great evil, but this concept of evil only comes through sympathy for the suffering of others. What is the evil of inequality or greed or a dominant bourgeois class if there is no concern for fellow man? From where does the humanist goodness, ascribed by Marx to the elimination of suffering, originate? Without an order, ordained above and outside by divine authority, there can be no objective good. No worldly cosmodicy is sufficient to prove an objective good. If one’s ultimate goal is “good” for the nation, one cannot look to Nietzsche for a cure; the concept of good is, in fact, part of the disease. But if one looks to Marx, one cannot find a source of good. Therein, the postmoderns are fruitless. And democratic man seems to agree. The true moral plague is that democratic man is not looking for goodness but instead assumes it. The modern atheist does not kill God but walks away from Him. In His absence, he does not search for truth or morality but merely replicates the idea of good that was passed down to him. He imitates, but his imitations, as they are not rooted in the source, are imperfect: bastardized (Murray and Nietzsche agree). He might even hold some personal religious sentiment but will not act on religious conviction. He does not mix the personal with the external world. He will work, govern, and wage war but will never do so in the name of God. He lives as if God does not exist. This … breed says in effect that, since he cannot know what God is, he will refuse to affirm that God is. But this stupidity, one may well think, surpasses that of the idolater. It is not merely an implicit refusal of God; it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. It is this modern man—the man who does not deny God but shoves him aside—that has become commonplace. This modern man feels neither the warm light of heaven nor the scorching hellfire below. He wanders in a cold fog, blind, deaf and dumb. He lingers in the cave only seeing shadows of the truth. Because he does not see the source of the light, he assumes there is no source and does not search for it. It is this modern man who must be re-enchanted. Disciple So how is our captain to deal with the moderns, with the Dr. Maturins that now sail aboard every ship? What is he to do with those who synthesize values of democracy and the equality of man but do not acknowledge the creator who created them equally? Thankfully, the modern agnostic, despite his lack of reason in comparison to the Nietzschean, has not yet thrown off his moral yoke. In some ways, he still feels a connection to the world beyond the material. There are yet some embers left to kindle. There are yet men left to kindle them. There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and the duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates. If man is to truly be re-enchanted—to be inspired and given lasting direction—he must look to that only thing which is transcendent, that is not merely of time and matter. If there is ever again to be unity amongst men, there must be unity with their creator. There must be disciples to show us the way. When man has been enchanted, even democratic man, it has been with and through religious spirit, fostered by disciples and prophets. These men once walked among us. These were the men in between God and humanity, Heaven and Earth, men who heard His voice and acted on His will. They were Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Peter. God even revealed Himself to man in mortal form, in and through man’s pain and flesh. And yet, despite all of these, man’s faith remains weak. The disciples' task is never finished. He may never stop, for if he does, man is quick to forget and quick to lose his way. He will lose himself in the desert, and never find the promised land, his true home, his self. The disciple must be an ever-present and ever-constant reminder of God. The captain, disciple in his most righteous form, has some divine spark, some glint in his eye, some Promethean fire in his bosom that animates bravery and fortitude. The captain calls his men to voyage into the unknown, across the far side of the world. He calls his men to fight for a home that long disappeared behind a horizon last seen thousands of miles ago. He brings together those born across the empire, those who share little, and those who resent much. The duty the captain must call his men to cannot be incentivized with the stuff of the earth. He can promise them no amount of riches or glory among men to keep them steadfast. There is something the captain must awaken in his men that moves their spirits, their souls, guiding them toward something not here attainable. Only manna sent down from upon high can quell a spiritual hunger. And so the Captain must be like Moses, the interlocutor between man and God—newly the interlocular between conservative and liberal. He does not make the manna nor the law in the heavens, but he does transmit them. He walks down from Sinai to deliver to those below. He understands the plight of his crew, the doctor, and the common man, but he does not let them build golden calves. He has ambition but he does not raise towers of Babble; he does not push onward without cause. Where have these disciples gone? Where is Moses to be seen? Who upholds the commandments given from on high? Might it not be the lack of disciples but man who is the problem? Have there been one too many golden calves built in town squares, one too many towers of Babylon raised to the mockery of Heaven? Are there enough ears today willing to hear a sermon, enough lips willing to say a prayer? I contend there are. While the world may not be presently enchanted, there have been moments, glimpses, of enchantment. There was Reagan who stood in the way of the communist threat with his quick wit but mild manner. There was Dr. King who appealed to the heavens, preached to the masses, and marched hand in hand with the persecuted. There was Churchill who looked the devil right in the eye and spat back at him. There was Lincoln who looked over a battlefield and made a promise those men would not die in vain. There was Washington who led his soldiers, served his time, and ceded his throne. It was these disciples that reminded man of himself, of his nature, of his longings. They called upon God, evoked a higher duty, and bound men to each other. They knew that “[r]eligion [...] imposes on each man [...] obligations toward mankind, to be performed in common [...] and so draws him away from thinking about himself.” Like a captain, those disciples, who were fit to suffer, suffered in common with their men when they could have stood afar. Dr. King marched with his men, was imprisoned for them, and died for them. Reagan too took a bullet for his nation, although he fortunately survived. Lincoln, in his service and his stress, aged himself twenty years in the span of four and was assassinated shortly thereafter, giving the last full measure of his devotion. Washington lost battles for months on end in the bitter cold until he found success in a Christmas night attack. Oh, the joy nations will feel when leaders acquire such courage again when they call upon the heavens as they did not so long ago. Oh, they will know that feeling that gathered hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, that mustered the men who crossed the Delaware, that had black and white Union soldiers singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they marched surely to their deaths at Fort Wagner. Only then can man come home to himself. Conclusion Who is our captain to be? What direction would we have him take our ship? Must he not be both a man of the people and a man of the elite, a democratic man who still has a touch, a memory in him, of that antiquity, that nobility, that honor of old? Still, he is not the vanguard of the proletariat, for the vanguard is a mutineer hellbent on revolution, not a captain. Neither is he the conqueror, for the captain must govern his ship beyond the rush of battle. He must lead his crew through those many times at sea which are dull and mundane. He must care for his men beyond their use in warfare. He must be selfless because that is what God calls him to be in times of struggle, a disciple who looks upward before he looks onward. But if those fires are ever to rise again, if the trumpet must once again cry its song of battle, the captain must be ready. He must again be simply a man of his trade, a good seaman and a good officer. He must dexterously maneuver his ship, out-sail, and outsmart his opponents. And when he must call for cannon fire, he must know what to cry to his men. He must have their best, not just for him, but for their God, their nation, and their fellow man. JACK - Want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? CREW- No! JACK- Do you want to call Napoleon your king? CREW- No! JACK- Want your children to sing The Marseillaise? CREW- No! JACK- Mr. Mowett, Mr. Pullings, starboard battery! References Burke, Edmund, et al. Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition. Liberty Fund, 1999. Marx, Karl, et al. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton, 1978. Murray, John Courtney. “The Problem of God Yesterday and Today.” Georgetown University Library, 1963, library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1964c. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and the Social Contract. Translated by John T. Scott, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Tocqueville, Alexis De, et al. Democracy in America. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Weir, Peter, and John Collee. Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Twentieth Century Fox, Aug. 2001.

Not Paying Income Tax Timely Leads to Significant Financial Losses for the governments. What Design Changes Could Be Made to Tax Collection Policy to Minimize These Delays? Aryan Midha Author Maxwell Robinson Vittorio Nazzi Matthew Wong Editors Abstract Behavioral economics challenges the notion that humans are always rational and capable of making good decisions. Humans often rely on various heuristics under uncertainty making them irrational at times. Heuristics is a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that simplifies decision-making and problem-solving. In this paper, we discuss the use of behavioral economics in improving tax policies by considering the status-quo bias, framing, and conformity heuristics. Status-quo bias causes taxpayers to stick to their default condition (i.e tax non-payment.) Framing refers to the formulation of the problem and how the information is presented to the decision maker. Further, conformity encourages taxpayers to pay their taxes by appealing to personal and social norms. Using these heuristics, I will explore how tax collection policies can be refined to minimize financial losses for the government. I. Introduction Einstein said, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax, ” which remains relevant today as tax computation and the payment process remain complicated. This leads to procrastination and non-payment, creating detrimental financial losses for the government. For example, In the US, between 2014 to 2016, the tax gap, the difference between true tax liability and amount paid on time, was $496 billion (IRS, 2022). The tax liability increased by more than 23% between the two periods, 2011-2013 and 2014-2016 indicating a need to change the tax policy. Studies show that tax policies that implement behavioral economics are more impactful and efficient compared to traditional tax policies (World Bank Group, 2018; Behavioral Insights Team, 2012; OECD, 2021). Behavioral economics assumes that humans have limited capability to compute large amounts of data at once. The World Bank splits the tax-paying process into four stages: understanding, deciding, declaring, and paying (World Bank Group, 2008). Behavioral policies can improve compliance at each stage by addressing systematic errors which are “cognitive biases or heuristics that consumers use to make pragmatic choices that are not rational or optimal ”(Kahneman, 2011). This paper will explore three main biases, namely Framing, Status quo, and Conformity, and take them into account to create a viable tax policy that targets the four stages mentioned above. Every year, more than 170 million taxpayers have to file taxes in the US. With the tax code becoming increasingly complex, taxpayers have to spend a significant amount of time filling out the 1040 form, various schedules and keeping records of their transactions. This leads to some individuals failing to pay taxes in a timely manner or take up benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). II. Framing Kahneman and Tversky define framing as the formulation of the problem and how the information is presented to the decision maker (Kahneman and Tversky, 1981). This shows how information is presented impacts the decision-making process. Framing is indeed a bias, as it leads to decision-makers making different choices with identical information. Their choices are not uniform. Governments can use this to their advantage by presenting income tax letters in a way that encourages taxpayers to pay their accurate tax amount on time hence improving compliance. A study by Jones (2017) further found that at least 30% of the extra revenue accrued to the government from overwithholding arises from loss-averse behavioral response. He claims it is possible to manipulate a taxpayer’s perception of what constitutes a gain or a loss—potentially through relatively cheap manipulations to phrasing or presentation. Loss framing could be induced to increase the take-up rate of a specific tax-based incentive in targeted populations. Gain framing could be induced to reduce evasion motives among traditionally non-compliant groups, potentially in a cost-effective manner when compared to audits. Hard Tone vs Soft Tone A study in Poland (World Bank Group, 2018) showed the effect of using a hard tone versus a soft tone on tax compliance. To do so, they created two types of letters: public good positive and public good negative , where both letters informed the taxpayer how the tax revenue would be used to provide public goods such as preschools, schools, roads, and safety. The public good positive treatment creates a perception of the taxpayer as a responsible member of their community who is helping provide public goods by paying their taxes. This appeals to the taxpayer on a very personal level making them aware of the public benefitting infrastructure provided by the government, which encourages them to pay on time. The public good negative treatment frames non-payment as an implicit threat where all the municipal benefits currently enjoyed would be lost without sufficient tax revenue. It uses the principle of loss aversion to motivate taxpayers to pay. The reaction of the taxpayer, as a result, will be to pay taxes to avoid losses. Loss aversion is defined as: “changes that make things worse (losses) loom larger than improvements or gains ” (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1991). The key contrast between both approaches is the “inability of the government to continue providing ” vis-à-vis “potential losses suffered by the individual in the future ”. These treatments are considered soft tones as they do not mention any form of punishment for non-payment. To create a comparison, “hard tone” was also used to clearly understand what encourages taxpayers the most to pay taxes on time. The World Bank used four different hard tone samples, including: deterrence, deterrence with an execution order attached, omission, and omission combined with deterrence together. These treatments explored the different effects of using a harsher tone. In the deterrence treatment, actions such as blocking bank accounts and salaries could be implemented as a punishment. Furthermore, payment of any execution expenses that arise must be covered by the non-complier. The deterrence with execution order treatment had the same contents as the deterrence letter however a sample execution order form was attracted to the letter. This evokes guilt and fear of the possible consequences of delayed payments. Taxpayers are illuminated to the harshness of the consequences. In an omission model the government chooses to see the non-payment of taxes as accidental and gives the benefit of the doubt to the defaulter. This method of framing is used to overcome status-quo bias, which will be explored in detail later in this paper. The effectiveness of the hard and soft-tone letters was compared in three parts: payment rate, payment amount, and outstanding tax liability. The payment rate is the percentage of the tax-paying population that pays their tax on time. The control group received an official enforcement letter called a dunning letter. Of this group, 40.2% made on-time tax payments. On average, the soft-tone letter increased payment rate to 43.8% while the hard-tone letter raised payments to 46.9% with p=0.01. This suggests that proper framing can increase payment rates and that overall hard tone is the most effective choice. Additionally, the use of hard-tone and soft-tone letters increased the payment amount received per letter sent. In the control group, taxpayers paid on average 1,122.7 PLN (Polish Zloty), the soft-tone letters yielded 1278.0 PLN ($341 USD), while the hard-tone letters yielded 1368.3 PLN ($365 USD). The increase in payment received is significant as the total revenue collected increases greatly with the average payment. Lastly, the use of different tones reduced the overall tax liability. The dunning letter group had an average of 6.26% in tax liability, while behavioral letters had a tax liability of 6.17% for soft-tone and 6.10% for hard-tone letters. This shows that more people were filing their taxes and the number of short fillers was reduced giving the government valuable insight on the methods to use to increase tax compliance. Lastly, this study delved deeper into how different taxpayers react to give a more insightful result. Letters reveal that taxpayers in their mid-40s are most responsive, with responsiveness decreasing afterwards. The hard-tone messages (omission commission + deterrence) perform best among those in their 50s, while softer messages reduce compliance, especially among older taxpayers. Younger taxpayers (20–29) respond positively to soft, public good messages, but these same messages have a negative impact on those aged 50–64, likely because older taxpayers don't benefit directly from services like schools. The 5.2pp difference in response is statistically significant. Customizing messages by emphasizing relevant public goods for each age group could improve tax compliance. Both men and women’s highest paying rate from all the treatments was in the hard-tone treatment showing both genders respond more to the hard-tone letters. However, a difference emerges between parents and non-parent taxpayers. Parents were not very responsive to any of the treatments and the behavioral letter was the most effective. Conversely, all the hard-tone letters performed better than soft-tone and the behavioral letters showing hard-tone messages work on non- parents, but not on parents. Given these differences in effects across groups, a targeting system could be used to send out appropriate toned messages to increase tax compliance. These studies concluded that hard-tone letters were the most effective in increasing tax compliance payments over outstanding debts. This does not negate that using soft-tone letters was also beneficial. The efficacy of these different tones depends on the individual characteristics of the taxpayer, such as age, gender, and parental status. Complexities Another major reason for tax noncompliance is the excessive use of legal jargon that impedes taxpayers’ understanding and ability to pay (Alm 2012, p.53). Fatigue and lethargy often influence an individual’s decision when a choice depends on a large amount of data as they are often unwilling to spend too much time or energy on that decision. Blumenthal and Slemrod (1992) found that, on average, taxpayers spent 27 hours recording and reporting their taxable activities. This leads people to employ heuristics such as intuition in decision-making. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) found that humans have two systems for making decisions: an "automatic system" that quickly finds a solution and a "reflective system" that logically reasons out the problem. The use of intuition falls in the realm of “automatic systems.” Most of the time, the “automatic system” comes up with the same solutions as the reflective system, which uses logic, but sometimes it does not due to the usage of heuristics. As mentioned earlier, the tax payment process has four steps: understanding, decision to pay, declaration, and payment. Complexities can be present in the “understanding” or “declaration” phase. Taxpayers have to individually compute the total value of taxes, a process which may be tedious due to inexperience or a lack of clarity regarding current tax laws. Additional problems arise during payment. Technology is constantly improving, thus, paying taxes has become much more simple. At times, too many options and related guidelines confuse and frustrate the taxpayer, causing them to abandon the process midway. Lastly, the complexity of the system makes the taxes seem unfair due to the lack of transparency in the income tax process which makes the taxpayer reluctant to pay their taxes on time or in full. Economic models have customarily recognized three costs which might deter the take-up of tax benefits which are: the transaction costs of applying for a benefit, the costs of learning about eligibility and application rules, and lastly, the stigma associated with enrollment (Currie 2006). These concerns could be a consequence of confusion regarding program eligibility or incentives (e.g., Liebman and Zeckhauser 2004), inattention (e.g., Karlan et al. 2015), or psychological aversion to program complexity or the small “hassles” often involved in claiming (e.g., Bertrand, Mullainathan, and Shafir 2006). This reflects a failure of policy to deliver benefits to those who most need them. As a case study, the United Kingdom released simplified letters to test whether they would increase tax compliance among dentists and doctors (Behavioural Insights Team, 2012). The simplified letters contained three short and easy-to-read sentences, outlining the actions and procedures required for compliance. This treatment saw a 15-30% higher response rate than other types of messaging, which shows that even highly skilled and well-educated people can be influenced to pay their taxes on time by simplifying the process. Furthermore, in Belgium, different methods were tested to overcome complexities in tax payment (Spinnewijn, Tsankova, and Luts, 2019). They simplified the tax letter by shortening the length of words, reducing the information overload, and highlighting the action-relevant information. This led to an increase in compliance by 10 percentage points (pp)(23% of the control mean). Moreover, late payers from the previous year were 2.6 pp more likely to file their taxes on time. Complexities affect individuals in developed countries and underdeveloped countries similarly. Taxpayers in low and middle-income countries are also particularly adversely affected, due to lower literacy rates and a lack of trained accountants. This causes difficulty in accurately maintaining records, filing returns, and comprehending tax laws, resulting in partial filing, late filing or non-filing making them partial or non-compliant. This backs the findings of Gangl (Gangl et al., 2015b) where perceived fairness and legitimacy lead to deliberate trust in the tax authorities. By removing these complexities, taxpayers can understand how much they are paying and how it is calculated, building trust and improving compliance. Complexities can lead to notable inefficiencies in government-run programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Simplifying the tax system and reducing compliance burdens could increase benefit take-up, reduce forgone benefits, and enhance revenue collection. The EITC, initially designed as an incentive for low-income individuals to work, demonstrates the barriers taxpayers face in claiming available benefits. Studies estimate a program take-up rate of 75% (Plueger 2009). A substantial portion of non-participation stems from informational barriers, with 16% of eligible individuals not filing taxes and 9% failing to claim the credit despite filing. This highlights the need for clarity in tax communication and simplification of claim procedures. Experimental evidence further underscores the sensitivity of benefit take-up to reduced informational complexity. Simplified notices, shorter worksheets, and enhanced salience of benefits through targeted messaging have demonstrably increased EITC claims, with a field study resulting in $4 million in claimed benefits out of $26 million identified as unclaimed (Manoli, 2015). Moreover, over-withholding demonstrates how simplifying processes can benefit both taxpayers and the government. Employers withholding excess taxes reduces taxpayers' need for year-end adjustments, leveraging loss-averse behavior to generate 42% more revenue than expected from interest costs alone. Simplification strategies can similarly mitigate tax manipulation, increase voluntary compliance, and maximize revenue efficiency. Governments can reduce complexities in tax policy to increase the legitimacy and perceived fairness of tax administration. Simpler tax systems will increase compliance and reduce the opportunity for tax evasion and avoidance by making the steps of paying taxes easier and reducing the mental computation required of taxpayers. III. Conformity Conformity refers to individuals changing their beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, or perceptions to complement the beliefs of a group to which they want to belong, and so they yield to group pressures (Crutchfield, 1955). Herbert C Kelman, an American psychologist, analyzed this behavior and distinguished three different forms of conformity: compliance, internalization, and identification (Kelman, 1958). For this paper, compliance and internalization are relevant. Compliance refers to “when an individual accepts influence [...] to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishment (Kelman, 1958, p. 53). This is a heuristic as many people become irrational and fall in without considering the benefits and drawbacks of their decision. According to an analysis (Zafar, 2011) people conform to groups because they are uncertain about their beliefs and believe that the group is more likely to be correct, a pattern denoted descriptive conformity . The second category is internalization which happens “when an individual accepts influence because the content of the induced behavior - the ideas and actions of which it is composed - is intrinsically rewarding. They adopt the induced behavior because it is congruent with their value system ” (Kelman, 1958, p. 53) which is also considered injunctive conformity. In this form of conformity, the group’s beliefs become part of the individual’s belief system and the behavioral change is permanent. Examples of personal norms could include the individual desire to live a healthy lifestyle or help in social causes. The World Bank tested conformity bias in Latvia where The informal economy was estimated at 20.3% of the GDP in 2016 (World Bank, 2019). The shadow economy refers to people who operate entirely outside the tax and regulatory system (US Treasury). The World Bank intervened by sending out tax letters which incorporate behavioral changes in this case social norms. These modified letters are called behavioral letters. There is a social norm to return favors where people feel obligated toward those who have done something for them. This is called reciprocity. The social norms letter boosted timely tax filing compared to the control group by 5% (3.2pp). Social norms messages also generated the maximum number of tax declaration submissions as compared to other methods like simple reminders and an omission/commission letter when given to non-compliers. This experiment further showed that the social norms messages had a greater impact on women than men as women responded to the messages by 3.0 pp more when compared to the control group. This coincides with the findings of Cross (Cross, 2017) where women are more likely than men to conform to social norms. The social norms letter even increased the average amount paid per taxpayer by $13.97 (210% increase from control group). The field experiment in Latvia concludes that using social norms improves tax punctuality and increases the payment amount. In Poland, The World Bank tested the use of social norms (World Bank, 2017). The payment rate for the dunning letter was 40.2% while payment rates increased to 43.7%, the average payment amount increased from 1,123 PLN to 1,300 PLN, and outstanding liability was reduced from 6.26% to 6.17% where letters mentioning social norms were used. This experiment corroborates the findings of the Latvia experiment. According to an OECD report (OECD, 2010) on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), SME compliance is highly influenced by personal norms. Phrases such as “Doing the right thing,” “Because it is the law,” and “Presumption from Revenue that you have been honest,” are indicated as having a strong influence on compliance. Social norms affect these SMEs less compared to personal ones as the owner's personal norms may be more prominent. Personal norms are feelings of moral obligations to do “the right thing” (Schwartz & Howard, 1981). The owner can also easily implement changes based on their prioritized heuristics . Social norms may not play a crucial role in the taxpayer's mind as the owner would want to be unique compared to larger firms. Therefore when the government tries to evoke conformity by using other firms as an example small businesses might not be encouraged to pay taxes. Responses related to personal norms are therefore stronger from a compliance perspective. Hence,it would be much more beneficial for the government to use personal norms on SMEs to improve tax compliance. A field experiment in the UK (Behavioural Insights Team, 2012) examined the effect of various types of norms on taxpayers who had declared their income but had yet to pay their taxes. Three norm statements were used: “Nine out of ten people pay their tax on time” (basic norm); “Nine out of ten people in the UK pay their tax on time” (country norm); “Nine out of ten people in the UK pay their tax on time. You are currently in the very small minority of people who have not paid us yet” (minority norm). Upon receiving the responses the economists learned that the basic norm statement produces a treatment effect of 1.3%, and the country norm statement produces a treatment effect of 2.1%. If these letters were sent to the entire tax-paying population there would be a £623,000 and £980,000 increase in total taxes paid within 23 days. In comparison, the minority norm statement had a much greater impact of 5.1%, which would represent a £2.367 million increase in taxes paid within 23 days. This underscores the highly effective method of using the conformity bias to improve tax payments. A follow-up experiment was done to replicate the most effective treatment from the first experiment to increase credibility. The effect of descriptive (what others do) and injunctive (what others think should be done) norms were also compared. Results showed that reminder letters with the norm framings have a 7.1-7.8% effect on payment. Letters with norm statements motivate people to pay their taxes, especially when a minority norm frame is used. This boosts overall tax compliance. Moreover, when comparing descriptive and injunctive, the data indicates that the descriptive treatment group has a 1.44% larger effect on payment than injunctive norms. Furthermore, this work reinforces wider evidence that descriptive norms are most effective when they can be targeted at a specific population or group, which in this case was achieved by referencing their local area. Applying successful messages throughout HMRC’s (UK's tax, payments, and customs authority) debt management practices led to £210 million being brought forward in the 2012/13 financial year alone. This would benefit the government greatly as they can use this revenue to provide subsidies and provide fiscal stimulus to the economy when needed. By using social norms, taxpayers gain a sense of fairness, knowing that their neighbors and fellow citizens are held to the same standards. This creates transparency between the government and taxpayers. Taxpayers are more willing to file taxes on time when they have faith in their government (Jimenez, Iyer, 2016). To inform taxpayers and foster healthy personal norms, tax administrations may attempt to communicate messages that emphasize the significance of compliance. Engaging with young professionals can have an impact on their beliefs, which improves long-term tax compliance. Individuals are less likely to avoid their taxes if there is a sense that tax evasion is rare and the bulk of people are compliant. People frequently assume that disobedience is more common than it is. Therefore, dispelling misconceptions about the extent of evasion strengthens compliance and has a marginal cost for the policymaker. This increases tax compliance and reduces financial losses for the government. IV. Status Quo Status quo bias refers to the tendency to stick to one's current situation (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1998). Most decisions have a status-quo option and studies show that individuals tend to unjustifiably stick with the status quo (Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988); Anderson (2003)). People are often unwilling to change primarily because of the effort it takes to understand other available options or the lack of awareness about the alternatives. Christopher J. Anderson researched status quo bias and characterized this behavior as “conservation of energy” (Anderson, 2008) where humans do not decide unless a deadline is coming. In terms of income tax, this can be seen as taxpayers continuing to avoid paying taxes as they have already done so for an extended period. Not paying taxes has become the status quo of these taxpayers. Now there are many methods of filing taxes that are faster and more efficient, however, taxpayers seem to stick to the older methods. This could cause financial losses for the government as they don’t receive the full tax amount they are expected to collect. There also could be incomplete taking up of tax benefits such as Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Standard Deductions or Itemized Deductions in the USA when that is not their status quo. People tend to favor minimal changes and choose the default option (Kahneman, 1991). Even if there are better options, they will not change their actions or choices. Most real-world decisions have the status quo option. That is, do nothing and keep the current or previous state showing the significant influence default choices have on behavior. The World Bank (World Bank Group, 2018; World Bank Group, 2019; World Bank Group, 2020), experimented with status-quo bias and its societal prevalence. They used a deliberate choice method to overcome the bias wherein non-compliance was considered a deliberate choice. This technique is intended to eliminate omission that serves as an excuse for non-compliance. Taxpayers unknowingly evade taxes by following the status quo. When they received letters they were made aware of their status quo so that lack of information can no longer be the reason for non-payment. Framing noncompliance as intentional minimizes uncertainty regarding inaction, heightens moral duties to take action and boosts the perception of deterrence. For instance, the deliberate decision letter in Guatemala (World Bank Group, 2020) contributed to an increase of $17.95 (269% increase compared to no letter) in the average amount paid per taxpayer. Taxpayers in Guatemala who received the behavioral letters in the first year paid four times as much in taxes. Over time, these gains have been maintained. The intentional choice letter, when received, raises the average amount paid by $23.05, according to local average treatment effects (LATE). If this letter was sent to all the sampled tax-payers an estimate of US$757,837 of extra tax revenue could be generated in 11 weeks compared to when no letter was sent. This is over 35 times the cost of sending the letters highlighting the benefit to the government. The experiment with the status quo made use of framing as well. The phrase also exempts the taxpayer from failing to declare previously, which introduces a concept of reciprocity as the taxpayer is driven to feel he has been offered a favor. The wording suggests that the taxpayer's actions are being closely monitored, which heightens the feeling that noncompliance will result in penalties. In Guatemala, the deliberate choice letter, social norm letter, national pride letter, and behavioral letter were tested. Out of them, the deliberate choice letter was the most effective letter for improving declaration rates, boosting declarations by 5.4 pp (46% increase) compared to the control group. The average amount paid conditionally on payment grew by 38.5 percent, and the payment rate increased significantly by 1.4% points. Further, the average unconditional amount increased from US$6.70 the control group average to US$17.95 showing an increase of US$11.25 in tax revenue for each letter sent. The average cost of sending behavioral letters lowers as the rate of payment and payment amount increases. Omission is the failure to fulfill a moral obligation, in this case, taxes. The World Bank used 3 different behavioral designs to overcome the status quo in Poland (World Bank Group, 2018), the treatments were "Omission + Deterrence", "Omission vs Commission" and "Omission Taxpayer-Perspective". These letters all suggested that the government had given the taxpayers the benefit of the doubt, presuming that non-compliance had been due to oversight and not dishonesty. The letters inform the taxpayer about non-compliance and the potential consequences of non-compliance in the future Upon analysis, it was found that the letter combining omission and deterrence messages was the most effective. It resulted in a 48.6% payment rate (8.37% increase) and increased taxpayer payments by 25.9%. The "omission + deterrence" letter also had the most significant reduction in outstanding tax liability, 19.3%. The use of only a deterrence message does not improve the standard behavioral letter as the standard behavioral letter had a payment rate of 46.3% compared to 44.8% for only deterrence. However, there is a significant gain when paired with the omission letter as payment rates jump from 44.8% to 48.6%. The other omission letters, which offer an excuse for noncompliance, do not yield a significant improvement in payment amounts over the standard behavioral message, despite increasing the compliance rate. The "omission + deterrence" letter was found to be the most effective out of the 3 categories of letter design and was always in the top 4 in increasing tax revenue. The omission letters also performed better overall than the behavioral letters suggesting that the omission message encourages payment mostly among tax- payers with a smaller liability; combining it with the threat (omission + deterrence) is very effective for taxpayers who owe more. In Latvia (World Bank Group, 2019), an experiment using a simple reminder, a social norms letter, and an omission/commission treatment was done. The omission/commission treatment was found to be most effective in increasing compliance with taxpayer filing deadlines and the annual income statement (AID) process. It led to a 9.4% higher filing rate than the control group, a statistically significant improvement. It can be inferred that including social norms is not as effective as using omission in improving tax compliance as the omission/commission treatment increases compliance with taxpayers following deadlines. Another experiment in the UK (Behavioural Insights Team, 2012) related to reducing the cost or inconvenience of filling out forms to pay taxes was done. Initially, only a simple letter with details of the payment form attached, was sent which achieved a response rate of 19%. Subsequently, this letter was updated to include the tax timelines and a link to the online system as well as contact information in case of questions. This significantly reduced the effort of the taxpayers. The simplification of the process helped many taxpayers overcome the status quo as they could start the tax filing process by just clicking on the link. This resulted in an improved response rate to 23%. This reduction in work aligns with Anderson's research, which suggests that individuals tend to default to the status quo as a way of conserving energy. Online tax calculators could also be made more readily available so taxpayers can calculate the total tax they need to pay. This can help avoid delays due to dependence on tax accountants and overcome the status quo bias of relying on the accountant completely. The benefits of simplification and digitalization are transferable over different aspects of a tax structure. In the USA taxpayers have two options to reduce their taxable income: standard deduction or itemized deduction. The standard deduction is a fixed amount that reduces taxable income without requiring documentation, while itemized deductions allow taxpayers to subtract specific expenses (e.g., medical costs, mortgage interest) if they exceed the standard deduction, though it requires detailed record-keeping and filing. Most taxpayers opt for the standard deduction due to its simplicity. This decision to itemize deductions versus claiming the standard deduction provides another lens into how complexity influences taxpayer behavior. While itemizing can result in larger deductions, it imposes higher compliance costs, including meticulous record-keeping and additional forms. Revealed preference analysis suggests taxpayers perceive the burden of itemizing as equivalent to 19 hours of regular work or approximately $617, deterring many from pursuing this option (Benzarti, 2015). Consequently, two-thirds of taxpayers opt for the standard deduction, potentially leaving money on the table. This highlights another aspect of the tax system that is often overlooked by taxpayers and sticks with the status quo. If information was more readily available and digitalization of calculating deductions itemized income could be implemented, it could nudge taxpayers to choose the options with greatest savings. Throughout the year, individuals make taxable income and make payments based on anticipated liabilities. On tax day, any discrepancy between total taxes owed and payments made is refunded, resulting in either a "loss" (balance due) or a "gain" (refund)(Jones, 2017). Kahneman and Tversky (1979) demonstrated that the perceived value of a marginal dollar declines sharply as a taxpayer moves from losses to gains. This loss aversion drives taxpayers facing a balance due to manipulate their liabilities more aggressively. Empirical analysis done by Jones of the 1979–90 IRS Statistics of Income Panel of Individual Returns, revealed significant shifts in the balance due distribution consistent with higher manipulation in the loss domain. Individuals facing a loss pursue an additional $34 of tax reductions above and beyond what would be pursued if they faced a gain. This highlights how taxpayers allocate more value to perceived losses and are more likely to change their behavior by changing their status quo to minimize their losses. This is particularly pronounced among high-income earners, underscoring how loss aversion exacerbates tax manipulation, ultimately depriving the government of revenues that would otherwise have been collected. It was estimated that if tax filers owning a payment were as motivated to manipulate as those facing a refund, 1.4 billion dollars of additional tax revenue would be collected. Addressing this behavior by incentivizing over-withholding or reducing opportunities for manipulation could mitigate these losses and enhance revenue stability. V. Possible tax policy With the help of these field experiments, we realize that status quo, conformity, and framing biases play a pivotal role in tax revenue collection. These biases are often used by taxpayers to make their lives easier by doing what others do or sticking to their original choice. Governments should implement these behavioral findings into their current tax policies. By doing so, overall tax compliance from taxpayers would increase and cause less financial loss for the government as seen from the above case studies. They can successfully plan and fund projects and schemes that benefit the country's citizens. Below is a proposed framework outlining plausible policies and strategies that can be implemented to overcome the aforementioned biases. The use of hard-tone language in tax letters, such as deterrence messages and execution letters, can increase tax compliance. Field experiments in Poland show that hard-tone letters were more successful in mobilizing payments and reducing tax debt compared to soft-tone letters. This method is particularly effective for older working age groups, who need a greater nudge. They have been paying taxes for a long period and have developed lethargy regarding this continuous and tedious process. Soft-tone letters were also found to be effective in improving compliance rates, but not as impactful as hard-tone. In most cases, only hard-tone should be used throughout the letter to make the need to pay taxes seem more urgent and prevent defaults. However, to increase tax compliance overall, governments should use a soft tone in letters to certain taxpayers based on their social identities. For example, hard-tone letters may not be effective with taxpayers who do not support the party in control. Soft-tone letters could also be used for younger taxpayers (ages 20-30) who may be more willing to comply with rules and regulations. Additionally, using a soft tone in letters to taxpayers with school-going children may be effective as they may be more willing to pay taxes to support the public education system. A hard-tone could be used for older taxpayers (50+) as they are more receptive to the hard-tone than the soft-tone. Moreover, the hard-tone can be implemented on non-parents as they need to be nudged more as they have lesser responsibilities (no children). Simplifying the tax letter by removing legal jargon and providing clear steps to follow for tax paying will expedite the process and will increase tax revenue. This can overcome status quo bias and reduce the complexity of decision-making. Evidence from the UK and Belgium shows a positive correlation between clear and concise tax letters and compliance rates. Simplification also reduces the reliance on automatic systems and encourages timely payments from both late filers and payers. The government can take advantage of the status quo bias by making tax deductions from employee salaries by the company the default choice. The company can pay the income tax collected directly to the government along with its corporate taxes. This is called an opt-in policy as the status quo is to opt in. Most employees would prefer to stay with the status quo as it reduces hassles for them. Another opt-in policy could be where the government directly estimates how much the employee has to pay. At the end of the financial year, the taxpayer can compare how much tax was estimated and collected by the government compared to how much they need to pay. This works on similar principles of advanced taxes where the employee estimates his payable tax amount and pays it to the government quarterly. This solves the problem of how to pay taxes for the taxpayer as the government is doing it automatically for them and helps them overcome their status quo. The use of social norms was also greatly experimented with in Latvia, Guatemala, Poland, and the UK. This underlines the importance of social norms in tax policies. It was found that personal norms hold a higher value than social norms in individuals and small and medium enterprises. Governments can use these findings to implement personal norms. These can be simple pieces of information regarding an individual's belief systems. Descriptive norms were found to be more impactful than injunctive norms in the UK. Governments should use personal norms when distributing tax letters to small-scale companies but use descriptive norms in the letters they send to individuals. Lastly, along with these norms described above the government can club it with a minority norm. This puts a spotlight on defaulting taxpayers who feel like they are not part of the desired group encouraging them to file their taxes. This will make the most efficient use of the conformity bias. Using a "worst offenders" list will also be effective as there would be a perceived social consequence to being on the list. People will increase their tax compliance so that they are not the exceptions. This phenomenon of feeling uncomfortable when not conforming is called the “spotlight effect” (Gilovich, 2000). The Australian tax office's real-time analytics initiative sends customized prompts to taxpayers filing annual tax returns (OECD, 2021). For example, a taxpayer may see a pop-up notifying them that they have reported work-related expenses unusually high and prompting them to confirm their entries. The initiative prompted 25% of taxpayers to voluntarily amend their tax returns, generating approximately AUD$ 22.4 million in revenue from 2018 to 2019. This method can also be used so that tax filings are honest and accurate. Along with these customized prompts, Another small change that can be implemented to the tax filing website is subtle environmental cues such as smiling faces and a friendly telephone voice. These small nudges can stimulate cooperation among taxpayers and overcome the status quo of not paying taxes or partial payment of taxes. Similarly, this also implements a soft tone to gently nudge taxpayers to be honest with their tax fillings. 5.1 How does behavioral economics advance cost-effectiveness as opposed to traditional economics? Behavioral interventions are extremely effective while having minimal additional costs as compared to the original tax letters. The average revenue collected is more than the average cost, hence highlighting that this method is extremely cost-effective for the government. The field study conducted in Guatemala (World Bank Group, 2020) helped increase revenue generated but at the same time was particularly cost-effective. It was estimated that the deliberate choice message would have generated revenues of USD 778,927 at a cost of $21,090 if sent to the entire sample of 43,387 taxpayers. This equates to 36 times the return on investment for tax authorities. It was estimated that $303,366 in revenue was generated and declared a profit of $288,301 for the Guatemalan Tax Authority showing it is beneficial to apply behavioral changes. Moreover, since there are no statistically significant differences in delivery method outcomes, the option of sending reminders by regular mail can simplify execution procedures in Poland without affecting revenue collection. However, for tax payments, tax authorities can use existing technology, such as websites and smartphones, to facilitate compliance on a modest budget. In Kosovo (World Bank Group, 2019) emails and SMS messages were used to send out behavioral tax letters instead of paper mail. This slightly reduces the overall costs resulting in increased tax revenue. The only major cost would be incurred while setting up the infrastructure. In years to come only small maintenance costs would be incurred making it a cost-effective solution in the long run. The government can make these design changes to its tax policies and use these biases to its advantage and work towards effectively increasing its tax revenue. These changes are uncomplicated, cost-effective, easily implementable, and have achieved a positive impact worldwide. Hence it is the best possible solution available to limit the financial loss currently being sustained by the government due to non-payment of taxes. VI. Conclusion The World Bank Group has extensively researched how to successfully implement behavioral changes to tax policies. Behavioral changes are very helpful as they increase tax revenues and receiving correct tax amounts on time helps reduce financial losses for the government. They have run field experiments in various countries, like Guatemala, Poland, and Kosovo, and have found compelling evidence on how to nudge taxpayers to be more compliant. The 3 biases explored in this paper are only a few, many other biases and heuristics such as availability and loss aversion are present in the tax-paying process which also negatively affect the government. By using these behavioral interventions the government’s tax base would widen, resulting in lower tax rates and higher aggregate demand leading to a healthier economy in the long run. Paying taxes may not be enjoyable, but with the successful implementation of behavioral changes, it can be turned around. This research effectively exposes some of the reasons taxpayers are not very vigilant in paying taxes. If governments can successfully incorporate changes to their tax policies they can reduce the problem of the tax gap and any financial losses. References [1] Anderson, Christopher J. "The Psychology of Doing Nothing: Forms of Decision Avoidance Result from Reason and Emotion." Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003): 139-167. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=895727. [2] Behavioural Insights Team. "Applying Behavioural Insights to Reduce Fraud, Error and Debt." 2012. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attac hment_data/file/60539/BIT_FraudErrorDebt_accessible.pdf. [3] Behavioural Insights Team. "Update Report 2013-2015." 2015. https://www.bi.team/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/BIT_Update-Report-Final-2013 -2015.pdf. [4] Congdon, William, et al. "Behavioral Economics and Tax Policy." NBER , September 10, 2009. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15328 . [5] De Neve, Jan‐Emmanuel, et al. "How to Improve Tax Compliance? Evidence from Population-Wide Experiments in Belgium." SSRN , May 16, 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3389405. [6] Fraccola, Sylvain, et al. "Pol Country Profile." OECD , 2015. https://www.oecd.org/education/pol-country-profile.pdf . [7] Hallsworth, Michael, et al. "The Behavioralist as Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance." NBER Working Paper Series , 2014. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20007/w20007.pdf . [8] Hernandez, Marco, et al. "Promoting Tax Compliance in Kosovo with Behavioral Insights." World Bank Group , 2019. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/747661551725011887/pdf/135032- WP-PUBLIC-Kosovo-Tax-Compliance.pdf. [9] Iyer, Govind S., and Peggy Jimenez. "Tax Compliance in a Social Setting: The Influence of Social Norms, Trust in Government, and Perceived Fairness on Taxpayer Compliance." Advances in Accounting . Elsevier, August 8, 2016. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S088261101630102X . [10] Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow . Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [11] Kahneman, Daniel, et al. "Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias." 1991. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/kahneman/files/anomalies_dk_jlk_ rht_1991.pdf . [12] Kelman, Herbert C. "Compliance, Identification, and Internalization: Three Processes of Attitude Change." Journal of Conflict Resolution 2, no. 1 (1958): 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200275800200106. [13] Kettle, Stewart, et al. "Behavioral Interventions in Tax Compliance: Evidence from Guatemala." World Bank Group , June 11, 2020. https://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2020/06/11/studies-prove-citizens-are-more -likely-to-pay-taxes-if-asked-the-right-way. [14] Levine, John M. "Conformity." Encyclopædia Britannica . Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/conformity . [15] Mascagni, Giulia. "From the Lab to the Field: A Review of Tax Experiments." 2017. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joes.12201. Accessed 2022. [16] Mcleod, Saul. "What Is Conformity?" Simply Psychology , January 1, 1970. https://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html . [17] "Measuring, explaining, and controlling tax evasion: lessons from theory, experiments, and field studies." International Tax and Public Finance 19, no. 1: 53. [18] Miller, Alicia M., et al. "Forum on Tax Administration." OECD , 2021. https://www.oecd.org/tax/forum-on-tax-administration/. [19] OECD. "Forum on Tax Administration." 2021. https://www.oecd.org/tax/forum-on-tax-administration/. [20] OECD. "Forum on Tax Administration." November 2010. https://www.oecd.org/tax/forum-on-tax-administration/. [21] OECD. "Poland - Poland." 2013. https://www.oecd.org/poland/TALIS-2013-country-note-Poland.pdf. [22] OECD. "Understanding Taxpayer Behaviour – New Opportunities for Tax Administration." 2012. https://nadt.gov.in/writereaddata/MenuContentImages/Understanding%20Taxpaye r%20Behaviour_tcm19-20102635470641831907068.pdf. [23] Samuelson, William, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Status Quo Bias in Decision Making." 1998. https://scholar.harvard.edu/rzeckhauser/publications/status-quo-bias-decision-mak ing . [24] Thaler, Richard H., and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness . Penguin Books, 2008. [25] Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." The University of Zürich , 1981. https://www.uzh.ch/cmsssl/suz/dam/jcr:ffffffff-fad3-547b-ffff-ffffe54d58af/10.18_ kahneman_tversky_81.pdf. [26] Walsh, Keith. "Understanding Taxpayer Behaviour – New Opportunities for Tax Administration." 2012. https://nadt.gov.in/writereaddata/MenuContentImages/Understanding%20Taxpaye r%20Behaviour_tcm19-20102635470641831907068.pdf. [27] World Bank Group. "A Trial in Latvia Looked at How Behavioral Science Compliance within the Shadow Economy." 2019. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/542711570109221622/pdf/Increasin g-Tax-Compliance-in-the-Shadow-Economy-in-Latvia.pdf . [28] World Bank Group. "Behavioral Insights for Tax Compliance." 2017. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/472181576511865338/pdf/Behavior al-Insights-for-Tax-Compliance.pdf [29] World Bank Group. "Studies Prove Citizens Are More Likely to Pay Taxes If Asked the Right Way." June 11, 2020. https://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2020/06/11/studies-prove-citizens-are-more -likely-to-pay-taxes-if-asked-the-right-way. [30] World Bank Group. “Paying Taxes The global picture”. 2008. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/pt/427711468140953709/pdf/379620D B1Paying1Taxes.pdf . [31] World Bank Group. "When Context Matters: Increasing Tax Payments in Poland." 2018. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/387711517954782156/pdf/123252- eMBeD-Poland-Tax-Brief.pdf. [32] Zafar, Basit. "An Experimental Investigation of Why Individuals Conform." European Economic Review . North-Holland, January 26, 2011. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292111000043 . [33] Cross, Catharine P., et al. “Sex Differences in Confidence Influence Patterns of Conformity.” University of St. Andrews , 2017, research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/12109/Cross_et_al_ 13_10_16_ [34] Jones, Alex R. “Quantifying Loss-Averse Tax Manipulation.” Review of Economic Studies , June 2017, alexreesjones.github.io/papers/Quantifying%20Loss-Averse%20Tax%20Manipul ation.pdf. [35] Gangl, K., Hofmann, E., & Kirchler, E. (2015b). “Tax authorities' interaction with taxpayers: A conception of compliance in social dilemmas by power and trust.” New Ideas in Psychology , 37, 13–23. [36] Manoli, Dayanand, et al. “Psychological frictions and the incomplete take-up of social benefits: Evidence from an IRS field experiment in the United States.” AEA Randomized Controlled Trials , vol. 105, no. 11, 29 Sept. 2016, pp. 3489–3529, https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1612.

Brooklyn Han, Patrick Leitloff, Sally Yang, Eddy Zou Is a UK Government commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals good for the economy and business in general? Brooklyn Han, Patrick Leitloff, Sally Yang, Eddy Zou One aspect of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) is a sustainable use of natural resources and comprehensive environmental protection, mandating a significant change in economic and industrial practices (1). This discussion paper investigates the impact of a government commitment to the implementation of the UN SDGs relating to natural capital on the economy and business in the United Kingdom. We evaluate existing research and governmental policy declarations. The investigation finds that greater certainty around environmental regulations has a net benefit on business performance and that positive spillovers exist already. Policy gaps in waste and energy regulation exist. We also argue that a more accurate tracking of the progress in the SDGs leads to more commitment and better policymaking. This paper won the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Renaissance Prize in April 2020 (2). I. Introduction In recent years, rising concerns over the environmental sustainability of human-driven economic practices have called for significant action. Len- ton et al. argue that the world may have already crossed several “tipping points” beyond which environmental degradation becomes irreversible, mandating immediate political and economic response (3). We thus choose to focus on natural capital-based Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in our discussion. Natural capital, defined as “stocks of the elements of nature that have value to society,” is used in combination with human, financial, and social capital to produce valuable goods and services (4). This differs from “natural resources” in the sense that natural capital is natural resources utilised to add value to society and the economy. It directly sustains human life, is not easily replenished, and is non-substitutable in certain cases, highlighting the need for sustainable use (5). We explore this with examples throughout our paper. Our SDGs of focus are: - Goal 12: Efficient use of natural resources and effective waste management - Goal 13: Climate change mitigation and adaptation - Goals 14 and 15: Preservation of water and land ecosystems Henceforth we refer to these goals as NC-SDGs. Figure 1. Natural capital-based Sustainable Development Goals (NC-SDGs) and auxiliary NC-SDGs We consider Goals 6, 7, and 9 as auxiliary NC-SDGs as they have targets relating to water ecosystems, fossil fuels as subsoil natural resources, and “environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes” respectively (6). Figure 1 provides a graphic summary. We refer to “commitment” as the integration of SDG targets and indicators in the design and evaluation of policies, as well as promoting awareness towards achieving SDGs in the indicated timeframe. In the following sections, we outline the UK-specific businesses and economy-wide benefits, then examine positive spillovers from current sustainable development policies. After identifying policy gaps, we reflect on the recent developments in measuring SDGs. II. Improved Business Performance There is strong evidence that environmentally sustainable practices improve business performance. Clark et al’s 2014 review of 200 studies on sustainability and corporate performance found that high environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards lowered costs of sourcing capital and improved financial performance in 90 percent of cases (7). Similarly, Flammer identified a positive causal impact of adopting Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) proposals, such as incorporating SDGs in business operations, on accounting performance, labour productivity, and business sales in 2015 (8). Flammer did so by exploiting variation in corporate proposals that are mostly independent of confounding factors, such as the passage of shareholder proposals on CSR that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. Figure 2. The size of incremental SDG-related business opportunities in 2030. Notes : Only the largest opportunities are shown. Source: Business and Sustainable Development Commission, 2017. The implementation of SDGs also opens up new markets for UK businesses. A 2017 report by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission estimates that delivering SDGs in the four “economic systems’”—food and agriculture, energy and materials, cities, and health—can generate over £10 trillion (9) worth of business opportunities per year by 2030 (10). These closely relate to NC-SDGs (summarised in Figure 2) and are highly applicable in the UK. For instance, product-re- formulation strategies, which improve the nutritional content of processed food in the UK and enhance sustainable consumption (SDG 12), require total business investments of approximately £3.7 billion. This is significantly smaller than the estimated gains in Figure 2 (11). Further, this improvement to processed food is projected to improve the health of the population, saving a total of 1.7 million disability-adjusted life years. Healthy workers reduce the burden on the National Health Service by avoiding economic costs associated with falling ill or being hospitalised; they also work and consume more, which are major drivers of GDP. Figure 3. The size of incremental SDG-related business opportunities in 2030, with externalities added. Notes: Evidence at the global level suggests that pricing externalities adds market opportunities substantially. Source: Business and Sustainable Development Commission, 2017. In addition, as shown in Figure 3, adjusting prices to reflect the positive exter- nalities generated by a business focus on SDGs can add up to 40 percent of busi- ness opportunities in the four economic systems identified (12). Figure 4. Low-carbon innovation activity of EU ETS regulated companies compared with the counterfactual scenario. Source: Calel & Dechezleprêtre, 2014 Carbon pricing policies can have a significant effect on business incentives in creating sustainable innovations (13). Figure 4 shows that the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) has led to an increase in the number of low-car- bon patents from companies. There is potential for the UK government to further commit to SDGs through measures such as maintaining carbon pricing. Such a commitment would result in even greater benefits from encouraging businesses to invest in low-carbon innovations and creating new business areas. As Europe’s centre of sustainable funds management, the UK’s financial industry has long incorporated ESG standards into its investment criteria to support the growth of sustainable finance. One common method of sustainable finance is investment in an eco-friendly fund which applies ESG criteria and focuses its investment options in companies which are less carbon-intensive or earn green revenues. Eco-friendly funds generally design their own metrics of “climate aware- ness” and adjust portfolios towards companies and assets that perform better along those metrics. One example is the Future World Fund managed by Legal & General Investment Management, which only includes companies meeting minimum environmental standards and exposes itself more to companies which, in addition to meeting environmental standards, engage in environmentally friendly activities (14). In 2016, HSBC placed £1.85 billion of its UK employees’ pension savings into the Future World Fund (15). Reasons for HSBC’s decision are reportedly greater expected returns, improved company engagement, and a more widespread perception that addressing climate change should be the “new normal” (16). The notion that eco-friendly funds can generate returns is supported by empirical evidence: Morningstar, a global research agency, compared average return, success and survival rates of 745 sustainable funds with those of 4150 traditional funds. They found that irrespective of the type considered (bond or equities), and the country of origin (UK or abroad), rates of return on sustainable funds either matched or beat their traditional counterparts. Many businesses also publicly urge the government to further commit to strengthening private-public coordination in delivering SDGs (17). While SDGs are beneficial to businesses, without an active governmental commitment to NC-SDGs to address market failure, firms and the economy more broadly may not fully realise these benefits. Market failures, whereby markets fail to achieve socially efficient resource allocations, necessitate government intervention. Many green investments are currently uncompetitive as they involve early-stage innovations yet to be commercialised. Gillingham and Stock use 2018 data from the US Energy Information Administration to compute the costs of abating each ton of CO2 by replacing electricity generated by an existing coal-fired power plant with the cleaner alternative (18). As a comparison, the UK in 2019 proposed a £16 ($19.2) tax per tonne of CO2 emitted by installations. This effectively means abatement costs for switching to most feasible “cleaner alternatives” are much higher than social costs reflected by carbon tax schemes. Furthermore, solar and wind are among the cleanest forms of energy (Figure 5), yet Gillingham and Stock show that solar thermal and offshore wind are the most costly to implement (Table 1) (19). Table 1. New source generation costs when comparing to existing coal generation. Notes : The table shows engineering costs per ton of CO2 abated by replacing electricity gener- ated by a current coal-fired power plant with the new generation source. Source: Gillingham and Stock, 2018 The UK Energy Research Centre’s review of evidence on the timescale of technological innovations showed that across 14 innovations studies, it takes an average of 39 years for an innovation to be commercialised and deployed (22). Furthermore, Gillingham and Stock suggest that much of the “green investments” in renewable energy suffer from path dependence, whereby rates of return go up in the long run only with sufficiently high inputs (23). Furthermore, environmental externalities in current pollutive technologies are not internalised, leading to overproduction. Greener innovations thus tend to be under-funded by private markets, causing deadweight welfare loss for both consumers and producers (24). Consumers continue to suffer the consequences of pollution, while producers forego the opportunity to achieve better business performance in the long run as outlined above (25). Government finance such as the UK Energy Entrepreneurs Fund, which was launched in 2012 and invested £75 million of grant money by 2019, can support the incubation of businesses before they generate revenues. Figure 5. Solar and wind are among the cleanest forms of energy. Source: Ritchie & Roser, 2020. In addition, the government can provide a regulatory base to correct “imperfect information”. Standardisation prevents greenwashing, the act of labelling projects or bonds with detrimental or negligible impact on the environment as “green” to attract investors. Addressing the lack of clear common standards, cited as the largest source of investor uncertainty, can fuel demand for green bonds, which are bonds earmarked primarily for projects improving energy efficiency (SDG 7) (26). This is exemplified by the ASEAN’s adoption of comprehensive Green Bond Standards that categorise projects and specify the exclusion of fossil fuels (27). These actions reduce information asymmetries between firms and investors and may encourage the latter group to more confidently invest in green projects and bonds. The government can also help establish common reporting standards to lower the implementation costs of sustainability practices. HSBC found that 26 percent of the 1000 UK firms surveyed suggested that a confusion with ESG reporting undermined their sustainability practices (28). KPMG also found that one of the biggest barriers to sustainability for firms was the lack of common metrics to assess and compare performances (29). In 2020, the British Standards Institution (BSI) launched the first of its five-year initiative with the UK Government (BEIS) and the UK industry (City of London’s GFI) to develop consensus-based standards in sustainable finance (30). We argue that such country-wide standardisation is only achievable through regulatory changes directed by the government. While firms in the private sector can also attempt to establish uniform standards, their lack of enforcement power gives other businesses considerable discretion over which standards to adopt. This inconsistency not only raises search and adoption costs of standards, but also undermines uniform comparisons of companies’ performances along relevant dimensions. By contrast, government directives provide the incentive to report some common metrics, allowing investors and other stakeholders to better assess such information. Moreover, government-induced standards can go beyond helping companies assess their environmental impacts by tailoring case-specific solutions to incorporate environmental sustainability into existing business practices. This is illustrated by the BSI’s new ISO standards, which aim to allow businesses of all sizes to consider climate change adaptation while designing new policies, strategies, plans, and activities (31). The government can also exercise its authority to endorse consistent information and nudge consumer behaviour. For example, mandating businesses to disclose the environmental impact of their products through labelling highlights the impact of consumption choices and addresses consumers’ behavioural bias (32). Finally, government commitments to SDGs have the potential to improve coordination in the private sector. An example of such improved coordination is industrial symbiosis, where governments promote mutual synergies between firms from different industries. The UK’s National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP), matches participating firms that can use each other’s byproducts with the view that “one company’s waste is another’s raw material.” For example, the waste filter cake produced by an air conditioner manufacturer is used by a fuel manufacturer as an oil absorption agent. In five years, NISP diverted over 47 million tonnes of industrial waste, contributing to improvements in SDG 12, production expansions and costs reductions (33). III. Current Policies and Positive Spillovers In the first year alone, 90 percent of the actions in the 25 Year Environment Plan have been delivered or are being progressed (34). Further, complex interactions and positive spillovers between goals occur. In the NC-SDGs framework, the key areas include air quality, water quality, urban planning, and waste management. Commitments to cleaner air have shown significant progress. The World Bank suggests that 100 percent of the UK population has access to clean fuels and technology for cooking in 2020 (SDG 7.1.2) (35). The ONS also finds that the share of renewable energy in total energy consumption rose exponentially from 0.7 per- cent in 1990 to 10.3 percent in 2017 (SDG 7.2.1) (36). This is expected to enhance climate resilience and encourage the transition to an economy with a lower reliance on high-emission technologies (SDG 13.2.1). Recent policies further support the attainment of NC-SDGs. The Clean Growth Strategy seeks to align economic growth with “clean” development by improving industry efficiency and encouraging the transition to low-carbon transport (37). Climate change policies may shape incentives in technological change, promoting innovation (SDG 9) and sustainable infrastructural development (SDG 11). Secondly, a commitment to cleaner water sources is “good business” because it raises productivity and cuts costs for firms, according to researchers at the Stock- holm International Water Institute (38). Current policies such as the Nitrates Directive and the Water Framework Directive reduce contamination risk to water bodies while enhancing their quality. Such policies ensured that 100 percent of UK households have access to safe drinking water and are connected to wastewater treatment (39). Access to sanitary drinking water is vital for personal health, and healthy workers make valuable contributions to business and the economy. Thirdly, urban planning policies encourage infrastructure innovation. Congestion is a huge cost for the economy in terms of lost time spent waiting in traffic and the continuous emission of pollutants from vehicles. TomTom’s London traffic reports in 2017 to 2019 show that just shy of 150 hours per year are spent by each driver waiting in rush hour traffic jams (40). Further, greenhouse gas emissions from road transport make up 21 percent of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions, which motivate the importance of making road planning easier for vehicle owners (41). To maximise the value of public investment, the UK government has established a Transforming Cities Fund worth £2.5 billion to tackle congestion and promote smart traffic management. The government is also considering new vehicle types and innovative ways to simplify journey planning and payments as a part of their Future of Mobility Urban Strategy. The aspects of this strategy are to be tested with a £90 million investment in four “future mobility zones.” These policies complement the goal of achieving cleaner air; as the transport sector is the largest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions at 34 percent of total emissions, introducing smarter vehicles and tackling traffic congestion can significantly reduce air pollution (42). Furthermore, there is a strong link between the sustainability of cities and communities (SDG 11) and the sustainability of an environmental ecosystem with which the cities and communities interact (43). Finally, waste management policies have also shown promise in maintaining cleaner environmental standards. Since 2000, the UK’s material footprint has shown a downward trend (44). Plastic waste has been a major area of focus for the government, with an aim to reach zero plastic waste by 2042 (45). Better waste management will benefit ecosystems on land and in water and preserve the quality of the resources that are necessary to everyday production and consumption. Further, achieving the sustainable management of natural resources (SDG 12.2) and promoting policies that are in accordance with such management (SDG 12.7) are closely associated with the development of sustainable transport and infrastructure (SDG 9). IV. Shortcomings of Current Policies Despite considerable progress in some areas, there is strong evidence to suggest that gaps still exist, particularly in waste management and energy efficiency. Current trajectories pose a considerable threat to the future availability of natural capital. This necessitates immediate action to be taken against these issues. Hazardous waste generated, such as used oils and chemical waste, rose by over 10 percent between 2010 and 2016 (46). This waste pollutes water bodies and threat- ens aquatic biodiversity. It necessitates greater purification efforts, resulting in major costs of production (47). Energy efficiency is plagued by policy inconsistencies. Relaxations on fracking rules, freezes on fuel duty, uncertainty around the future of carbon pricing, and the end of hybrid vehicle subsidies damage expectations about the government’s commitment to a low-carbon economy (48). Low per capita spending on improving household energy efficiency and uncertainty in the government’s target to up-grade “fuel-poor” homes have caused the improvement in median energy efficiency ratings to level off (Figure 6). The proportion of households in fuel poverty has not changed significantly despite the fuel poverty gap decreasing since 2014 (49). Households are considered fuel poor if their fuel costs are above the national median level and their residual income after fuel costs would fall below the poverty line. A combination of slack minimum energy efficiency regulations, high fixed costs and the fact that returns are typically distributed over the long term means that private incentives, which are based on a series of myopic optimisation, do not bring enough investments to meet current targets (50). Given that energy efficiency is one of the most effective ways to tackle fuel poverty, stagnant improvements in this area stall progress in indicators such as 9.4.1 (CO2 emission per unit of value added) (51). Figure 6. The improvement in median energy efficiency ratings between 2010 and 2015 has lev- elled off in recent years for fuel-poor households and all households Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, 2018. V. Opportunities for Better Measurement Existing improvements in measurement enable policymakers to track progress on specific SDGs, analyse root causes of challenges in delivering SDGs and de- sign policies that address problems for specific stakeholders, to “Leave No One Behind” (52). The ability to establish quantitative targets for indicators that currently lack clarity will further enhance governmental commitment by reducing the propensity to take discretionary action and exploit the vagueness of said indicator(s). 70 percent of 180 SDG indicators reported using UK data are disaggregated (broken down into subcategories) by at least one variable, such as geographic region (53). This data can be used to compare the socio-economic impact of policies across regions, enabling policymakers to identify and target regional economic disparities. For example, researchers can use UK regional Google patent rank data to quantify regional distributions of economic spillovers from innovation in- vestments (Figure 7). Policymakers can then direct innovation spending to regions with stagnant productivity. Figure 7. A scatter plot of relative regional productivity and relative regional average spillovers for NUTS2 regions of the UK Notes : From this estimation, it is clear that targeting regions with below national average produc- tivity and high innovation spillovers can generate higher benefits. Source: Rydge, Martin & Valero, 2018. For NC-SDGs, we argue that the UK government can leverage the 100 percent coverage of climate action indicators and existing micro-level data to incorporate climate change-induced dynamics when investing in different parts of the UK. Existing literature suggests that foresighted infrastructure investments that con- sider dynamic effects of climate change, including inundation, sea-level rises, and floods, bring significant long-term economic welfare gains (54). An understanding of inter-linkages between SDGs allows policymakers to con- sider the distributional and long-term consequences of their decisions, thereby avoiding policy conflicts between different departments or omitting key areas of policy focus (55). For instance, the UN Statistical Division is collaborating with the ONS and other statistical agencies across developing countries to harmonise the use of indicators in understanding positive linkages between targets, to direct statistical reporting and policies to those with the greatest potential for positive externalities. Figure 8. Proportion of Global Indicators for each SDG that have data reported on the UK National Reporting Platform, as of June 2019. Source: UK Government, 2019b Greater governmental commitment to NC-SDGs is essential to accelerate im- provements in data measurement. As shown in Figure 7, among specific goals we focus on, there is substantial scope for improved data availability in Goals 12, 14, and 15. Many indicators require more details on how they can be met. For instance, none of the transboundary basin areas in the UK currently have an operational agreement on water cooperation (56). In addition to improving local and international water resource management, clarification will also help the UK maintain international ties, the importance of which has only increased since Brexit. VI. Conclusion Sustainable growth cannot be left to the private sector alone; a consistent, well-measured UK government commitment helps deepen the symbiotic relationship between stakeholders. This can help address market failures such as imperfect information and coordination problems in the private sector, where sustainable economic activity has the potential to take place on a large scale. Our assessment of current policies show that a stronger government commitment is consistent with current policy trajectories and that bridging existing policy gaps can deliver large gains. We have demonstrated the ways in which SDGs benefit the UK economy and businesses, such as reducing production costs through the maintenance of water sources, incentivising sustainable innovations through carbon pricing schemes, and strengthening the relationship between environmental ecosystems and the city. Environmental sustainability and economic growth are not always on a collision course. Rather, they should be viewed as complementary aims under the overarching goal of sustainable growth. With the advent of improved data collection methods and measurement of SDG indicators, we can better quantify progress towards a more sustainable future that benefits businesses and the economy. Endnotes 1 We thank Chiara Sotis and Judith Shapiro for their continued support and guidance. We are grateful to the ONS for initiating the prize and agreeing to the publication of the modified version of the paper. We would also like to thank the editors, Alice Jo and Jacob Zeldin, for their comments and suggestions which have significantly improved the paper. 2 www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/whatwedo/programmesandprojects/economicstatisticstransformation/ theonsrenaissanceprize 3 Lenton, T. M., Rockström, J., Gaffney, O., Rahmstorf, S., Richardson, K., Steffen, W., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2019). Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against. Nature, 575(7784), 592-595. doi: 10.1038/d41586-019- 03595-0. 4 HM Treasury (2020). The Green Book: Central Government Guidance On Appraisal and Evaluation. 5 Neumayer, E. (1998). Preserving natural capital in a world of uncertainty and scarce financial resources. International Journal Of Sustainable Development & World Ecology , 5(1), 27-42. doi: 10.1080/13504509809469967 6 United Nations General Assembly (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development , A/RES/70/1. 7 Clark, G. L., Feiner, A., & Viehs, M. (2015). From the stockholder to the stakeholder: How sustainability can drive financial outperformance. Available at SSRN 2508281 . 8 Flammer, C. (2015). Does corporate social responsibility lead to superior financial performance? A regression discontinuity approach. Management Science, 61 (11), 2549-2568. 9 The original data is in USD. We employ an exchange rate of $1=£1.2. 10 Business and Sustainable Development Commission. (2017). Better Business Better World: The report of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission. 11 Dobbs, R., Sawers, C., Thompson, F., Manyika, J., Woetzel, J., Child, P., ... & Spatharou, A. (2016). Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis. McKinsey Global Institute, 2014. 12 Business and Sustainable Development Commission. (2017). Better Business Better World: The report of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission. 13 Calel, R., & Dechezleprêtre, A. (2016). Environmental policy and directed technological change: evidence from the European carbon market. Review of economics and statistics , 98(1), 173-191. Around 300 companies regulated under the EU ETS are included in the sample. “Non EU ETS companies” are a group of 3000 European companies that are not regulated under the EU ETS but operated in the same country and the same economic sector and are comparable in size and innovation capacity to companies regulated under the EU ETS. 14 Legal & General Investment Management (2016). The Future World fund range . 15 Flood, C. (2016, November 8). HSBC’s UK pension scheme to invest £1.85bn in eco-friendly fund. The Financial Times . 16 Bioy, H. & Boyadzhiev, D. (2020). How does European sustainable funds’ performance measure up? Morningstar. 17 UKSSD Network (2018). Measuring up: How the UK is performing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 18 Gillingham, K., & Stock, J. H. (2018). The cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 32(4), 53-72. While they conclude that solar thermal and offshore wind technologies are the most costly to implement, we caution that these measures represent underestimates of true costs of abating CO2, given that they only consider mechanical switching and differ from costs of policy responses needed to encourage switching. 19 Ibid. 20 The original data is in USD. We employ an exchange rate of $1=£1.2. 21 While the technical note was later withdrawn due to further developments in Brexit negotiations, there have since been new calls and consultation processes for implementation of a Carbon Emissions Tax. 22 Hanna, R., Gross, R., Speirs, J., Heptonstall, P., & Gambhir, A. (2015). Innovation timelines from invention to maturity. UK Energy Research Centre . 23 Gillingham, K., & Stock, J. H. (2018). The cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 32(4), 53-72. 24 Owen, R., Lyon, F., & Brennan, G. (2018). Filling the green finance gap: Government interventions supporting early-stage low carbon ventures. Academy of Management Proceedings , 2018(1), 16419. 25 One example would be Clark et al. (2015). 26 Climate Bonds Initiative (2019). Green Bond European Investor Survey. International Finance Corporation (2020). Green Bond Impact Report. 27 ASEAN (2017). ASEAN Green Bond Standards . 28 HSBC (2018). HSBC Navigator 2018 . 29 KPMG (2017). KPMG Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2017 . 30 British Standards Institution (2020a). B SI launches first sustainable finance guide setting standards for financial institutions to align to global sustainability challenges. 31 British Standards Institution (2020b). New international standard helps organizations adapt to climate change. 32 Ölander, F., & Thøgersen, J. (2014). Informing versus nudging in environmental policy. Journal of Consumer Policy , 37(3), 341-356. doi: 10.1007/s10603-014-9256-2. 33 International Synergies (2013). National Industrial Symbiosis Programme . 34 UK Government (2019a). First review of 25 Year Environment Plan published . 35 World Bank (2020). Access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking, percentage of population . 36 Office for National Statistics (2020). Energy use: renewable and waste sources . 37 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). Clean Growth Strategy . 38 Sanctuary, M., Haller, L., & Tropp, H. (2005). Making water a part of economic development: the economic benefits of improved water management and services . SIWI. 39 WHO/UNICEF (2020). People using safely managed drinking water services (% of population) . OECD (2020). Wastewater treatment (% population connected). 40 TomTom (2020). London traffic report . 41 Office for National Statistics (2019b). Road transport and air emissions . 42 Department for Transport (2019). Department for Transport single departmental plan . 43 Stafford-Smith, M., Griggs, D., Gaffney, O., Ullah, F., Reyers, B., Kanie, N., ... & O’Connell, D. (2017). Integration: the key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability Science , 12(6), 911-919. doi:10.1007/s11625-016-0383-3. 44 Office for National Statistics (2019a). Measuring material footprint in the UK: 2008 to 2016 . An economy’s material footprint refers to the amount of resources extracted in order to produce the goods and services demanded by the domestic economy. 45 UK Government (2018). A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. 46 Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2020). UK statistics on waste . 47 Sanctuary, M., Haller, L., & Tropp, H. (2005). Making water a part of economic development: the economic benefits of improved water management and services . SIWI. 48 Rydge, J., Martin, R., & Valero, A. (2018). Sustainable Growth in the UK: Seizing opportunities from technological change and the transition to a low-carbon economy. CEP Industrial Strategy Paper , (7). 49 Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (2018). English Housing Survey 2016 to 2017: headline report . 50 Gillingham, K., & Stock, J. H. (2018). The cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 32(4), 53-72. 51 UKSSD Network (2018). Measuring up: How the UK is performing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals . 52 Dawe, F. (2019). UN Sustainable Development Goals: How does climate change jeopardise the chances of a sustainable future? 53 UK Government (2019b). Voluntary National Review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals . 54 Balboni, C. A. (2019). In harm’s way? infrastructure investments and the persistence of coastal cities (Doctoral dissertation, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)). 55 Inter-agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators (2019). Interlinkages of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 56 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (2018). Progress on Transboundary Water Cooperation. REFERENCES ASEAN (2017). ASEAN Green Bond Standards . https://www.sc.com.my/api/docu- mentms/download.ashx?id=75136194-3ce3-43a2-b562-3952b04b93f4 Balboni, C. A. (2019). In harm’s way? infrastructure investments and the persistence of coastal cities (Doctoral dissertation, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)). Bioy, H. & Boyadzhiev, D. (2020). How does European sustainable funds’ performance measure up? Morningstar. British Standards Institution (2020a). BSI launches first sustainable finance guide set- ting standards for financial institutions to align to global sustainability challenges. https://www.bsigroup.com/en- GB/about-bsi/media-centre/press-releas- es/2020/january/bsi-launches-first-sustainable-finance- guide-setting-stan- dards-for-financial-institutions-to-align-to-global-sustainability-challeng- es/ British Standards Institution (2020b). New international standard helps organiza- tions adapt to climate change. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/about-bsi/ media-centre/press- releases/2019/september/new-international-stan- dard-helps-organizations-adapt-to-climate- change/ Business and Sustainable Development Commission. (2017). Better Business Bet- ter World: The report of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2399Better- BusinessBetterWorld.pdf Calel, R., & Dechezleprêtre, A. (2016). Environmental policy and directed tech- nological change: evidence from the European carbon market. Review of economics and statistics , 98 (1), 173-191. Clark, G. L., Feiner, A., & Viehs, M. (2015). From the stockholder to the stake- holder: How sustainability can drive financial outperformance. Available at SSRN 2508281 . Climate Bonds Initiative (2019). Green Bond European Investor Survey. https://www. climatebonds.net/files/files/GB_Investor_Surveyfinal.pdf. Dawe, F. (2019). UN Sustainable Development Goals: How does climate change jeopardise the chances of a sustainable future? https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2019/10/11/un-development-goals-how-does- climate-change-jeopardise-the-chances-of-a- sustainable-future/ Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). Clean Growth Strat- egy. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clean-growth-strategy Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2020). UK statistics on waste. https://www.gov.uk/government/statisticaldata-sets/env23-uk-waste-data- and-management Department for Transport (2019). Department for Transport single departmental plan. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/department-for-trans- port-single-departmental- plan Dobbs, R., Sawers, C., Thompson, F., Manyika, J., Woetzel, J., Child, P., ... & Spatharou, A. (2016). Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis. McK- insey Global Institute. Flammer, C. (2015). Does corporate social responsibility lead to superior financial performance? A regression discontinuity approach. Management Science , 61 (11), 2549-2568. Flood, C. (2016, November 8). HSBC’s UK pension scheme to invest £1.85bn in eco-friendly fund. The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/ a5af8328-a4ef-11e6-8898-79a99e2a4de6 Gillingham, K., & Stock, J. H. (2018). The cost of reducing greenhouse gas emis- sions. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 32 (4), 53-72. Hanna, R., Gross, R., Speirs, J., Heptonstall, P., & Gambhir, A. (2015). Innovation timelines from invention to maturity. UK Energy Research Centre . HM Treasury (2020). The Green Book: Central Government Guidance On Appraisal and Evaluation. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/938046/The_Green_Book_2020.pdf HSBC (2018). HSBC Navigator 2018. https://www.business.hsbc.com/navigator/sustainability Inter-agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators (2019). Interlinkages of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/stat- com/50th-session/documents/BG-Item3a-Interlinkages-2030-Agen- da-for-Sustainable-Development-E.pdf International Finance Corporation (2020). Green Bond Impact Report. https:// www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/5a9405c4-cfeb-42d2-889e-3a6c6eb48a26/ IFC+FY20+Green+Bond+Impact+Report_FINAL.pdf?MOD=A- JPERES&CVID=nj.Zu6o International Synergies (2013). National Industrial Symbiosis Programme. https:// www.international-synergies.com/projects/nationalindustrial-symbio- sis-programme/. KPMG (2017). KPMG Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2017. https:// assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2017/10/kpmg-survey-of-corpo- rate-responsibility- reporting-2017.pdf Legal & General Investment Management (2016). The Future World fund range. http://update.lgim.com/futureworldfund Lenton, T. M., Rockström, J., Gaffney, O., Rahmstorf, S., Richardson, K., Steffen, W., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2019). Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against. Nature, 575 (7784), 592-595. doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03595-0. Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (2018). English Housing Survey 2016 to 2017: headline report. https://www.gov.uk/government/statis- tics/english-housing-survey-2016- to-2017-headline-report Neumayer, E. (1998). Preserving natural capital in a world of uncertainty and scarce financial resources. International Journal Of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 5 (1), 27-42. doi: 10.1080/13504509809469967 OECD (2020). Wastewater treatment (% population connected). https: //stats.oecd.org/ index.aspx? DataSetCode=water_treat# Office for National Statistics (2019a). Measuring material footprint in the UK: 2008 to 2016. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/ method- ologies/measuringmaterialfootprintintheuk2008to2016 Office for National Statistics (2019b). Road transport and air emissions. https://www. ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/roadtransportan- dairemissions/2019-09- 16 Office for National Statistics (2020). Energy use: renewable and waste sources [Data set] . https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/datasets/ ukenvironmentalaccountsenergyconsumptionfromrenewableandwaste- sources Ölander, F., & Thøgersen, J. (2014). Informing versus nudging in environmen- tal policy. Journal of Consumer Policy , 37 (3), 341-356. doi: 10.1007/s10603- 014-9256-2. Owen, R., Lyon, F., & Brennan, G. (2018). Filling the green finance gap: Government interventions supporting early-stage low carbon ven- tures. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018 (1), 16419. doi: 10.5465/ AMBPP.2018.16419abstract. Ritchie, H. & Roser, M. (2020). What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy? Our World In Data. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Rydge, J., Martin, R., & Valero, A. (2018). Sustainable Growth in the UK: Seizing opportunities from technological change and the transition to a low-car- bon economy. CEP Industrial Strategy Paper , (7). Sanctuary, M., Haller, L., & Tropp, H. (2005). Making water a part of economic devel- opment: the economic benefits of improved water management and services . SIWI. Stafford-Smith, M., Griggs, D., Gaffney, O., Ullah, F., Reyers, B., Kanie, N., ... & O’Connell, D. (2017). Integration: the key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability Science , 12 (6), 911-919. doi:10.1007/s11625-016-0383-3. TomTom (2020). London traffic report. https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-in- dex/london- traffic/ UKSSD Network (2018). Measuring up: How the UK is performing on the UN Sustain- able Development Goals . https://www.ukssd.co.uk/measuringup UK Government (2018). A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/693158/25-year-environment-plan.pdf UK Government (2019a). First review of 25 Year Environment Plan published. https:// www.gov.uk/government/news/first-review-of25-year-environment-plan- published. UK Government (2019b). Voluntary National Review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (2018). Progress on Transboundary Water Cooperation. http://www.unwater.org/app/uploads/2018/12/ SDG6_Indicator_Report_652_Progress-on-Transboundary-Water-Co- operation_ENGLISH_UNECE_2018.pdf United Nations General Assembly (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Age da for Sustainable development, A/RES/70/1 . https://www.un.org/en/devel- opment/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcom- pact/A_RES_70_1_E.pdf WHO/UNICEF (2020). People using safely managed drinking water services (% of population). https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS?view=- map World Bank (2020). Access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking, percentage of population. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.CFT.ACCS.ZS Previous Next

Schedule F And The Future Of Civil Service Protections Sasha Bonkowsky Author Abstract Civil service protections in the United States, such as merit-based hiring, employee tenure, and the dismissal appeal , have come under attack in recent years, most notably from former president Donald Trump’s proposed Schedule F that would strip those protections from many federal employees. Under Schedule F, thousands of federal positions would become political appointees who could be dismissed at-will. This paper examines the history and justifications for exempting positions from traditional civil-service protections, as well as the feasibility for Biden’s Office of Personnel Management to forestall Schedule F. I conclude that Schedule F would likely have negative effects on government performance and morale, but that the OPM may not be able to effectively prevent implementation of Schedule F in the event of Trump’s re-election. Word count: 4,059 Introduction Throughout President Donald Trump’s administration, he frequently attacked the federal bureaucracy for what he saw as its inefficiency or refusal to enact his policies. He was elected on promises of “draining the swamp” in American government; after the 2016 election, he repeatedly attacked a supposed “deep state” of insider operatives within federal agencies and departments who were ideologically opposed to him and used their positions in the bureaucracy, from which it was hard to dismiss them, to hamstring and block his agenda. Where Trump had appointment power, such as with agency heads or other political appointees, he was quick to remove those he saw as disloyal. However, many of his attacks were limited to mere invective. In the vast American civil service comprising more than two million employees, only 4,000 of those are political appointees that the president can remove at will. And in comparison to other democracies like the UK, France, or Japan, which all have similar civil service systems,, the US actually has many more political appointees. The rest are career employees. Career civil servants are usually hired using a merit-based, competitive examination system, in which all prospective employees are given the same exam, and those meeting or exceeding a particular score are hired. Once in the federal bureaucracy—and after a probationary period of several months to a year—employees usually cannot be dismissed unless they are found to be significantly derelict in their duties, and they can appeal a firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which can investigate and reinstate an employee if they have been unlawfully dismissed. There are certain exceptions to this process, known as Schedules A through E, but they are only used when the usual processes are deemed “impractical.” In October 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13957, which would have significantly increased the number of political appointees. It created a new category of positions within the federal bureaucracy—known as Schedule F positions—that would be exempted from regular civil service hiring procedures. Instead of the examination process, the president would be able to handpick employees for positions that fell under Schedule F and dismiss them at will without worrying about an appeal to the MSPB, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in its analysis of the order. President Biden repealed the executive order during his first days in office, writing that it “undermined the foundations of the civil service and its merit system principles.” But such an action is hardly permanent—after all, another future president could easily reissue the executive order. To avoid that, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a proposed rule in late 2023 that would prevent career employees from being excepted under Schedule F or a similar order. The proposed rule also stated that any employee who was reclassified as political appointee would still possess the same protections from being fired and could appeal any dismissal to the MSPB. However, it’s unclear if this proposal will take effect before the 2024 election and a possible transition of power. This paper first examines civil service protections and common exemptions—especially those for current political appointees—in more detail, before turning to the possible effects of Schedule F and attempts to block it. Data from the past 10 years of OPM rulemaking demonstrates that, on average, rules take about a year to be finalized, meaning that if this civil service rule follows the usual timeline, it may be too late to go fully into effect before a Republican president or Republican Congress could repeal it. Civil Service Exceptions The US civil service already allows certain positions to be excepted from the competitive service in five categories: Schedules A, B, C, D, and E. Typically, prospective civil service employees must take a general exam, from which the highest scorers (and those with veteran’s preference) can be selected for hiring. However, this process can be slow, and does not cover specialized knowledge that an agency might require. Positions excepted under one of these schedules can be hired without this usual examination process when it is determined that the exam would make it impractical to recruit adequate numbers of students from qualifying institutions, (under Schedule D), when urgency is required (under Schedule A), or when selecting for particular experience (under Schedule B), among others. Only one schedule deals with political appointments—Schedule C—and it functions most similarly to the proposed Schedule F. Schedule C allows excepted hiring for “positions which are policy-determining or which involve a close and confidential working relationship with the head of an agency or other key appointed officials”. These are often positions like press secretaries for individual bureaus within agencies, White House liaisons, or confidential assistants to secretaries and undersecretaries. There are usually between 1,500 and 1,800 Schedule C appointments at any given time, with 1,725 at the end of the first Bush administration, 1,538 at the end of the Obama administration, and 1,566 at the end of the Trump administration. These political appointments within the civil service didn’t always exist, and like the present-day Schedule F, Schedule C was the subject of significant controversy when it was first carved out in 1956 under the Eisenhower administration. One Democratic senator decried Schedule C as “an attempt to turn the civil service into a Republican grab bag” on the Senate floor, and the Democratic Party platform of 1956 stated that the Eisenhower administration’s policies “reflect prejudices and excessive partisanship to the detriment of employee morale”. The director of the Civil Service Commission defended them in the New York Times , writing that “the American people in 1952 expected your Administration to put into effect your announced policies…it is of the most vital importance that…policy-determining officials should be subject to change with any change in political administration”. Yet despite this public criticism, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed no legislation curtailing or ending Schedule C, and presidents of both parties have made use of Schedule C’s hiring authority. Several restrictions are placed on Schedule C positions and the ways in which they can be assigned. There are no “vacant” Schedule C positions which may be filled at will by the President—instead, any Schedule C positions must be approved by the director of OPM, and OPM’s authorization for those positions is automatically revoked when an employee leaves. Additionally, when requesting Schedule C exception, the head of the requesting agency must submit a statement to OPM that the position was not created in order to detail the employee to the White House—that is, assign them to work in the White House while still being paid by their original agency. This requirement was added after a 1990 GAO report found that Schedule C appointees were being inappropriately detailed to the White House rather than performing the specified duties of their positions. Though Schedule F and Schedule C may appear similar in their creation of low-level, politically appointed positions, the proposed Schedule F category would carve out much broader exceptions to the competitive service. Schedule C restricts its exceptions to appointments of a “confidential or policy-determining” character; Schedule F would allow exceptions to the competitive service for positions of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy -advocating character.” Policy-making or policy-advocating are much broader terms than merely policy-determining, and their definitions are statutorily vague, meaning they could be applied to a much greater number of employees. The executive order drew its legal basis from Section 7511 of Title 5 of the US Code, which excludes employees “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” from competitive examination procedures and protection from dismissal. Determination of whether an employee’s job fits these requirements are made by the President and required to be authorized by the head of OPM. This exception, however, had never been put into practice before. The effects of Schedule F implementation are unclear. The executive order was issued in late October 2020, directing that agencies should submit a list of positions that would fall under Schedule F and their reasons for selecting those positions within 90 days (on January 19, 2021). Agencies were also directed to submit petitions to the Federal Labor Relations Authority to determine whether excepted positions under Schedule F would also be excluded from collective bargaining authorities. Few agencies—15 in total, out of over 400 federal agencies—submitted information to OPM, many claiming that they needed more time. Of those, just four agencies submitted names and lists of positions for conversion: the International Boundary and Water Commission proposed converting just 5 employees of its 234, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed 579 employees of its 11,000, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed 836 of its 1,166 employees, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed 436 of its 527 employees. One issue is these agencies are not particularly representative of the bureaucracy as a whole—the IBWC and FERC are independent commissions, and OMB is deeply embedded in the White House—and so it remains unclear exactly how many employees would be affected by a future implementation of Schedule F. However, the authors of Schedule F have definite intentions for its use and assumptions of how many employees it might affect. The executive order was largely crafted and written by James Sherk, a member of the Domestic Policy Council focusing on labor policy. In 2017, he submitted a memo entitled “Proposed Labor Reforms,” in which he argued for the possibility that “Article II executive power gives the president inherent authority to dismiss any federal employee. This implies civil service legislation,as well as other protections for federal employees, (such as preventing their dismissal for joining a union) are unconstitutional. If so, the President could issue an Executive Order outlining a streamlined new process for dismissing federal employees”. Three years later, he would see that executive order realized in the creation of Schedule F. At a panel discussion for the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in 2023, he continued to argue in favor of this proposition, saying that “every federal employee should serve at the pleasure of the president”. Given the limited data submitted by agencies, there’s no set number of employees Schedule F might affect. Experts, and Sherk himself, have estimated around 50,000, although Sherk noted the number as a low estimate., In the same NAPA seminar, he said that “I think there's ways you could broaden the scope of the order…I think you could expand it beyond 50,000. Say to like, 200,000. 300,000.” Former Trump administration officials have reportedly “saved lists of previous appointees…as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections”, although such lists have not been made public. But having the ability to fire employees, or doing so, doesn’t necessarily mean the administration would be able to fill the positions. The Trump administration was slower than other administrations to nominate officials to key positions, other civil servants rated Trump appointees as less competent than previous Republican administrations or career civil servants, and the Trump administration faced difficulties finding even officials to fill top-level positions. While the Trump administration was able to authorize and fill about as many Schedule C positions as previous administrations, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would be able to fill Schedule F positions given the vastly larger number of them. Besides the numerical scope of its effects, Schedule F was also defended as necessary to improve the efficiency of the federal bureaucracy. The text of the executive order itself cited “long delays and substandard-quality work for important agency projects” as part of its rationale, and stated “agencies need the flexibility to expeditiously remove poorly performing employees”. Many stakeholders that GAO interviewed acknowledged that the speed of federal hiring should be improved, and that Schedule F would streamline that process; one also told GAO that “employees in Schedule F positions should be…more motivated to quickly and effectively implement the President’s policy agenda”. Criticism of a slow-moving and unresponsive bureaucracy, in which onerous hiring procedures and strict removal protections hamstring the agencies themselves, has been long-standing. Presidents and agencies alike have bipartisanly seen problems in the hiring process and sought to reform it: the US National Performance Review in 1993 wrote that “hiring is complex and rule-bound” in the civil service; a Bush-era report from the Merit Systems Protection Board wrote in favor of reform that would “provide agencies the flexibilities they need to effectively manage” and recommended that OPM should “speed the process” of federal hiring; and the Obama administration in turn issued guidance on simplifying and overhauling the civil service hiring process. The picture is little better in terms of firing underperforming employees: it’s long been understood that civil protections reduce the power of incentives, such that employees in government see little connection between performance and job security. But Schedule F seems unlikely to accomplish these reforms in a way that benefits government performance. Several of the stakeholders which GAO spoke to said that Schedule F could make recruitment of federal employees more difficult, as potential applicants might be leery of taking a Schedule F position if they believed they could be removed after a change in administration or for other political reasons. This is in line with the theory advanced by Gailmard and Patty, which states that civil servants are incentivized to build expertise when tenure provides them the stability to make such an investment. David Lewis writes in his book The Politics of Presidential Appointments, drawing on the example of the OPM in the 1980s and 1990s, that, while “politicization helped change policy,” it came at the expense of “long-term agency capacity and reputation…experienced career professionals left the agency and it was hard to replace them [or] recruit bright young people to work in the agency.” New meta-analysis of the meritocratic civil services on government performances found that associated practices such as tenure or merit-based hiring are broadly associated with stronger government performance and lower corruption. With an eye towards a potential future reissuing of the executive order, authors conclude that “converting career employees to Schedule F and removing their civil service protections is likely to degrade government performance”. Rulemaking To Prevent the Reinstatement of Schedule F The Biden administration and Democrats more broadly share similar concerns about Schedule F’s potential impact on the federal government were it to be reinstated by Trump or another future administration. Congressional Democrats have attempted multiple times to pass bills which would prevent Schedule F’s reinstatement or add amendments blocking Schedule F to must-pass defense appropriation bills. However, their efforts have been blocked by Republicans. Bypassing the legislative method, Biden’s OPM released on September 18, 2023, a proposed rule entitled “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit Systems Principles,” aimed as a regulatory method to prevent future administrations from reissuing Schedule F. The rule would: allow employees moved from the competitive service to the excepted service to retain their civil service protections unless the employee voluntarily relinquishes them. redefine “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating”—the language which Sherk and the Trump White House relied on to craft the executive order—to mean only non-career, political appointees. allow employees moved from the competitive service to the excepted service to appeal the move to the MSPB. This would, in essence, cut out the heart of Schedule F: removing its legal basis and specifying that converted employees retain tenure protections, such that converting their positions to the excepted service does not make them at-will employees. OPM draws its authority to make these changes from Chapter 75 of Title 5 of the United States Code, specifically 5 U.S. Code § 7514 and 5 U.S. Code § 7504, both sections which give OPM broad discretion to regulate civil service protections for federal employees. OPM also asserts its authority based on 5 U.S.C. 1103(a)(5) and 5 U.S.C. 1302 to make specific regulations about the procedures of moving employees between the competitive and excepted service, pointing out that OPM has repeatedly exercised that authority in the past (and indeed, regulated that movement in the implementation of Schedule F). The proposed rule closed its 60-day comment period on November 17, 2023, during which time it received 4,096 comments. With the strong support of the Biden administration and the leadership of OPM behind it, the rule is expected to move forward. However, the proposed rule has been the target of criticism by Republicans and people associated with the Trump 2024 campaign—which gives OPM a potential impending deadline. Almost certainly, if Trump wins the 2024 election and the rule is not finalized by his inauguration, he will direct the OPM to drop it; and even a finalized rule could be subject to overturning by a potential Republican Congress under the Congressional Review Act. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is a tool that Congress can use to overturn federal regulatory actions, which was enacted as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act in 1996. The CRA requires that agencies submit finalized rules to Congress and the GAO 60 legislative days before they take effect: if Congress passes a resolution of disapproval of the rule within that time period and the President signs it, or if Congress passes such a resolution over a presidential veto, then the rule cannot go into effect. Because of the threat (and exercise) of presidential veto power, rules have been overturned under the CRA only immediately following a change in presidential administration, in 2001, 2017, and 2021. However, the deadline for finalized rules to avoid CRA review by a potentially hostile Congress or President is not just 60 days before a new president could be inaugurated (that is, late November). Congress has 60 legislative days to consider rules—and if Congress adjourns sine die during that period, the 60-day period resets in its entirety beginning on the 15th day of the new legislative session, in what’s known as a “lookback” period. In 2017, that meant that the Republican Congress was able to disapprove of rules finalized as far back as May 2016. Thus, in order to be certain that it will go into effect, OPM must finalize its rule by mid-2024. But the question is if it will be able to do so by then. In the 2023 Fall Unified Agenda, published by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), OPM specified that it is targeting April 2024 for publication of a final rule. Based on historical precedent, this would provide the rule enough time to avoid reconsideration and potential disapproval from the next Congress. But OPM’s projected timeline may be overly optimistic, given its past timelines in publishing final rules. I collected data on finalized OPM rules between 2023 and 2013 in the Federal Register and examined how long it took between publication of the proposed rule and publication of the finalized rule. Since OPM’s proposed rule at hand of upholding civil-service protections has been defined as “significant” under Executive Order 12866 (likely due to its potential to “raise novel legal or policy issues arising out of legal mandates [or] the President’s priorities”), I restricted my search to only those rules which were similarly deemed significant, as they require a full review by OIRA that lengthens the rulemaking process. I also did not include OPM rules that were issued only as interim final rules rather than undergoing a full notice-and-comment period. The full list of all OPM rules meeting these criteria and their timelines can be found in Appendix A. Below are the summarized results: FIGURE 1: OPM RULEMAKING AVERAGE TIMELINE Notes: The timeline of OPM rulemaking is defined as the number of days between OPM’s publication of a proposed rule and the publication of a final rule. Several outlier rules took more than three years to be finalized. Data sourced from the Federal Register, 2013-2023. FIGURE 2. OPM RULEMAKING TIMELINE BY YEAR Notes: OPM published no significant final rules in 2017. Data sourced from the Federal Register 2013-2023. On average, it took 473 days between OPM issuing a proposed rule and OPM issuing a final rule. Even after eliminating the major outlier rule that took nearly 6 years to finalize, the data still suggests that it generally takes over a year to finalize a rule after it is proposed. Though the timeline varies slightly year by year, there is no clear pattern that would allow us to infer that the OPM of 2023-2024 finalizes rules significantly faster or slower than the OPM of, say, 2013-2014. If this timeline holds for OPM’s rule undercutting Schedule F, we can project that OPM will finalize the rule sometime in December 2024—too late to avoid a potential disapproval under the CRA. However, one case study of similar civil-service rulemaking demonstrates that potential CRA review is not the same as certain CRA review. On September 17, 2019, the OPM under Trump issued a proposed rule that would more strictly enforce the probationary period before employees were accepted to a competitive service position and sought to streamline civil service removal procedures. In many ways, this rule was a precursor to Schedule F, drawing on the same language and reasoning about an ineffective federal government that couldn’t remove underperforming employees. The rule was finalized on October 16, 2020, a timeline which would have allowed the 117th Congress under unified Democratic control to review and disapprove it. They didn’t. It’s not entirely clear why not: congressional disapproval of rules cannot be filibustered in the Senate, and 20 days after their proposal can be discharged for a floor vote by a minority of 30 Senators. More likely, the Democratic Congress preferred to let rollback occur through the agency processes: there were only three rule disapprovals in total in 2021 of Trump-era rules, but many more were overturned by agencies’ new leaders. But that process takes time, and so it was only in November 2022 when OPM finalized its rollback, meaning the Trump-era changes were in place for almost two full years of the Biden administration. The OPM’s proposed anti-Schedule F rule would likely follow a similar track. An OPM under Trump would certainly seek to undo it, even if the rule is successfully finalized and put into effect without disapproval—but as in the case above, it would likely take them months or years to do so. A rule undoing this one would also be open to legal challenges that an executive order would not be, and the Trump administration faced significant challenges in successful rulemaking. Previous administrations succeeded in roughly 70% of challenges to agency actions, while the Trump administration had a dismal 23% success rate in legal challenges due to bypassing procedural requirements, providing incomplete analyses of policy effects, or taking action which exceeded an agency’s statutory authority. Conclusion Whether or not OPM manages to finalize its rule and put it into effect successfully, the fight over the structure and protections of the civil service is unlikely to end in 2024 or beyond. In recent years, long-held civil service practices of non-politicization and tenure protections that were largely taken as established have come under increasing attack, largely from Republican officials and presidential candidates. In recent years, it’s the executive branch which has been most involved in determining the structure of federal civil service, from the Schedule F executive order to OPM’s proposed rulemaking, and attempts for similar legislation have been blocked or stalled out before making major progress, and research has largely focused on the president’s and agencies’ influence. But Congress has historically been the instrument of major changes to the civil service, from the Pendleton Act to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978—and it’s only recently that Congress has ceded that power to the executive. While research such as this examining the direction, scope, and timing of executive influence over civil service is certainly beneficial given the political context, one potential direction for further research could be an examination of Congress’ role in civil service in the past, and what potential legislative actions would be beneficial in future. References “5 U.S. Code § 7504 - Regulations.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7504 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “5 U.S. Code § 7511 - Definitions; Application.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7511 . Accessed 13 Dec. 2023. “5 U.S. Code § 7514 - Regulations.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7514 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “116th Congress Legislative Calendar.” Ballotpedia , https://ballotpedia.org/116th_Congress_legislative_calendar . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. Arnsdorf, Isaac, et al. “Trump and Allies Plot Revenge, Justice Department Control in a Second Term.” Washington Post , 6 Nov. 2023. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/ . Bellini, Jason. “Trump’s Tool for Undoing Obama-Era Regulations.” WSJ , 18 Feb. 2017, https://www.wsj.com/video/trumps-tool-for-undoing-obama-era-regulations/DA82F16D-2ED0-47F0-984B-A9A873E2F9A0 . Carey, Maeve P., and Christopher M. Davis. “The Congressional Review Act (CRA): A Brief Overview.” Congressional Research Service , Feb. 2023. Davis Noll, Bethany. ‘Tired of Winning’: Judicial Review of Regulatory Policy in the Trump Era . 4426370, 22 Apr. 2021. Social Science Research Network , https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4426370 . Dawsey, Josh, et al. “In Trump’s Final Days, a 30-Year-Old Aide Purges Officials Seen as Insufficiently Loyal.” Washington Post , 14 Nov. 2020. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-white-house-purge/2020/11/13/2af12c94-25ca-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html . Drezner, Daniel W. “Perspective | How Hard up Is President Trump in Staffing His Administration? Pretty Hard Up!” Washington Post , 19 June 2019. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/how-hard-up-is-president-trump-staffing-his-administration-pretty-hard-up/ . “Employment and Trends - September.” U.S. Office of Personnel Management , Sept. 2013, https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/employment-trends-data/2013/september/ . Forum on Schedule F and the Future of the Public Service . Directed by NAPA WASH, 2023. YouTube , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSUY9ito9TM . Friedman, Drew. “Democrats Revive Anti-Schedule F Bill, with a Few Tweaks and a New Name.” Federal News Network , 14 Feb. 2023, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2023/02/democrats-revive-anti-schedule-f-bill-with-a-few-tweaks-and-a-new-name/ . Gailmard, Sean, and John W. Patty. Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch . University of Chicago Press, 2012. GAO. Civil Service: Agency Responses and Perspectives on Former Executive Order to Create a New Schedule F Category of Federal Positions | U.S. GAO . 28 Sept. 2022, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-105504 . Lewis, David E. The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance . Princeton University Press, 2008. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7rnqz . Lewis, David E., and Mark D. Richardson. “The Very Best People: President Trump and the Management of Executive Personnel.” Presidential Studies Quarterly , vol. 51, no. 1, 2021, pp. 51–70. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12697 . Makita, Jun. “A Study of the Functions of Political Appointees from a Comparative Perspective.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics , vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2022, pp. 146–61. SAGE Journals , https://doi.org/10.1177/20578911211036943 . Moynihan, Don. “A Tangible Thing You Can Do Today to Fight Trump’s Takeover of the Federal Government.” Can We Still Govern? , 15 Nov. 2023, https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-tangible-thing-you-can-do-today . Moynihan, Donald P. “Public Management for Populists: Trump’s Schedule F Executive Order and the Future of the Civil Service.” Public Administration Review , vol. 82, no. 1, 2022, pp. 174–78. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13433 . MSPB. “Reforming Federal Hiring - Beyond Faster and Cheaper.” Office of Policy and Hiring , 2006. OIG. “Evaluation of the Department of State’s Use of Schedule B Hiring Authority.” OIG , 2018. OIRA. “View Rule: Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles.” Reginfo.Gov , https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202310&RIN=3206-AO56 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. Oliveira, Eloy, et al. “What Does the Evidence Tell Us about Merit Principles and Government Performance?” Public Administration , vol. n/a, no. n/a, June 2023. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12945 . OPM. “Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions.” Federal Register , 17 Sept. 2019, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/09/17/2019-19636/probation-on-initial-appointment-to-a-competitive-position-performance-based-reduction-in-grade-and . ---. “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles.” Federal Register , 18 Sept. 2023, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/09/18/2023-19806/upholding-civil-service-protections-and-merit-system-principles . Peters, Gerhard, and John Wooley. “1956 Democratic Party Platform.” The American Presidency Project , https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1956-democratic-party-platform . Accessed 12 Dec. 2023. Rainey, Hal G. “Perceptions of Incentives in Business and Government: Implications for Civil Service Reform.” Public Administration Review , vol. 39, no. 5, 1979, pp. 440–48. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/3109918 . Rein, Lisa, et al. “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making.” Washington Post , 24 Oct. 2020. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-federal-civil-service/2020/10/23/02fbf05c-1549-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html . “SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS 1956.” CIA FOIA , 5 May 2010, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp63t00245r000100180018-2 . Swan, Jonathan, et al. “Biden Administration Aims to Trump-Proof the Federal Work Force.” The New York Times , 15 Sept. 2023. NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/us/politics/trump-biden-schedule-f.html . Swan, Jonathan, and Maggie Haberman. “Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration.” The New York Times , 20 Apr. 2023. NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/republican-president-2024-heritage-foundation.html . Thompson, James R. “Civil Service Reform Is Dead: Long Live Civil Service Reform.” Public Personnel Management , vol. 50, no. 4, Dec. 2021, pp. 584–609. SAGE Journals , https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026020982026 . Trump, Donald. “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service.” The White House , https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/ . Accessed 13 Dec. 2023. Ungar, Bernard L. “Details of Schedule C Employees to the White House.” GAO , 1992. https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-ggd-92-28.pdf United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), 2016 . U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1 Dec. 2016. DGPO , https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2016 . United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), 2020 . U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1 Dec. 2020. DGPO , https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2020 . Wagner, Erich. “Schedule F Architects Say the Plan’s Critics Are ‘Hyperbolic.’” Government Executive , 29 June 2023, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2023/06/schedule-f-architects-plans-critics-hyperbolic/388118/ . ---. “Year of the Living Dead: How Schedule F Continued to Threaten to Upend the Civil Service in 2022.” Government Executive , 28 Dec. 2022, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/12/year-living-dead-how-schedule-f-continued-threaten-upend-civil-service-2020/381257/ . Young, Philip. “Civil Service and Eisenhower Texts.” The New York Times , 1 Oct. 1956, p. 14. Tables Table 1: OPM Significant Rules, 2013-2023 Rule Name Date Finalized Date Proposed Time Passed (Days) Appointment of Current and Former Land Management Employees 12/6/23 5/15/20 1300 Fair Chance to Compete For Jobs 9/1/23 4/27/22 492 Federal Employees' Retirement System; Present Value Conversion Factors for Spouses of Deceased Separated Employees 9/28/23 7/14/23 76 Retirement: Members of Congress and Congressional Employees 5/17/23 11/16/22 182 Access to Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) for Employees of Certain Tribally Controlled Schools 4/13/22 9/3/21 222 Enhancing Stability and Flexibility for the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program (FLTCIP)-Abbreviated Underwriting, Applications for FLTCIP Coverage, and Technical Corrections 11/16/22 6/3/22 166 Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions (repeal) 11/10/22 1/4/22 310 Temporary and Term Employment 12/1/22 9/14/20 808 Opportunities To Enroll and Change Enrollment in the FEHB Program During a Lapse in Appropriations; Continuation of Certain Insurance Benefits During a Lapse in Appropriations 4/2/21 7/20/20 256 Promotion and Internal Placement 6/8/21 12/16/19 540 Representative Payees Under the Civil Service Retirement System and Federal Employees' Retirement System 10/8/21 3/8/21 214 Federal Employees Health Benefits Acquisition Regulations: Self Plus One and Contract Matrix Update 3/25/20 4/2/19 358 Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance Program: Clarifying Annual Rates of Pay and Amending the Employment Status of Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims 9/24/20 6/29/18 818 Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions 10/16/20 9/17/19 395 Compensatory Time Off for Religious Observances and Other Miscellaneous Changes 4/29/19 8/30/13 2068 Examining System 5/3/19 10/29/18 186 Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program: Extension of Eligibility to Certain TRICARE-Eligible Individuals; Effective Date of Enrollment 6/7/19 11/19/18 200 Federal Employees' Retirement System; Present Value Conversion Factors for Spouses of Deceased Separated Employees 9/23/19 5/28/19 118 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Flexibilities 4/27/18 12/19/17 129 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Removal of Eligible and Ineligible Individuals From Existing Enrollments 1/23/18 12/1/16 418 General Schedule Locality Pay Areas 12/7/18 7/9/18 151 Veterans' Preference 12/7/18 12/27/16 710 Weather and Safety Leave 4/10/18 7/13/17 271 Career and Career-Conditional Employment 12/8/16 1/6/14 1067 Family and Medical Leave Act; Definition of Spouse 4/8/16 6/23/14 655 Access to Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) for Employees of Certain Indian Tribal Employers 12/28/16 8/31/16 119 Special Rights for Transferred Employees Under the Dodd-Frank Act Regarding Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance 9/1/16 1/6/14 969 Personnel Management in Agencies 12/12/16 2/8/16 308 Recruitment, Selection, and Placement (General) and Suitability 12/1/16 5/2/16 213 Designation of National Security Positions in the Competitive Service, and Related Matters 6/5/15 12/4/10 1644 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Self Plus One Enrollment Type 9/17/15 12/2/14 289 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Enrollment Options Following the Termination of a Plan or Plan Option 10/8/15 1/7/15 274 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: FEHB Plan Performance Assessment System 6/30/15 12/15/14 197 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; Subrogation and Reimbursement Recovery 5/21/15 1/7/15 134 Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program Eligibility Changes 10/30/15 11/13/14 351 Managing Senior Executive Performance 9/25/15 12/10/14 289 Solicitation of Federal Civilian and Uniformed Service Personnel for Contributions to Private Voluntary Organizations 10/23/15 8/17/15 67 Collection by Offset From Indebted Government Employees 1/6/14 5/2/11 980 Nondiscrimination Provisions 7/29/14 9/4/13 328 Phased Retirement 8/8/14 6/5/13 429 Electronic Retirement Processing 11/18/13 3/5/13 258 Excepted Service-Appointment of Persons With Intellectual Disabilities, Severe Physical Disabilities, and Psychiatric Disabilities 2/22/13 2/7/12 381 Garnishment of Accounts Containing Federal Benefit Payments 5/29/13 4/19/10 1136 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Members of Congress and Congressional Staff 10/2/13 8/8/13 55 Expanding Coverage of Children; Federal Flexible Benefits Plan: Pre-Tax Payment of Health Benefits Premiums: Conforming Amendments 10/30/13 7/20/12 467 General Schedule Locality Pay Areas 1/24/13 11/26/12 59 Programs for Specific Positions and Examinations (Miscellaneous) 12/2/13 9/7/10 1182 AVERAGE: 473 days

Adithya V. Raajkumar “Victorian Holocausts”: The Long-Term Consequences of Famine in British India Adithya V. Raajkumar Abstract: This paper seeks to examine whether famines occur- ring during the colonial period affect development outcomes in the present day. We compute district level measures of economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure using cross-sectional satellite luminosity, census data, and household survey data. We then use a panel of recorded famine severity and rain- fall data in colonial Indian districts to construct cross-sectional counts measures of famine occurrence. Finally, we regress modern day outcomes on the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era, with and without various controls. We then instrument for famine occurrence with climate data in the form of negative rainfall shocks to ensure exogeneity. We find that districts which suffered more famines during the colonial era have higher levels of economic development; however, high rates of famine occurrence are also associated with a larger percentage of the labor force working in agriculture, lower rural consumption, and higher rates of income inequality. We attempt to explain these findings by showing that famine occurrence is simultaneously related to urbanization rates and agricultural development. Overall, this suggests that the long-run effects of natural disasters which primarily afflict people and not infrastructure are not al- ways straightforward to predict. 1. Introduction What are the impacts of short-term natural disasters in the long-run, and how do they affect economic development? Are these impacts different in the case of disasters which harm people but do not affect physical infrastructure? While there is ample theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of devastating natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, there are relatively few studies on the long-term consequences of short-term disasters such as famines. Further- more, none of the literature focuses on society-wide development outcomes. The case of colonial India provides a well-recorded setting to examine such a question, with an unfortunate history of dozens of famines throughout the British Raj. Many regions were struck multiple times during this period, to the extent that historian Mike Davis characterizes them as “Victorian Holocausts” (Davis 2001 p.9). While the short-term impacts of famines are indisputable, their long-term effects on economic development, perhaps through human development patterns, are less widely understood. The United Kingdom formally ruled India from 1857 to 1947, following an ear- lier period of indirect rule by the East India Company. The high tax rate imposed on peasants in rural and agricultural India was a principal characteristic of British governance. Appointed intermediaries, such as the landowning zamindar caste in Bengal, served to collect these taxes. Land taxes imposed on farmers often ranged from two-thirds to half of their produce, but could be as high as ninety to ninety-five percent. Many of the intermediaries coerced their tenants into farming only cash crops instead of a mix of cash crops and agricultural crops (Dutt 2001). Aside from high taxation, a laissez-faire attitude to drought relief was another principal characteristic of British agricultural policy in India. Most senior officials in the imperial administration believed that serious relief efforts would cause more harm than they would do good and consequently, were reluctant to dispatch aid to afflicted areas (ibid). The consequences of these two policies were some of the most severe and frequent famines in recorded history, such as the Great Indian Famine of 1893, during which an estimated 5.5 to 10.3 million peasants perished from starvation alone, and over 60 million are believed to have suffered hardship (Fieldhouse 1996). Our paper focuses on three sets of outcomes in order to assess the long-term impact of famines. First, we measure macroeconomic measures of overall development, such as rural consumption per capita and the composition of the labor force. We also use nighttime luminosity gathered from satellite data as a proxy for GDP, of which measurement using survey data can be unreliable. Second, we look at measures of human development: inequality, social mobility, and education, constructed from the India Human Development Survey I and II. Finally, we examine infrastructure, computing effects on village-level electrification, numbers of medical centers, and bus service availability. To examine impacts, we regress famine occurrence on these outcomes via ordinary least-squares (OLS). We use an instrumental-variables (IV) approach to ensure a causal interpretation via as-good-as-random assignment (1). We first estimate famine occurrence, the endogenous independent variable, as a function of rainfall shocks–a plausibly exogenous instrument–before regressing outcomes on predicted famine occurrence via two-stage least-squares (2SLS). Since the survey data are comparatively limited, we transform and aggregate panel data on rainfall and famines as counts in order to use them in a cross-section with the contemporary outcomes. We find for many outcomes that there is indeed a marginal effect of famines in the long-run, although where it is significant it is often quite small. Where famines do have a significant impact on contemporary outcomes, the results follow an interesting pattern : a higher rate of famine occurrence in a given district is associated with greater economic development yet worse rural outcomes and higher inequality. Specifically, famine occurrence has a small but positive impact on nighttime luminosity–our proxy for economic development–and smaller, negative impacts on rural consumption and the proportion of adults with a college education. At the same time, famine occurrence is also associated with a higher proportion of the labor force being employed in the agricultural sector as well as a higher level of inequality as measured by the Gini index (2). Moreover, we find limited evidence that famine occurrence has a slightly negative impact on infrastructure as more famines are associated with reduced access to medical care and bus service. We do not find that famines have any significant impact on social mobility–specifically, intergenerational income mobility–or infrastructure such as electrification in districts. This finding contradicts much of the established literature on natural disasters, which has predominantly found large and wholly negative effects. We at- tempt to explain this disparity by analyzing the impact of famines on urbanization rates to show that famine occurrence may lead to a worsening urban-rural gap in long-run economic development. Thus, we make an important contribution to the existing literature and challenge past research with one of our key findings: short-term natural disasters which do not destroy physical infrastructure may have unexpectedly positive outcomes in the long-run. While the instrumental estimates are guaranteed to be free of omitted variable bias, the OLS standard errors allow for more precise judgments due to smaller confidence intervals. In around half of our specifications, the Hausman test for endogeneity fails to reject the null hypothesis of exogeneity, indicating that the ordinary-least squares and instrumental variables results are equally valid (3). How- ever, the instrumental variables estimate helps address other problems, such as attenuation bias, due to possible measurement error (4). Section 2 presents a review of the literature and builds a theoretical framework for understanding the impacts of famines on modern-day outcomes. Section 3 describes our data, variable construction, and summary statistics. Sections 4 and 5 present our results using ordinary least-squares and instrumental two-stage least- squares approaches. Section 6 discusses and attempts to explain these results. 2. Review and Theoretical Framework 1. The Impact of Natural Disasters Most of the current literature on natural disasters as a whole pertains to physical destructive phenomena such as severe weather or seismic events. Moreover, most empirical studies, such as Nguyen et al (2020) and Sharma and Kolthoff (2020) , focus on short-run aspects of natural disasters relating to various facets of proxi- mate causes (Huff 2020) or pathways of short-term recovery (Sharma and Kolthoff 2020). Famines are a unique kind of natural disaster in that they greatly affect crops, people, and animals but leave physical infrastructure and habitation relatively unaffected. We attempt to take this element of famines into account when explaining our results. Of the portion of the literature that focuses on famines, most results center on individual biological outcomes such as height, nutrition, (Cheng and Hui Shui 2019) or disease (Hu et al. 2017. A percentage of the remaining studies fixate on long-term socioeconomic effects at the individual level (Thompson et al. 2019). The handful of papers that do analyze broad long-term socioeconomic outcomes, such as Ambrus et al. (2015) and Cole et al. (2019), all deal with either long-term consequences of a single, especially severe natural disaster or the path dependency effects that may occur because of the particular historical circumstances of when a disaster occurs, such as in Dell (2013). On the other hand, our analysis spans several occurrences of the same type of phenomenon in a single, relatively stable sociohistorical setting, thereby utilizing a much larger and more reliable sample of natural disasters. Thus, our paper is the first to examine the long-term effects of a very specific type of natural disaster, famine, on the overall development of an entire region, by considering multiple occurrences thereof. Prior econometric literature on India’s famine era has highlighted other areas of focus, such as Burgess and Donaldson (2012), which shows that trade openness helped mitigate the catastrophic effects of famine. There is also plenty of historical literature on the causes and consequences of the famines, most notable in academic analyses from British historians (contemporarily, Carlyle 1900 and Ewing 1919; more recently Fieldhouse), which tend to focus on administrative measures, or more specifically, the lack thereof. In terms of the actual effects of famine, all of the established literature asserts that natural disasters overwhelmingly influence economic growth through two main channels: destruction of infrastructure and resulting loss of human capital (Lima and Barbosa 2019, Nguyen et al. 2020, Cole et al. 2019), or sociopolitical historical consequences, such as armed conflict (Dell 2013, Huff 2019). Famines pose an interesting question in this regard since they tend to result in severe loss of human capital through population loss due to starvation but generally result in smaller-scale infrastructure losses (Agbor and Price 2013). This is especially the case for rural India, which suffered acute famines while having little infrastructure in place (Roy 2006). We examine three types of potential outcomes: overall economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure, as outlined in section three. Our results present a novel finding in that famine occurrence seems to positively impact certain outcomes while negatively impacting most others, which we attempt to explain by considering the impact of famines on urbanization rates. Famines can impact outcomes through various mechanisms; therefore, we leave the exact causal mechanism unspecified and instead treat famines as generic shocks with subsequent recovery of unknown speed. If famines strike repeatedly, their initial small long-term effects on outcomes can escalate. In order to distinguish long- run effects of famines, we construct a simple growth model where flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after the shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically. Our intuition for the basis of distinguishing a long-run effect of famines rests on a simple growth model in which flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after a shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically (5). Thus, over finite timespans, the differences in stock variables between districts that undergo famines and those that do not should be measurable even after multiple decades. As mentioned below, this is in line with more recent macroeconomic models of natural disasters such Hochrainer (2009) and Bakkensen and Barrage (2018). Assume colonial districts (indexed by i ) suffer n i famines over the time period (in our data, the years 1870 to 1930), approximated as average constant rates f i . The occurrence of famine can then be modeled by a Poisson process with interval parameter f i , which represents the expected time between famines–even though the exact time is random and thus unknown–until it is realized (6). For simplicity, we assume that famines cause damage d to a district’s economy, for which time r i is needed to recover to its assumed long-run, balanced growth path (7). We make no assumptions on the distributions of d and r i except that r i is dependent on d and that the average recovery time E[ r i] is similarly a function of E[ d ]. If the district had continued on the growth path directly without the famine, absent any confounding effects, it would counterfactually have more positive out- comes today by a factor dependent on niE[tf] and thus n i , the number of famines suffered. We cannot observe the counterfactuals (the outcome in the affected district had it not experienced a famine), so instead, we use the unaffected districts in the sample as our comparison group. Controlling for factors such as population and existing infrastructure, each district should provide a reasonably plausible counterfactual for the other districts in terms of the number of famines suffered. Then, the differences in outcomes among districts measured today, y i , can be modeled as a function of the differences in the number of famines, n i . Finally, across the entire set of districts, this can be used to represent the average outcome E[y i ] as a function of the number of famines, which forms the basis of our ordinary-least squares approach in section four. This assumes that the correlation between famine occurrence and outcome is equal to 0. To account for the possibility their correlation is non-zero, we also use rainfall shocks to isolate the randomized part of our independent variable in order to ensure that famine occurrence is uncorrelated with our outcome variables. The use of rainfall shocks, in turn, forms the basis of our instrumental variables approach in section five. The important question is the nature of the relationship between d and ri . While f can be easily inferred from our data, d and especially r are much more difficult to estimate without detailed, high-level, and accurate data. Since the historical record is insufficiently detailed to allow precise estimation of the parameters of such a model, we constrain the effects of famine to be linear in our estimation in sections four and five. 2. Estimation Having constrained the hypothesized effects of famine to be linear, in section four, we would prefer to estimate (1) below, where represents our estimate of the effect of famine severity ( famine i), measured as the number of famines undergone by the district, on the outcome variable outcome yi, and Xi is a vector of contem- porary (present-day) covariates, such as mean elevation and soil quality. The con- stant term captures the mean outcomes across all districts andis a district-specific error term. Much of the research on famine occurrence in colonial India attributes the occurrence of famines and their consequences to poor policies and administration by the British Raj. If this is the case, and these same policies hurt the development of districts in other ways, such as by stunting industrialization directly, then the estimation of (1) will not show the correct effect of famines per se on comparative economic development. Additionally, our observations of famines, which are taken indirectly from district-level colonial gazetteers and reports, may be subject to “measurement” error that is non-random. For example, the reporting of famines in such gazetteers may be more accurate in well-developed districts that received preferential treatment from British administrators. To solve this problem, we turn to the examples of Dell et al. (2012), Dell (2013), Hoyle (2010), and Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who use weather shocks as instruments for natural disaster severity. While Dell (2013) focuses on historical consequences arising from path dependency and Hoyle (2010) centralizes on productivity, the instrumental methodology itself is perfectly applicable to our work. Another contribution of our pa- per is to further the use of climate shocks as instruments. We expand upon the usage of climate shocks as instruments because they fit the two main criteria for an instrumental variable. Primarily, weather shocks are extremely short-term phenomena, so their occurrence is unlikely to be correlated with longer-term climate factors that may impact both historical and modern outcomes. Secondly, they are reasonably random and provide exogenous variation with which we can estimate the impact of famines in an unbiased manner. We first estimate equation (2) below before estimating (1) using the predicted occurrence of famine from (2): We calculate famine as the number of reported events occurring in our panel for a district and rainfall as the number of years in which the deviation of rainfall from the mean falls below a certain threshold, nominally the fifteenth and tenth percentiles of all rainfall deviations for that district. As in (1), there is a constant term and error term. As is standard practice, we include the control variables in the first-stage even though they are quite plausibly unrelated to the rainfall variable. This allows us to estimate the impacts of famine with a reasonably causal interpretation; since the assignment of climate shocks is ostensibly random, using them to “proxy” for famines in this manner is akin to “as good as random” estimation. The only issue with this first-stage specification is that while we instrument counts of famine with counts of lo w rainfall years, the specific years in which low rainfall occurs theoretically need not match up with years in which famine is recorded in a given district. Therefore, we would prefer to estimate (3) below instead, since it provides additional identification through a panel dataset. Any other climate factors should be demeaned out by the time effects. Other district characteristics that may influence agricultural productivity and therefore famine severity, such as soil quality, should be differenced out with district effects, represented by the parameters. Differences in administrative policy should be resolved with provincial fixed effects. Unfortunately, we would then be unable to implement the standard instrumental variables practice of including the control variables in both stages since our modern-day outcomes are cross-sectional (i.e, we only have one observation per district for those measures). Nevertheless, our specification in (2) should reason- ably provide randomness that is unrelated to long-term climate factors, as mentioned above. Finally, we collapse the panel by counting the number of famines that occur in the district over time in order to compare famine severity with our cross-sectional modern-day outcomes and to get an exogenous count measure of famine that we can use de novo in (1). To account for sampling variance in our modern-day estimates, we use error weights constructed from the current population of each district meaning that our approach in section 5 is technically weighted least-squares, not ordinary. While this should account for heteroscedasticity in the modern observations, we use robust SM estimators in our estimations (McKean 2004, Barrera and Yohai 2006) to assure that our standard errors on the historical famine and rainfall variables are correct (8). The results of these approaches are detailed in section six. 3. Data 1. Sources and Description Our principal data of interest is a historical panel compiled from a series of colonial district gazetteers by Srivastava (1968) and details famine severity at the district level over time in British India from 1870 to 1930. Donaldson and Burgess (2010) then code these into an ordinal scale by using the following methodology: 4 – District mentioned in Srivastava’s records as “intensely affected by famine” 3 – District mentioned as “severely affected” 2 – Mentioned as “affected” 1 – Mentioned as “lightly affected” 0 – Not mentioned 9 – Specifically mentioned as being affected by spillover effects from a neighbor- ing district (there are only four such observations, so we exclude them) In our own coding of the data, we categorize famines as codes 2, 3, and 4, with severe famines corresponding to codes 3 and 4. We compute further cross-sectional measures, chiefly the total number and proportion of famine-years that a district experienced over the sixty-year periods. This is equivalent to tabulating the frequency of code occurrences and adding the resulting totals for codes 2 to 4 to obtain a single count measure of famine. Our results are robust to using “severe” (codes 3 and 4) famines instead of codes 2, 3, and 4. Across the entire panel, codes from 0 to 4 occurred with the following frequencies: 4256, 35, 207, 542, and 45 respectively. We also supplemented this panel with panel data on rainfall over the same time period. Several thousand measuring stations across India collected daily rainfall data over the time period, which Donaldson (2012) annualizes and compares with crop data. The rainfall data in Donaldson (2012) represents the total rainfall in a given district over a year, categorized by growing seasons of various crops (for ex- ample, the amount of total rainfall in a district that fell during the wheat growing season). Since different districts likely had different shares of crops, we average over all crops to obtain an approximation of total rainfall over the entire year. We additionally convert this into a more relevant measure in the context of famine by considering only the rainfall that fell during the growing seasons of crops typically grown for consumption in the dataset; those being bajra, barley, gram (bengal), jowar (sorghum), maize, ragi (millet), rice, and wheat. Finally, to ensure additional precision over the growing season, we simply add rainfall totals during the grow- ing seasons of the two most important food crops - rice and wheat - which make up over eighty percent of food crops in the country (World Bank, UN-FAOSTAT). The two crops have nearly opposite growing seasons, so the distribution of rainfall over the combined growing seasons serves as an approximation of total annual rainfall. Our results are robust with regards to all three definitions; the pairwise correlations between the measures are never less than ninety percent. Moreover, the cross-sectional famine instruments constructed from these are almost totally identical as the patterns in each type of rainfall (that is, their statistical distributions over time) turn out to be the same. As expected, there appears to be significant variation in annual rainfall. The ex- ample of the Buldana district (historically located in the Bombay presidency, now in Maharashtra state) highlights this trend, as shown in Figure 1 on the following page. In general, the trends for both measures of rainfall over time are virtually in- distinguishable aside from magnitude. As anticipated, famine years are marked by severe and/or sustained periods of below-average rainfall although the correlation is not perfect. There are a few districts which have years with low rainfall and no recorded famines, but this can mostly be explained by a lack of sufficient records, especially in earlier years. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a few districts that recorded famines despite above-average rainfall, which could possibly be the result of non-climatic factors such as colonial taxation policies, conflicts, or other natural disasters, such as insect plagues. However, the relationship between rainfall patterns and famine occurrence suggests that we can use the former as an instrument for the latter especially since the correlation is not perfect, and famine occurrence is plausibly non-random due to the impact of British land ownership policies. Figure 1: Rainfall over time for Buldana from 1870 to 1920 Notes : The dashed line shows mean rainfall for all food crops; the solid line shows the total rainfall over the wheat and rice growing seasons. The blue and purple lines represent the historical means for these measures of rainfall. The rad shading denotes years in which famines are recorded as having affected the district. We construct count instruments for famines by first computing the historic mean and annual deviation for rainfall in each district. We can then count famines as years in which the deviation was in the bottom fifteenth percentile in order to capture relatively severe and negative rainfall shocks as plausible famine causes. For severe famines, we use the bottom decile instead. The percentiles were chosen based on famine severity so that the counts obtained using this definition were as similar as possible to the actual counts constructed from recorded famines (see above) in the panel dataset. For modern-day outcomes, we turn to survey data from the Indian census as well as the Indian Human Development Survey II, which details personal variables (ex. consumption and education), infrastructure measures (such as access to roads), and access to public goods (ex. hospital availability) at a very high level of geographical detail. An important metric constructed from the household development surveys is that of intergenerational mobility as measured by the expected income percentile of children whose parents belonged to a given income percentile, which we obtain from Novosad et al. (2019). Additionally, as survey data can often be unreliable, we supplement these with an analysis of satellite luminosity data, which provides measures of the (nighttime) luminosity of geographic cells, which should serve as a more reliable proxy for economic development, following Henderson et al. (2011) and Pinkovsky and Sala-i-Martin (2016). These data are mostly obtained from Novosad et. al (2018, 2019) and Iyer (2010), which we have aggregated to the district level. The outcomes variables are as follows: 1. Log absolute magnitude per capita. We intend this to serve as a proxy for a district’s economic development in lieu of reliable GDP data. This is the logarithm of the total luminosity observed in the district divided by the district’s population. These are taken from Vernon and Storeygard (2011) by way of Novosad et al. (2018). 2. Log rural consumption per capita. This is taken from the Indian Household Survey II by way of Novosad et al. (2019). 3. Share of the workforce employed in the cultivation sector, intended as a mea- sure of rural development and reliance on agriculture (especially subsistence agri- culture). This is taken from Iyer et al. (2010). 4. Gini Index, from Iyer (2010), as a measure of inequality. 5. Intergenerational income mobility (father-son pairs), taken from Novosad et al. (2018). Specifically, we consider the expected income percentile of sons in 2012 whose fathers were located in the 25th percentile for household income (2004), using the upper bound for robustness (9). 6. The percentage of the population with a college degree, taken from census data. 7. Electrification, i.e. the percent of villages with all homes connected to the power grid (even if power is not available twenty-four hours per day). 8. Percent of villages with access to a medical center, taken from Iyer (2010), as a measure of rural development in the aspect of public goods. 9. Percent of villages with any bus service, further intended as a measurement of public goods provision and infrastructure development. Broadly speaking, these can be classified into three categories with 1-3 representing broad measures of economic development, 4-6 representing inequality and human capital, and 7-9 representing the development of infrastructure and the provision of public goods. As discussed in section two, our preliminary hypothesis is that the occurrence of famines has a negative effect on district development, which is consistent with most of the literature on disasters. Hence, given a higher occurrence of famine, we expect that districts suffering from more famines during the colonial period will be characterized by lower levels of development, being (1) less luminous at night, (2) poorer in terms of a lower rural consumption, and (3) more agricultural, i.e have a higher share of the labor force working in agriculture. Similarly, with regards to inequality and human capital, we expect that more famine-afflicted districts will have (4) higher inequality in terms of a higher Gini index, (5) lower upward social mobility in terms of a lower expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th income percentile, and (6) a lower percentage of adults with a college education. Finally, by the same logic, these districts should be relatively underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, and thus (7) lack access to power, (8) lack access to medical care, and (9) lack access to transportation services. Finally, even though our independent variable when instrumented should be exogenous, we attempt to control for geographic and climatic factors affecting agriculture and rainfall in each district, namely: - Soil type and quality (sandy, rocky or barren, etc.) - Latitude (degree) and mean temperature (degrees Celsius) - Coastal location (coded as a dummy variable) - Area in square kilometers (it should be noted that district boundaries correspond well, but not perfectly, to their colonial-era counterparts) As mentioned previously, research by Iyer and Banerjee (2008, 2014) suggests that the type of land-tenure system implemented during British rule has had a huge impact on development in the districts (10). We also argue that it may be re- lated to famine occurrence directly (for example, in that tenure systems favoring landlords may experience worse famines), in light of the emerging literature on agricultural land rights, development, and food security (Holden and Ghebru 2016, Maxwell and Wiebe 1998). Specifically, we consider specifications with and without the proportion of villages in the district favoring a landlord or non-land- lord tenure system, obtained from Iyer (2010). In fact, the correlation between the two variables in our dataset is slightly above 0.23, which is not extremely high but enough to be of concern in terms of avoiding omitted variable bias. We ultimately consider four specifications for each dependent variable based on the controls in X from equation (1): no controls, land tenure, geography, and land tenure with geography. Each of these sets of controls addresses a different source of omitted variable bias: the first, land-tenure, addresses the possibility of British land-tenure policies causing both famines and long-term development outcomes. The second, geography, addresses the possibility of factors such as mean elevation and temperature impacting crop growth while also influencing long-term development (for example, if hilly and rocky districts suffer from more famines because they are harder to grow crops in but also suffer from lower development because they are harder to build infrastructure in or access via transportation). We avoid using contemporary controls for the outcome variables (that is, including infrastructure variables, income per capita, or welfare variables in the right- hand side) because many of these could reasonably be the result of the historical effects (the impact of famines) we seek to study. As such, including them as controls would artificially dilate the impact of our independent variable. 2. Summary statistics Table I presents summary statistics of our cross-sectional dataset on the follow- ing page. One cause for potential concern is that out of the over 400 districts in colonial India, we have only managed to capture 179 in our sample. This is due chiefly to a paucity of data regarding rainfall; there are only 191 districts captured in the original rainfall data from Donaldson (2012). In addition, the changing of district names and boundaries over time makes the matching of old colonial districts with modern-day administrative subdivisions more imprecise than we would like. Nevertheless, these districts cover a reasonable portion of modern India as well as most of the regions which underwent famines during imperial rule. The small number of districts may also pose a problem in terms of the standard errors on our coefficients, as the magnitude of the impacts of famines that occurred over a hundred years ago on outcomes today is likely to be quite small. Table 1 – Summary Statistics Source : Author calculations, from Iyer (2010), Iyer and Bannerjee (2014), Novosad et. al (2018), Asher and No- vosad (2019), Donaldson and Burgess (2012). 4. Ordinary Least Squares Although we suspect that estimates of famine occurrence and severity based on recorded historical observations may be nonrandom for several reasons (mentioned in section two and three), we first consider direct estimation of (1) from section two. For convenience, equation (1) is reprinted below: As in the previous section, famine refers to the number of years that are coded 2, 3, or 4 in famine severity as described in Srivastava (1968). X is the set of con- temporary covariates, also described in section three. We estimate four separate specifications of (1) where X varies: 1. No controls, i.e. X is empty. 2. Historical land tenure, to capture any effects related to British land policy in causing both famines and long-term developmental outcomes. 3. Geographical controls relating to climatic and terrestrial factors, such as temperature, latitude, soil quality, etc. 4. Both (2) and (3). Table II presents the estimates for the coefficients on famines and tenure for our nine dependent variables on the following page (we omit coefficients and confidence intervals for the geographic variables for reasons of brevity and relevance in terms of interpretation). In general, the inclusion or exclusion of controls does not greatly change the magnitudes of the estimates nor their significance, except for a few cases. We discuss effects for each dependent variable below: Log of total absolute magnitude in the district per capita : The values for famine suggest that interestingly, each additional famine results in anywhere from 1.8 to 3.6 percent more total nighttime luminosity per person in the district. As mentioned in section three, newer literature shows that nighttime luminosity is a far more reliable gauge of development than reported survey measures such as GDP, so this result is not likely due to measurement error. Thus, as the coefficient on famine is positive, it seems that having suffered more famines is positively related to development. This in fact is confirmed by the instrumental variables (IV) estimates in Table III (see section five). Curiously, the inclusion of tenure and geography controls separately does not change the significance, but including both of them together in the covariates generates far larger confidence intervals than expected and reduces the magnitude of the effect by an entire order of magnitude. This may be because each set of controls tackles a different source of omitted variable bias. As expected, however, land tenure plays a significant role in predicting a district’s development; even a single percent increase in the share of villages with a tenant-favorable system is associated with a whopping 73-80% additional night- time luminosity per person. Log rural consumption per capita : We find evidence that additional famines are associated with lower rural consumption, albeit on a minuscule scale. This suggests that the beneficial effect of famines on development may not be equal across urban and rural areas but instead concentrated in cities. For example, there might be a causal pathway that implies faster urbanization in districts that undergo more famines. Unlike with luminosity, historical land tenure does not seem to play a role in rural consumption. Percent of the workforce employed in cultivation : As expected, additional famines seem to play a strongly significant but small role with regards to the labor patterns in the district. Districts with more famines seem to have nearly one percent of the labor force working in cultivation for each additional famine, suggesting famines may inhibit development of industries other than agriculture and cultivation. Our instrumental variables estimates confirm this. Puzzlingly, land tenure does not seem to be related to this very much at all. Gini Index : The coefficients for the number of famines seem to be difficult to interpret as both those for the specification with no controls and with both sets of controls are statistically significant with similar magnitudes yet opposite signs. The confidence interval for the latter is slightly narrower. This is probably because the true estimate is zero or extremely close to zero, and the inclusion or exclusion of controls is enough to narrowly affect the magnitude to as to flip the sign of the co- efficient. In order to clarify this, more data is needed – i.e for more of the districts in colonial India to be matched in our original sample. At the very least, we can say that land tenure clearly has a large and significant positive association with in- equality. Unfortunately, this association cannot be confirmed as causal due to the lack of an instrument for land tenure which covers enough districts of British India. However, as Iyer and Banerjee (2014) argue, the assignment of tenure systems itself was plausibly random (having been largely implemented on the whims of British administrators) so that one could potentially interpret the results as causal with some level of caution. Intergenerational income mobility : Similarly, we do not find evidence of an association between the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era and social mobility in the present day, but we do find a strong impact of land tenure, which makes sense to the reported institutional benefits of tenant-favorable systems in encouraging development as well as the obvious benefits for the tenants and their descendants themselves. Each one-percent increase in the share of villages in a district that uses a tenant-favorable system in the colonial era is associated with anywhere from ten to thirteen percent higher expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th percentile in 1989 although the estimates presented in Table II are an upper bound. College education : We find extremely limited evidence that famines in the colonial period are associated with less human capital in the present day, with a near-zero effect of additional famines on the share of adults in a district with a college degree (in fact, rounded to zero with five to six decimal places). Land tenure similarly has very little or no effect. Electrification, access to medical care , bus service : All three of these infra- structure and public goods variables show a negligible effect of famines, but strong impacts of historical land tenure. Ultimately, we find that famines themselves seem to have some positive impact on long-term development despite also being associated with many negative out- comes, such as a greater share of the workforce employed in agriculture (i.e as opposed to more developed activities such as manufacturing or service). Another finding of note is that while famines do not seem to have strong associations with all of our measures, land tenure does. This suggests that the relationship between land-tenure and famine is worth looking into. The existence of bias in the recording of famines, as well as the potential for factors that both cause famines while simultaneously affecting long-term outcomes, present a possible problem with these estimates. We have already attempted to account for one of those, namely historical land tenure systems. Indeed, in most of the specifications, including tenure in the regression induces a decrease in the magnitude of the coefficient on famine. As the effect of famine tends to be extremely small to begin with, the relationship is not always clear. Other errors are also possible. For example, it is possible that a given district experienced a famine in a given year, but insufficient records of its occurrence remained by 1968. Then, Srivastiva (1968) would have assigned that district a code of 0 for that year, but the correct code should have been higher. Indeed, as described in section three, a code of 0 corresponds to a code of “not mentioned”, which encompasses both “not mentioned at all” and “not mentioned as being affected by famine” (Donaldson and Burgess 2010). While measurement error in the dependent variable is usually not a problem, error in the independent variable can lead to attenuation bias in the coefficients since the ordinary least-squares algorithm minimizes the error on the dependent variable by estimating coefficients for the independent variables. The greater this error, the more the ordinary least- squares method will bias the estimated coefficients towards zero in an attempt to minimize error in the dependent variable (Riggs et al. 1978). For these reasons, we turn to instrumental variables estimation in section five in an attempt to provide additional identification. Table 2 – Ordinary Least-Square Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). 5. Weather Shocks as an Instrument for Famine Severity As explained in section two, there are many possible reasons why recorded famine data may not be exogenous. In any case, it would be desirable to have a truly exogenous measure of famine, for which we turn to climate data in the form of rainfall shocks. Rainfall is plausibly connected to the occurrence of famines, especially in light of the colonial government’s laissez-faire approach to famine relief (Bhatia 1968). For example, across all districts, mean rainfall averaged around 1.31m in years without any famine and around 1.04m in districts which were at least somewhat affected by famine (code 1 or above). Figure 2 below shows that there is a very clear association between rainfall activity and famines in colonial India, although variability in climate data as well as famine and agricultural policy means that there are some high-rainfall districts which do experience famines as well as low-rainfall districts which do not experience as many famines, as noted in section three. Figure 2: Associations between famine occurrence and rainfall trends It should be clear from the first three scatterplots above that there is a negative relationship between the amount of rainfall a district receives and the general prevalence of famine but more importantly, the total size of the rainfall shocks and the total occurrences of famine in that district. From the final plot we see that when we classify low-rainfall years by ranking the deviations from the mean, counting the number of years in which these deviations are in the bottom fifteenth percentile corresponds well to the actual number of recorded famines for each district. In order to use this to measure famine exogenously, we first estimate (2) (see below, section two and section three) where we predict the number of famines from the number of negative rainfall shocks as represented by deviation from the mean in the bottom fifteen percent of all deviations before estimating (1) using this predicted estimate of famine in place of the recorded values. Our reduced form11 estimates, where we first run (1) using the number of negative rainfall shocks directly, are presented on the following pages in Table III (11). The reduced form equation is shown as (4) below as well: Table 3 – Reduced form estimates for IV Notes : Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). From Table III, it would appear that negative rainfall shocks have similar effects on the outcome variables as do recorded famines in terms of the statistical significance of the coefficients on the independent variable. There is also the added benefit that we can confirm our very small and slightly negative effects of famines on the proportion of adults with a college education: for each additional year of exceptionally low rainfall in a district, the number of adults with a college education in 2011 decreases by 0.1%. In addition, whereas the coefficients in Table II were conflicting, Table III provides evidence in favor of the view that additional famines increase inequality in a district as measured by the Gini index. However, the magnitudes of the effects of famines or low-rainfall years are pre- dominantly larger than their counterparts in Table II to a rather puzzling extent. While we stated earlier in section three that famines and rainfall are not perfectly correlated, it might be that variation in historical rainfall shocks can better explain variation in outcomes in the present day. In order to get a better understanding of the relationship between the two, it would first be wise to look at the coefficients presented in Table IV, which are the results of the two-stage least-squares estimation using low-rainfall years as an instrument for recorded famines. Table IV follows the patterns established in Table II and Table III with regards to the significance of the coefficients as well as their signs; famines have a statistically significant and positive impact on nighttime luminosity, a significant negative impact on rural consumption, and a positive impact on the percent of the labor force employed in agriculture. The results with respect to Table II, concerning the impact of famine on the proportion of adults with a college education, are also very similar. Most other specifications do not show a significant effect of famine on the respective outcome with the exception of access to medical care. Unlike in Table II and Table III, each additional famine is associated with an additional 11.2 to 12.5 percent of villages in that district having some form of medical center or service readily accessible (according to the specifications with geographic controls, which we argue are more believable than the ones without). However, this relationship breaks down at the level of famines seen in some of our districts; a district having suffered nine or ten famines would see more than 100% of its villages having access to medical centers (which is clearly nonsensical), suggesting we may need to look for nonlinearity in the effects of famine in section six. Unfortunately, unlike in Table III, it seems that we cannot conclude much regarding the effect of famines on intergenerational mobility as the coefficients are contradictory and generally not statistically significant. For example, the coefficient on famine in the model without any controls is highly significant and positive, but the coefficient in the model with all controls is not significant and starkly negative. The same is true for the effect of famines on the Gini index. One possibility is that the positive coefficients on famine for both of these dependent variables are driven by outliers as our data was relatively limited due to factors mentioned in section 2. The magnitudes of the coefficients in Table IV are generally smaller than those presented in Table III but still significantly larger than the ones in Table II. For ex- ample, in Table II, the ordinary least-squares model suggests that each additional historical famine is associated with an additional 0.5 to 0.9 percent of the district’s workforce being employed in cultivation in 2011, but in Table IV, these numbers range from 1.5 to 4.3 percent for the same specifications, representing almost a tenfold increase in magnitude in some cases. One reason for this is the possibility attenuation bias in the ordinary least-squares regression; here, there should not be any attenuation bias in our results as the use of instruments which we assume are not correlated with any measurement error in the recording of famines excludes that possibility (Durbin 1954). On the other hand, the Hausman test for endogeneity (the econometric gold standard for testing a model’s internal validity) often fails to reject the null hypothesis that the recorded famine variable taken from Srivastava (1968) and Donaldson and Burgess (2012) is exogenous. To be precise, in one sense the test fails to reject the null hypothesis that the rainfall data add no new “information”, which is not captured in the reported famine data. It is possible that our rainfall instrument, as used in equation (2) is invalid due to endogeneity with the regression model specified in equation (1) despite being excluded from it. The only way to test this possibility is to conduct a Sargan-Han- sen test12 on the model’s overidentifying restrictions; however, we are unable to conduct the test as we have a single instrument. It follows that our model is not actually overidentified (12). Table 4 –Instrumental Variables Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of years with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above), instrumented with number of low-rainfall years (rainfall deviation from historic mean in bottom fifteenth percentile). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). We also need to consider the viability of our instrumental variables estimates. Table V on the following page offers mixed support. While the weak-instrument test always rejects the null-hypothesis of instrument weakness, for models with more controls, namely those with geographic controls, the first-stage F-values – the test statistics of interest– are relatively small. Which is not encouraging as generally a value of ten or more is recommended to be assured of instrument strength (Staiger and Stock 1997) (13). In Table IV, we show confidence intervals obtained by inverting the Anderson-Rubin test, which accounts for instrument strength in determining the statistical significance of the coefficients. These are wider in the models with more controls, although not usually wide enough to move coefficients from statistically significant to statistically insignificant. However, additional complications arise when considering the Hausman tests for endogeneity. The p-values in Table V suggest that around half of the regression specifications in Table IV do not suffer from a lack of exogeneity, meaning that the ordinary least-squares results are just as valid for those specifications. A more serious issue is that the Hausman test rejects the null-hypothesis of exogeneity for four out of nine outcome variables. Combined with the fact that the first-stage F-statistics are concerningly low for the specifications with geographic controls, this means that not only are the ordinary least-squares results likely to be biased, but the instrumental variables estimates are also likely to be imprecise. This is most concerning for the results related to rural consumption and percent of the workforce in agriculture. Conversely, the results for nighttime luminosity are not affected as the Hausman tests do not reject exogeneity for that outcome variable. While we might simply use the ordinary-least squares results to complement those obtained via two-stage least-squares, the latter are lacking in instrument strength. More importantly, the differences in magnitude between the coefficients presented in Table II and in Table IV are too large to allow this use without abandoning consistency in the interpretation of the coefficients. Ultimately, given that the Hausman tests show that instrumentation is at least somewhat necessary, and the actual p-values for the weak-instrument test are still reasonably low (being less than 0.05 even in the worst case), we prefer to uphold the instrumental variables results as imperfect as some of them may be. We argue that it is better to have un- biased estimates from the instrumental variables procedure (IV), even if they may be less unreliable, than to risk biased results due to endogeneity problems present in ordinary least squares (OLS). Table 5 – Instrumental Variables Diagnostics Notes : The weak-instrument test p-value is obtained from comparison of the first-stage F-statistic with the chi- square distribution with degrees of freedom corresponding to the model (number of data points minus number of estimands). Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. 6. Discussion Our data suggest that there are long-run impacts of historical famines. Tables II, IV, and VII clearly show that the number of historical famines has a[72] [73] [MOU74] statistically significant, though small impact on the following: average level of economic development as approximated by nighttime luminosity, the share of the population employed in cultivation, consumption, inequality, and the provision of medical services in contemporary Indian districts. There appear to be no discernible effects on intergenerational income mobility or basic infrastructure such as electrification. The effects are quite small and are generally overshadowed by other geographical factors such as climate (i.e., latitude and temperature). They are also small in comparison to the impact of other colonial-era policies such as land-tenure systems. Nevertheless, they are still interesting to observe given that the famines in question occurred nearly a hundred years prior to the measurement of the outcomes in question. We contend that they reveal lasting and significant consequences of British food policy in colonial India. Table IV suggests that a hypothetical district having suffered ten famines - which is not atypical in our data - may have developed as much as ninety-four percent more log absolute magnitude per capita, around forty percent less consumption per capita in rural areas , 150% percent more of the workforce employed in cultivation, and a Gini index nearly ten percent greater than a district which suffered no famines. As to the question of whether or not the famines were directly caused by British policy, the results suggest that, at the very least, British nineteenth-century laissez-faire attitudes to disaster management have had long-lasting consequences for India. Moreover, these estimates are causal as the use of rainfall shocks as instruments provides a means of estimation which is “as good as random.” Therefore, we can confidently state that these effects are truly the result of having undergone the observed famines. In considering whether to prefer our instrumental estimates or our least-squares estimates, we must mainly weigh the problems of a potentially weak instrument versus the benefits of a causal interpretation. We argue that we should still trust the IV estimates even though the instrument is not always as strong as we would like. First of all, the instrumentation of the recorded famine data with the demeaned rainfall data provides plausible causal estimation due to the fact that the rainfall measures are truly as good as random. Even if the recorded famine measure is itself reasonably exogenous as suggested by the Hausman tests, we argue that it is better to be sure. Using instruments for a variable which is already exogenous will not introduce additional bias into the results and may even help reduce attenuation bias from any possible measurement error. The Hausman test, after all, can- not completely eliminate this possibility; it can only suggest how likely or unlikely it is. In this sense, the instrumental estimates allow us to be far more confident in our assessment of the presence or absence of the long-run impact of famines. Though the first-stage F-statistics are less than ten, they are still large enough to reject the null hypothesis of instrument weakness as shown by the p-values for this test in Table V. We argue that it is better to be consistent than pick and choose which set of estimates we want to accept for a given dependent variable and model. We made this choice because the differences in magnitude between the IV and OLS coefficients are too large to do otherwise. A more interesting question raised by the reported coefficients in Table II, Table IV, and Table VII has to do with their sign. Why do districts more afflicted historically by famines seem to have more economic development yet worse out- comes in terms of rural consumption and inequality by our models? This could be due to redistributive preferences associated or possibly even caused by famines; Gualtieri et al. pose this hypothesis in their paper on earthquakes in Italy. We note that districts suffering more famines in the colonial era are more “rural” to- day in that they tend to have a greater proportion of their labor force working in cultivation. This cannot be a case of mere association where more rural districts are more susceptible to famine as our instrumental estimates in Table IV suggest otherwise. Rather, we explore the possibility that post-independence land reform in India was greater in relatively more agricultural districts. Much of the literature on land-tenure suggests that redistributing land from large landowners to smaller farmers is associated with positive effects for productivity and therefore, economic development (Iyer and Banerjee 2005, Varghese 2019). If the historical famines are causally associated with districts having less equal land tenure at independence, then this would explain their positive, though small, impact on economic development by way of inducing more land reform in those districts. On the other hand, if they are causally associated with districts remaining more agricultural in character at independence, and a district’s “agriculturalness” is only indirectly associated with land reform (in they only benefit because they have more agricultural land, so they benefit more from the reform), this would indicate that famines have a small and positive impact on economic development through a process that is less directly causal. Although we are unable to observe land-tenure and agricultural occupations immediately at independence, we are able to supplement our data with addition- al state-level observations of land-reform efforts in Indian states from 1957-1992 compiled in Besley and Burgess (2010) and aggregate the district-level observations of famines in our dataset by state (14). If our hypothesis above is correct, then we should see a positive association between the number of historical famines in a state’s districts and the amount of land-reform legislation passed by that state after independence, keeping in mind that provincial and state borders were almost completely reorganized after independence. Although this data is quite coarse, being on the state level, it is widely available. However, the plot below suggests completely the opposite relationship as each additional famine across the state’s districts appears to be associated with nearly 0.73 fewer land-reform acts. Even after removing the outlier of West Bengal, which underwent far more numerous land reforms due to the ascendancy of the Communist Party of India in that state, the relationship is still quite apparent; every two additional famines are associated with almost one fewer piece of land-reform legislation post-independence. Figure 3: Historical Famine Occurrence vs Post-independence land reforms Figure 3 with West Bengal removed Therefore, there seems to be little evidence that famines are associated with land-reforms at all. This is quite puzzling because it is difficult to see how famine occurrence could lead to positive economic development while hurting outcomes such as inequality, consumption, and public goods provision. One potential explanation is that famines lead to higher urban development while hurting rural development, which would suggest a key impact of famine occurrence is the worsening of an urban-rural divide in economic development. This would explain how high er famine occurrence is linked with higher night-time luminosity, which would itself be positively associated with urbanization but is also linked with lower rural consumption, higher inequality (which may be the result of a stronger rural-urban divide), and a higher proportion of the workforce employed in the agricultural sector. For example, it is highly plausible that famines depopulate rural areas, leaving survivors to concentrate in urban centers, where famine relief is more likely to be available. Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who find that historical famine relief tended to be more effective in areas better served by rail networks, support this explanation. At the same time, the population collapse in rural areas would leave most of the workforce employed in subsistence agriculture going forward. Thus, if famines do lead to more people living in urban areas while simultaneously increasing the proportion of the remaining population employed in agriculture, then they would also exacerbate inequality and worsen rural, economic out- comes. If the urbanization effect is of greater magnitude, this would also explain the slight increase in night-time luminosity and electrification. This is somewhat supported by the plots in Figure 4, in which urbanization is defined as the proportion of a district’s population that lives in urban areas as labeled by the census. It appears that urbanization is weakly associated with famine occurrence (especially when using rainfall shocks) and positively associated with nighttime luminosity and inequality while negatively associated with rural consumption and agricultural employment as hypothesized above. However, instrumental estimates of urbanization as a result of famine detailed in Table VI only weakly support the idea that famine occurrence causally impacts urbanization as only the estimation without any controls is statistically significant. Figure 4: Urbanization Rates vs. Famine occurrence and Development outcomes Notes : The first two plots (in the top row) depict urbanization against famine occurrence and negative rainfall shocks. The rest of the plots depict various outcomes (discussed above) against the urbanization rate. Table VI –Urbanization Vs. Famine Occurrence Notes : Independent variable is percent of a district’s population that is urban as defined in the 2011 Indian census. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). Nevertheless, this represents a far more likely explanation for our results than land reform, especially since the land reform mechanism implies that famine occurrence would be associated with better rural outcomes. In other words, if famines being associated with land-reform at independence was the real explanation behind our results, because the literature on land-reform suggests that it is linked with improved rural development, we would not expect to see such strongly negative rural impacts of famine in our results. Therefore, not only is the explanation of differential urban versus rural development as a result of famine occurrence better supported by our data, it also constitutes a more plausible explanation for our findings. While we do not have enough data to investigate exactly how famine occurrence seems to worsen urban-rural divides in economic development (for example, rural population collapse as hypothesized above), such a question would certainly be a key area of future study. Conclusion In this paper, we have shown that famines occurring in British India have a statistically significant long-run impact on present-day outcomes by using both ordinary least-squares as well as instrumenting for famine with climate shocks in the form of deviated rainfall. In particular, the occurrence of famine seems to ex- acerbate a rural-urban divide in economic development. Famines appear to cause a small increase in overall economic development, but lower consumption and welfare in rural areas while also worsening wealth inequality. This is supported by the finding that famines appear to lead to slightly higher rates of urbanization while simultaneously leading to a higher proportion of a district’s labor force remaining employed in the agricultural sector. Even though our ordinary-least squares measures are generally acceptable, we point to the similar instrumental variable estimates as stronger evidence of the causal impact of the famines. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that negative cli- mate shocks combined with certain disaster management policies, such as British colonial laissez-faire approaches to famine in India, may have significant, though counter-intuitive, impacts on economic outcomes in the long-run. Endnotes 1 One can essentially understand this technique as manipulating the independent variable, which may not be randomly assigned, via a randomly assigned instrument. 2 The Gini index measures the distribution of wealth or income across individuals, with a score of zero corresponding to perfectly equal distribution and a score of one corresponding to a situation where one individual holds all of the wealth or earns all of the income in the group. 3 The Durbin-Wu-Hausman test essentially asks whether adding the instrument changes bias in the model . A rejection of the null hypothesis implies that differences in coefficients between OLS and IV are due to adding the instrument, whereas the null hypothesis assumes that the independent variable(s) are already exogenous and so adding an instrument contributes no new information to the model. 4 Attenuation bias occurs when there is measurement error in the independent variable, which biases estimates downward due to the definition of the least-squares estimator as one which minimizes squared error on the axis of the dependent variable. See Durbin (1954) for a detailed discussion. 5 Classical growth theory, such as in the Solow-Swan (1957) and Romer (1994) implies long-run convergence and therefore that districts would have similar outcomes today regardless of the number of famines they underwent. However, this is at odds with most of the empirical literature as discussed previously, in which there are often measurable long-term effects to natural disasters. 6 A Poisson process models count data via a random variable following a Poisson distribution. 7 Although we use the term damage, the impact to the economy need not be negative – indeed, we find that some impacts of famine occurrence are positive in sections four and five, which we attempt to explain in section seven. 8 Normally, OLS assumes that the variance of the error term is not correlated with the independent variable(s) i.e the errors are homoscedastic. If this is not true, i.e the errors are heteroscedastic, then the standard errors will be too small. Robust least-squares estimation calculates the OLS standard errors in a way that does not depend on the assumption that the errors are homoscedastic. 9 So, for example, if this value is 25, then there is on average no mobility on average, as sons would be expected to remain in the same income percentile as their fathers. Similarly, if it is less than (greater than) 25, then there would be downward (upward) mobility. A value of 50 would indicate perfect mobility, i.e no relationship between fathers’ income percentiles and those of their sons. 10 For a brief overview of the types of systems employed by the East India Company and Crown administrators, see Iyer and Banerjee (2008), or see Tirthankar (2006) for a more detailed discussion. 11 While reduced form estimates–that is, estimating the outcomes as direct functions of the exogenous variables rather than via a structural process–are often not directly interpretable, they can serve to confirm the underlying trends in the data (for example, via the sign of the coefficients), which is why we choose to include them here. 12 The Sargan-Hansen test works very similarly to the Durbin-Wu-Hausman test, but instead uses a quadratic form on the cross-product of the residuals and instruments. 13 To be precise, this heuristic is technically only valid with the use of a single instrument, which is of course satisfied in our case anyway. 14 To be clear, the value of famine for each state is technically the average number of famines in the historical districts that are presently part of the state, since subnational boundaries were drastically reorganized along linguistic lines after independence. Bibliography Agbor, Julius A., and Gregory N. Price. 2014. “Does Famine Matter for Aggregate Adolescent Human Capital Acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa?” African Development Review/Revue Africaine de Développement 26 (3): 454–67. Am brus, Attila, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez. 2020. “Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Land- scape.” American Economic Review , 110 (2): 475-525. Anand, R., Coady, D., Mohommad, A., Thakoor, V. V., & Walsh, J. P. 2013. “The Fiscal and Welfare Impacts of Reforming Subsidies in India”. The Inter- national Monetary Fund, IMF Working Papers 13/128. Anderson, T.W. and Rubin, H. 1949. Estimation of the parameters of a single equation in a complete system of stochastic equations. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 20, 46-63. Asher, Sam, Tobias Lunt, Ryu Matsuura, and Paul Novosad. 2019. The Socioeconomic High- Resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India. Asher, Sam and Novosad, Paul. 2019. “Rural Roads and Local Economic Development”. American Economic Review (forthcoming). Web. Bakkensen, Laura and Lint Barrage. 2018. “Do Disasters Affect Growth? A Macro Model-Based Perspective on the Empirical Debate”. IMF Workshop on Macroeconomic Policy and Income Inequality. Bannerjee, Abhijit and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India”. American Economic Review 95(4) pp. 1190- 1213. Besley, Timothy and Burgess, Robin. 2000. Land reform, poverty reduction and growth: evidence from India. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (2). pp. 389-430. Bhatia, B.M. 1968. Famines in India. A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India (1860- 1965) London: Asia Publishing House. Print. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. 2004. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (2nd ed.) Routledge. Brekke, Thomas. 2015. “Entrepreneurship and Path Dependency in Regional Development.” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 27 (3–4): 202–18. Burgess, Robin and Dave Donaldson. 2010. “Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India’s Famine Era”. American Economic Review 100(2), Papers and Proceedings of the 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association pp. 449-453. Carlyle, R. W. 1900. “Famine Administration in a Bengal District in 1896-7.” Economic Journal 10: 420–30. Cheng, Wenli, and Hui Shi. 2019. “Surviving the Famine Unscathed? An Analysis of the Long-Term Health Effects of the Great Chinese Famine.” Southern Economic Journal 86 (2): 746–72. Cohn, Bernard S. 1960. “The Initial British Impact on India: A case study of the Benares region.” The Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies. 19 (4): 418–431. Cole, Matthew A., Robert J. R. Elliott, Toshihiro Okubo, and Eric Strobl. 2019. “Natural Disasters and Spatial Heterogeneity in Damages: The Birth, Life and Death of Manufacturing Plants.” Journal of Economic Geography 19 (2): 373–408. Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World . London: Verso. Print. Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2012. “Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics , 4 (3): 66-95. Dell, Melissa. 2013.“Path dependence in development: Evidence from the Mexican Revolution,” Harvard University Economics Department, Manuscript. Donaldson, Dave. 2018. “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure.” American Economic Review , 108 (4-5): 899-934. Drèze, Jean. 1991. “Famine Prevention in India”, in Drèze, Jean; Sen, Amartya (eds.), The Political Economy of Hunger: Famine prevention Oxford University Press US, pp. 32–33. Dutt, R. C. 1902, 1904, 2001. The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule. From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 . London: Routledge. Durbin, James. 1954. “Errors in Variables”. Revue de l’Institut International de Statistique / Review of the International Statistical Institute , 22(1) pp. 23-32. Ewbank, R. B. 1919. “The Co-Operative Movement and the Present Famine in the Bombay Presidency.” Indian Journal of Economics 2 (November): 477–88. FAOSTAT. 2018. FAOSTAT Data. Faostat.fao.org, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fieldhouse, David. 1996. “For Richer, for Poorer?”, in Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 400, pp. 108–146. Goldberger, Arthur S. 1964. “Classical Linear Regression”. Econometric Theory . New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 164-194. Gooch, Elizabeth. 2017. “Estimating the Long-Term Impact of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-61) on Modern China.” World Development 89 (January): 140–51. Gualtieri, Giovanni, Marcella Nicolini, and Fabio Sabatini. 2019. “Repeated Shocks and Preferences for Redistribution.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 167(11): 53–71. Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and David Weil. 2011. “A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth.” American Economic Review. Hochrainer, S. 2009. “Assessing the Macroeconomic Impacts of Natural Disasters: Are there Any?” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4968. Washington, DC, United States: The World Bank. Holden, Stein T. and Hosaena Ghebru. 2016. “Land tenure reforms, tenure security and food security in poor agrarian economies: Causal linkages and research gaps.” Global Food Security 10: 21-28. Hoyle, R. W. 2010. “Famine as Agricultural Catastrophe: The Crisis of 1622-4 in East Lancashire.” Economic History Review 63 (4): 974–1002. Hu, Xue Feng, Gordon G. Liu, and Maoyong Fan. 2017. “Long-Term Effects of Famine on Chronic Diseases: Evidence from China’s Great Leap Forward Famine .” Health Economics 26 (7): 922–36. Huff, Gregg. 2019. “Causes and Consequences of the Great Vietnam Famine, 1944-5.” Economic History Review 72 (1): 286–316. Lima, Ricardo Carvalho de Andrade, and Antonio Vinicius Barros Barbosa. 2019. “Natural Disasters, Economic Growth and Spatial Spillovers: Evidence from a Flash Flood in Brazil.” Papers in Regional Science 98 (2): 905–24. Maxwell, Daniel, and Keith Daniel Wiebe. 1998. Land tenure and food security: A review of concepts, evidence, and methods . Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998. McKean, Joseph W. 2004. “Robust Analysis of Linear Models”. Statistical Science 19(4): 562–570. Nguyen, Linh, and John O. S. Wilson. 2020. “How Does Credit Supply React to a Natural Disaster? Evidence from the Indian Ocean Tsunami.” European Journal of Finance 26 (7–8): 802–19. Pinkovsky, Maxim L. and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. 2016. “Lights, Camera, ... In- come! Illuminating the National Accounts-Household Surveys Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 131(2): 579- 631. Li, Q. and J.S. Racine. 2004. “Cross-validated local linear nonparametric regression,” Statistica Sinica 14: 485-512. Riggs, D. S.; Guarnieri, J. A.; et al. (1978). “Fitting straight lines when both variables are subject to error.” Life Sciences . 22 : 1305–60. Romer, P. M. 1994. “The Origins of Endogenous Growth”. The Journal of Economic Perspectives . 8 (1): 3–22. Roy, Tirthankar. 2006. The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 . Oxford U India. Print. Ruppert, David, Wand, M.P. and Carroll, R.J. 2003. Semiparametric Regression . Cambridge University Press. Print. Salibian-Barrera, M. and Yohai, V.J. .2006. A fast algorithm for S-regression esti- mates, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15(2): 414-427. Scholberg, Henry. 1970. The district gazetteers of British India: A bibliography. University of California, Bibliotheca Asiatica 3(4). Sharma, Ghanshyam, and Kurt W. Rotthoff. 2020. “The Impact of Unexpected Natural Disasters on Insurance Markets.” Applied Economics Letters 27(6): 494–97. Solow, Robert M. 1957. “Technical change and the aggregate production function.” Review of Economics and Statistics. 39 (3): 312–320. Srivastava, H.C. 1968. The History of Indian Famines from 1858–1918 , Sri Ram Mehra and Co., Agra. Print. Staiger, Douglas, and James H. Stock. 1997. “Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments.” Econometrica 65(3): 557-586. Thompson, Kristina, Maarten Lindeboom, and France Portrait. 2019. “Adult Body Height as a Mediator between Early-Life Conditions and Socio-Economic Status: The Case of the Dutch Potato Famine, 1846-1847.” Economics and Human Biology 34 (August): 103–14. Varghese, Ajay. 2019. “Colonialism, Landlords, and Public Goods Provision in India: A Controlled Comparative Analysis”. The Journal of Development Studies , 55(7), pp. 1345-1363. Wang, Chunhua. 2019. “Did Natural Disasters Affect Population Density Growth in US Counties?” Annals of Regional Science 62 (1): 21–46. World Bank. 2011. “India Country Overview.” Worldbank.org Previous Next

Journal Features Online Features & Interviews Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Steven Pinker Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Paul Krugman Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Yanis Varoufakis Vol. II | Issue II Foreword Editorial Board Vol. II | Issue II Vol. II | Issue I Sheldon Whitehouse United States Senator from Rhode Island Vol. II | Issue I Foreword Editorial Board Vol. II | Issue I Vol. I | Issue II Nicola Sturgeon First Minister of Scotland Vol. I | Issue II John R. Allen President of the Brookings Institution Vol. I | Issue II Foreword Editorial Board Vol. I | Issue II Vol. I | Issue I Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island Vol. I | Issue I Greg Fischer Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky Vol. I | Issue I Foreword Editorial Board Vol. I | Issue I

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEWS, STEVEN PINKER: Free Speech, Protests, the “Alt-Right”, and Jordan Peterson Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. Fall 2019 JPPE : There’s considerable debate over the distinction between free speech and hate speech. How do we know when one meets the other? Is there a responsibility of college campuses or their students to help provide definitions or guidelines for these ideas and which views we believe are of academic merit? Pinker : There are limits on free speech that are recognized in all societies—even in the most libertarian societies when it comes to free speech—such as the incitement of imminent lawless activity, libel, extortion, and some cases of obscenity. There can be restrictions on the place, time, and manner in which speech is expressed. This is all contained in free speech jurisprudence. Nevertheless, those limits are pretty expansive in the United States, and I think laudably the “default” is the notion that speech is free except for very circumscribed exceptions. And that pertains to government strictures on free speech, which is not the same as the discretion that any outlet or platform has regarding who they give a voice to. And of course, a university is not going to invite any drunk on a soapbox in a public park or any ranter on Facebook. There are certain standards of scholarly accuracy and attention to academic literature. So I think the issue doesn’t arise in terms of whether a university ought to invite some provocateur who is just not part of the community of scholarly discourse and intellectual argumentation; but rather it arises when there are scholars who clearly do meet that standard but whose opinions just happen to be controversial, yet they can back up what they say with generally accepted academic standards. Of course, protests too are a legitimate form of free speech, so there can’t be any objections to protests. Although, there is jurisprudence; there are guidelines among defenders of free speech that you may protest but that you may not shut someone down. That is, there is no heckler’s veto, even though there can be of course protests that don’t disrupt the ability of heterodox views to be expressed. JPPE : From what you have observed, do you believe that students are keener to protest speakers than when you were an undergraduate? Pinker : I think there is a narrowing. It’s been going on for some time. It was certainly true when I was an undergraduate and that was a long time ago. And so despite some commentary, which blames it on the millennial generation or on generation z, there was plenty of this in my day. There is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which monitors disinvitations and speech codes, and it found that things have gotten a little bit better in 2018 compared to previous years. They’ve only been monitoring it for, I think, 10 or 15 years. Things definitely got worse until last year, but there have been ups and downs. FIRE also monitors de-platforming, which is a disruptive attempt to prevent speakers from speaking once they’re there; they monitor speech codes. My sense is it’s gotten worse, although it definitely existed when I was a student. JPPE : Did you participate in these kinds of protests? Pinker : No (laughs). JPPE : It seems somewhat arbitrary to determine who is of “scholarly merit”. Pinker : It’s kind of what academics do all the time. We referee one another’s grant proposals, manuscripts, and tenure cases. There are disputes. There are unclear cases. But there is definitely a difference between a Richard Spencer on the one hand and a Charles Murray or a Heather Mac Donald or Jordan Peterson on the other. JPPE : That last name—Jordan Peterson—is someone speaking to a large and predominantly male audience. How do you explain the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? Pinker : I agree it’s a puzzle who he is speaking to. I think he symbolizes for young men two things: one of them is an intellectual engagement that transgresses some of the very narrow boundaries in elite universities and in media like the New York Times. While he’s not alt-right or all of the things that people lazily accuse him of, he is not New York Times or Brown University. He is clearly an erudite and intelligent person. He was a professor first at Harvard, then at the University of Toronto. He is an extremely knowledgeable political psychologist and expert on psychological personality testing. He stretches the boundaries of what you can say, however, not into the territory of white supremacists or neo-nazis and other kooks and crackpots and nutcases. The other thing is that the demographic of young men he speaks to often feel so marginalized by, on the one hand, leftist feminist discourse in universities and, on the other hand, the kind of nihilistic immature culture in advertising, extreme sports, and popular culture, which seems to glorify immaturity, hedonism, and decadence. And I think they realize that someone just saying pretty banal things like “be mature, be responsible for what you say, and clean up after yourself”; that strikes them—caught between these two worlds—as something noble and revelatory. And it can’t be a bad thing that you have a charismatic guy telling young men to be responsible, not to hurt people, and to make their bed. It’s astonishing that it has to be said. But apparently it does. JPPE : You said that there were highly literate and highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right. What do you make of the blow-back you received from that statement? Pinker : The New York Times reported it under an op-ed titled "How Social Media Makes Us Stupid". That was Jesse Singal who wrote that op-ed. For one thing, many people misinterpreted that because their impression of the alt-right is tiki-torch-holding-neo-nazis, whereas the people that call themselves alt-right are not that. I think their views are often quite noxious, and I’ve argued against them. But I know, since some of them are former students that write back to me—I mean Harvard graduates—, that it is a mistake to write them off as tiki-torch-holding-skinheads and neo-nazis. Some of them are smart; they are intelligent, and they feel that there are so many topics that are forbidden in standard university settings. And they feel that mainstream scholars can’t handle the truth and that they feel privy to a kind of forbidden truth, which I argued is dangerous because it means that rather extreme views proliferate in this community without themselves being criticized by opposing views or data that bear on those views. And they can actually blossom in a kind of noxious form if they’re not expressed in an arena in which they can be criticized.

Oedipus and Ion as Outsiders: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship Oedipus and Ion: The Implications and Limitations of Genealogical Citizenship An Analysis of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles and Ion by Euripides Claire Holland University of Chicago Author Marysol Fernandez Harvey Tathyana Mello Amaral Antonio Almazan Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (12 pages) Introduction In ancient Athenian society, the collective myth of autochthony[1] provided the basis for social order, determining who got the benefits of citizenship and who was excluded from the polis [2]. According to their autochthonous myth, the citizenry of Athens did not emigrate from elsewhere, but instead arose from the earth upon which ancient Athens stood. Theirs was not a city of immigrants; from their very origins, the people of Athens believed themselves to be the only population that had always belonged to Athenian soil. Thus, each true-born Athenian carried within them the essential spirit of the Athenian people, passed down from generation to generation. To determine and confirm their citizenship on an individual level, each Athenian had to demonstrate their autochthonous familial descent when they came of age in a dokimasia, an examination wherein citizen tribunals collected testimony from friends and family members in support of one’s claims to citizenship[3]. In this way, one’s lineage became the sole factor determining one’s inclusion in the polis . Once blood became the basis for citizenship, citizens who were established as autochthonous could not be excluded from the polis on the basis of class. The poorest citizens had the same right to participate in Athenian government as the elite, although in practice the higher classes enjoyed special privileges, such as training in rhetoric, which poorer citizens did not. For ancient Greek city-states, this level of inclusivity was groundbreaking; most city-states did not consider their lower- or even middle-class members to be citizens, even in democratic systems of governance. However, this is not to say that Athens was entirely without social divisions, for more than just fully-privileged citizens lived within the city walls. Overall, inhabitants were sorted into three groups: citizens, metics, and slaves. While citizens enjoyed all the rights and benefits of the polis , including the right to vote and to participate in public forums, metics were an in-between, catch-all group, not subjugated like slaves but not as privileged as citizens. They could not participate in government or vote, for example, but were still able to participate economically in Athenian society. Metics were what we today might call a migrant class, as they did not meet the full requirements for blood-based citizenship but were still free. Metics were not confined to only the lower classes; like citizens, metics existed in every economic stratum, from the poorest to the richest. However, regardless of economic class, citizens, being true-born Athenians, were more socially vaunted. While lauded by political theorists for its groundbreaking inclusivity, the Athenian genealogical grounds for inclusion, like any other such system, necessitated that some be excluded so that the polis might be defined and unified rather than indistinct and anarchic. This exclusion, at least theoretically, was to be on the grounds of blood-based requirements for citizenship[4]. However, as Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the second in his trilogy about the eponymous protagonist, and Ion by Euripides make abundantly clear, this distinction did not always play out as it ought. In fact, the existence of exceptions to the rule of blood-based citizenship reveals that its apparent legitimacy was, at its core, fallacious. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is in that the knowledge of their parentage, which should have moved them out of their marginal social positions and into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually prevented them from claiming their rightful places within society. This is due to the fact that in practice, blood did not stand alone in determining membership to the polis . Athenian society instead relied upon adherence to socially-codified, secondary behavioral implications of blood-based membership, as shown through a further examination of the Athenian city-state and the plays Oedipus at Colonus and Ion. What’s more, the rule of descent necessarily meant that any violations of these secondary behaviors were inheritable and thus contaminated an individual’s entire genetic line from their transgression onward. In examining the social structures as they are presented in these two works, in light of the historical context of ancient Athens, it is clear that the lineage-based autochthony myth was only the beginning of the implied social order. Literary Background Before diving into the social structure of Athens, a short summary of each play is in order, which will highlight the most relevant plot points. Thanks to Freud, most are familiar with Oedipus, or at least with his infamous acts: killing his father, marrying his mother, and fathering her children. Once he discovers all that he has unknowingly done, Oedipus blinds himself and is outcast from Thebes, his home and onetime kingdom. All of this takes place in Oedipus Rex , the first in Sophocles’ trilogy of plays about Oedipus and his family. Following these events is Oedipus at Colonus , which shows Oedipus in exile from Thebes as he approaches the Athenian acropolis. During the course of the play, Oedipus encounters a pair of Athenian citizens, who fetch Theseus, the Athenian king, to determine if Oedipus will be allowed to stay in Athens. After a lengthy debate, Theseus decides to accept him, thanks in part to the pleading of Oedipus’s daughters, who have been helping him in his blindness. At the conclusion of the play, Oedipus is led away into the forest of Athens where he dies without leaving a trace, with Theseus as his sole witness swearing not to say a word about what happened to him. The themes of Oedipus at Colonus reach their pinnacle in Antigone , the final play in Sophocles’ trilogy, wherein Oedipus’s children are all killed, save Ismene, whether it be by their own hands or those of their political rivals. Ion by Euripides centers around another family drama, although perhaps not as well known as that of Oedipus. In the play, Ion is an orphan like Oedipus, raised in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The play starts when Creusa, forebear and Queen of Athens, and her husband Xuthus, a war hero and metic, visit the Temple to ask for a prophecy concerning Xuthus’s prospects of having any children. There, the couple meets Ion, and the prophecy leads Xuthus to assume that the now-grown orphan is his true-born son. By the end of the play, however, Creusa and Ion discover his true parentage: that it is she who is really his mother, and that his father is actually the god Apollo, who raped her before she married Xuthus. Following council from the goddess Athena, they choose to keep this knowledge secret from Xuthus for reasons that will later be discussed, and Ion goes on to eventually found the Ionian race. The Athenian City-State With the above summaries in mind, we will begin our analysis of the Athenian city-state. Athenian democracy, while more inclusive of lower classes than any prior sociopolitical structure, necessarily imposed limits on those allowed into the privileged citizenry. Voting could only be meaningful if it were limited; absolute freedom to participate in the polis would be, as Jacques Derrida says of unconditional hospitality, “a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, for short.”[5] For order and social duty to exist, there must be a specific group to whom these imperatives apply, or else all is unordered chaos. The necessary trade-off in this collective unification is the creation of an out-group against which the citizenry can be defined and assert its exceptionalism. In this way, the social order itself creates the outlaw, the metic, the orphan, and the bastard: broad, inferior social categories designed to include those who do not adhere to the implied social code. Those considered “outside of the law” are not actually so, for they fall into categories created by the social order. The only individuals truly outside of the law are those who cannot be defined by it, which we shall see is the case for Ion and Oedipus. The social rule creates the social rulebreakers, and at the same time the rule-breakers throw the rule itself into relief. Each is the inverse of the other’s positive assertion, becoming a co-constitutive axis. They provide legitimacy by means of a relation of difference through which to define themselves, while in reality neither category exists outside of the artificial, dyadic social construction. In order for a society to function, however, it must be able to overlook the arbitrariness of social delineation and instead see it as legitimate, even inherent to its subjects. To that end, Athens turned to a system of social order that on its face seemed absolute, inherent, and infallible: blood-based citizenship dependent upon genealogical descent from an autochthonous original populace. In the way of legitimacy, autochthony appeared acceptable to its citizens because it could not be disproven, even though it was just as much of a social construct as any other conception of citizenship and justification of exceptionalism. Because the mythical original autochthonous population from which Athenians claimed citizenship was ancestral, its supposed existence could not be called into question based on facts, since there were none to confirm or deny its existence. Like the founding myth of any society, the lie at the core of Athenian structure not only persisted but, interestingly, added legitimacy to the regime. Autochthony also provides a reason to see status as inherent to the citizen, since it “grounds difference in claims of nature—specifically, in earth and blood—[which gives] these categories the appearance of an ontological status.”[6] That is, Athenian exceptionalism appeared justified since it was traceable back to inherent natural differences between people. The lie of one’s social status being inherent, especially in a system based on blood, means that both adhering to its standards and violating them are not seen as merely shifting status, but are actions sublimated into the person themself. Oedipus, answering the question the Chorus poses as to his identity, does not say, “I am in exile”—that is, inhabiting an external, imposed state—but “I am an exile” (italics added).[7] His status has become his being, since blood determines both. Just as Thomas Kuhn conceives of paradigm shifts in science as not only incorporating past scientific information, but also as proclaiming past paradigms unscientific, so too do new information and actions that cause a change in status retroactively re-write one’s entire self. Everything that previously signaled one’s status becomes a lie, and, in a world where statuses can change, passing becomes both possible and inevitable.[8] This is the unavoidable fallout of the idea of social status as inherent and blood based. While autochthony’s claims of being inherent certainly rested on shaky ground, these were not the only fallacious premises upon which Athenian self-conception depended. Because autochthony was meant to order, it centrally imposed its structure down to even the level of individual family, and in doing so, manifested itself as a myth of unity. Above all, genealogical claims were meant to be objective and clear, “largely to guard against the kind of mingling and confusion of identities that blurs discrete lines of demarcation in the social order.”[9] The ideological primacy of a clearly-ordered and unified family structure was designed to make orderly life possible, with a cohesive overall clan structure which mirrored the internal structure of the family. In this way, the polis functioned ideologically as a single entity, its uniform organization all the way down to the individual level supplementing its unifying claim to one collective heritage. This ideology is far from abstract, and is in fact visible in much of the literature Athenian citizens produced. In Pericles’ Funeral Oration, for example, “the ‘populus,’ in the general sense of the term, is not politically divided,” and, indeed, “is never divided in the works of the tragic poets.”[10] This broad claim of unity is seen in Oedipus at Colonus as well, when Theseus, reacting to Creon’s abduction of Oedipus’s daughters, proclaims, “Your [Creon’s] behavior is an affront to me, / A shame to your own people and your nation,” and that “the whole city [Athens] / Must not seem overpowered by one man.”[11] In a unified citizenry, any citizen exemplifies that citizenry, and thus the actions of one man can impact the reputation of the entire polis . In this way, the citizen is metonymic of the polis , and conflating one with the other is both an easy and powerful move in a mythically-unified city like Athens, especially by its figurehead Theseus. What this means, however, is that the broad-reaching social order determines not only social status, but behavior. One must act in accordance to its social prescriptions, or else one endangers the social ideal of collective unity. Thus, those who violate the social norms, especially those important enough to be codified into law, must either be expelled from the polis by being placed into one of the excluded classes—in extreme cases, such as with Oedipus, this meant being expelled from the city itself and branded an exile—or eliminated entirely. In a society founded on absolute, broad-reaching, inherent order, any person whose very presence defies that system of order threatens the entire conception of the polis, a conception that must be kept in place so that democracy and the state as a whole can function. In order to see why Oedipus and Ion are not able to take their rightful places, then, it is necessary to examine exactly which secondary social prescriptions they violate that threaten the order and unity of the polis .[12] The Social Implications Of Blood While the primary concern of a genealogical social organization is creating a clear order, it must also be a self-sustainable system. What this means is that in order to reproduce viable citizens, and thereby the entire social order, secondary behavioral prescriptions become necessary. A system meant merely to determine whether or not one was citizen (i.e., pure lineage) became instead a guiding social principle, dictating not only social standing but also desired social behavior. To borrow a term coined by James C. Scott, the requirement of pure lineage in a genealogical society set into motion “a process by which ‘a measure colonizes behavior’”—that is, what is meant to be descriptive becomes prescriptive.[13] In the quest to create social order and obtain clarity through kinship organization, a blood-based society generated secondary regulations that helped further its own existence. No longer did it merely order society, but the desire to adhere to the blood standard now shaped the ways Athenians lived their lives. For example, the stringency of claims to autochthony biased societal perceptions of preferable marriages. Athenian-Athenian matches, or, more generally, marriages between members of the polis with clearly-defined statuses were considered more appropriate in ancient Athenian society. These biases played into the need for social order: if one was certain who one’s parents were, one’s own status was clearly defined. Conversely, if one was uncertain about their parentage, their social status was diminished due to the social order. We see this bias throughout history, with orphans and bastards historically being treated as lower-class citizens, inferior to those of straightforward lineage. With unclear parentage, one is not immediately stateless, per say, but one experiences a sort of social statelessness. As Creusa says of Ion, “It was for your good that Loxias settles into a noble house. If you were called the god’s son, you would not have had a house as your inheritance or a father’s name.”[14] Because Athenian women could not hold property, Ion must pass as the son of a metic in order to inherit a name of any meaning. Indeed, we see at the beginning of the play that Ion has no name at all until Xuthus gives it to him.[15] Naming is a familial claim, but as a bastard of Apollo, Ion has no name to claim whatsoever. While his Athenian mother ought to make him Athenian as well, revealing his true parentage would render Ion not only destitute, but without any form of social identification. To have a subordinate place in the social order is better—at least as Ion is coerced to believe by Xuthus and Athena—than to have no place at all. While his parentage is clear, Ion’s social status is not, revealing one of the major failures of a blood-based system. Inheritance can only deal with facts that it was built to incorporate for it is based on the grounds that it stems from absolute fact. While being the son of a god ought to have positive effects on his social standing, the fact that Apollo has entered the social order from a place completely external to it means that Ion and all of his progeny are also unable to fit into the social system at all. Ion cannot even be defined by one of the catch-all categories such as “orphan” that have been built into society for extreme, non-standard cases. A social order based on genetic lineage “expresses a demand to repeat (over generations) what can only happen once (the original birth).”[16] Genealogical in-grouping made both citizenship and violations of its reproductive practices iterative: if one’s ancestors made a mistake in marriage or reproduction, it would be reproduced throughout the entire genealogical line with no chance of correction, save through covering it up. Once revealed, Apollo’s original sin of impregnating Creusa—or, as it was more likely to be seen in this society, Creusa’s original sin of giving birth to Ion—would haunt Ion’s family line forever. Ion therefore must follow Athena’s advice and pass as a metic until the end of his days, his knowledge of his true parentage keeping him from fully joining the polis lest he become disenfranchised and lose his social classification of orphan, along with the protection that classification affords. While Ion’s crime against the social order is his very birth, Oedipus’s crime is more nuanced, hinging on his transition from ignorance to knowledge of his own parentage. Oedipus at Colonus thus explores what happens when that which goes against the social order is revealed, instead of staying safely hidden. While Ion confounds orderly overall social classification, Oedipus hopelessly confuses the internal family ordering upon which the whole of Athenian society was based. Oedipus not only confuses this order by killing his father, upending the proper power dynamic and sinning against the polis ’s conception of the ideal family, but also by marrying his mother and having children by her. This creates social positions untenable within Athenian society: sister-daughters, son-brothers, father-siblings, grandmother-mothers, etc. In his ignorance, Oedipus commits crimes that, upon coming to light, make both himself and his entire family socially unclassifiable, for the social order has no way of coping with the complications of incest. Just as Ion’s potential outing could contaminate the legitimacy of his entire line, Oedipus’s revelation does contaminate his entire family structure because of the supposedly inherent and unifying qualities of blood. This inherited contamination is evident in the ill fate of Oedipus’s daughters in the following play, Antigone . What brings people together in the social order can just as quickly spread social contamination. Oedipus and his family, especially his offspring, each inhabit multiple social categories, which contradict each other in their implications of exclusion and inclusion. Despite Oedipus and by extent his children being at least doubly Theban, the revelation of Oedipus’s parentage means they cannot be allowed to remain in the polis . Society has no outcast category in which to put the members of this family, so they must be expelled. They have violated the social order and thus cannot stay in the city since their continued presence threatens the myth of broader social unity. While the concept of unity was not as important in Thebes as in Athens, at least from an Athenian perspective, incest was still taboo. To some extent, Oedipus’s family had to be Theban since Thebes served as Athens’ dramatic foil, a place where scenes were allowed that couldn’t play out in Athens, even mythically.[17] Thebes was a place to explore social possibilities. If Oedipus’s stories took place within Athens’ idealized system, even in fiction, they risked exposing too directly its fragility. The slight distance between the two cities, both physically and ideologically, was what made such socially-shattering myths as Oedipus palatable. They were allowed to explore the potential effects that taboo events such as incest could have within Athens without threatening the social order with its intense emotional baggage. Conclusion The Athenian social order tolerates certain types of aberrations as long as they fall within the outcast categories it has created so that its myth of unity can persist despite inevitable anomalies. If an individual falls outside of these catch-all categories then they must be eliminated. Indeed, we see this occur through the plays as Oedipus’s children—who break no laws but whose very existence as daughter-sisters and brother-sons exposes the fragility of blood-based social order—eventually kill themselves and each other. The sin must be cut off at the source or else it will grow exponentially with every following generation. All of Oedipus’s family must end to cleanse the blood and the city. Unlike with Ion, Oedipus’s familial social transgressions are known, precluding him from the approved social order. Therefore, Oedipus faces no other socially-viable option but to be expelled from the polis . He threatens the polis ’s behavioral unity, the myth of unity that the entire polis is founded upon, and therefore, the polis itself. The mythically-unified polis, for whom all included individuals are metonymic representatives, cannot include an individual who has violated its secondary socio-familial prescriptions even if those transgressions are not intentional. Interestingly, Oedipus is asked to conditionally rejoin Thebes after his expulsion because the metonymic power the polis has over its citizens supersedes all other considerations. The claim which Athens newly asserts over Oedipus infringes upon that primary consideration, and so his secondary sins can be overlooked in favor of his primary birthright. Oedipus’s parentage is revealed, while Ion’s is not, and these revelations are what shaped their tragic fates. However, in a genealogical system that gains legitimacy based on the claim that blood is objective, inherent, and unfakeable, how is it possible that either of their lineages, at any point, not be revealed? The answer, in short, is that despite its apparent objectivity, blood does not speak for itself. One cannot look at someone and tell who their parents are, and, like Ion, individuals might be mistaken about their true parentage. This opens up the possibility of acting and passing as a citizen, even unintentionally, when one is not. This possibility threatens the autochthonous myth of blood being self-evident and inherent—thereby threatening the entire Athenian social order. As the bastard child of a god and an Athenian, Ion, while objectively an Athenian, does not fit neatly into the social narrative. Revealing his parentage may lead to questions about his autochthony. To secure his high position of power, a palatable lie must be constructed to ensure the propagation of his own line and the social order as a whole. Blood in this case is a performance, willing or not, for the sake of the social order to which his own exceptional circumstances must be subsumed. Because the autochthonous genealogical citizen myth is founded on the basis that it has no exceptions, having a questionable figurehead at one of the most important family lines might incite social crumbling from the top down. As an inevitable consequence of the need to preserve the mythical unity that this society was founded on, Ion, whose familial transgressions can be subsumed into pre-existing social categories, is able to be a metic as long as he hides his familial transgressions under a socially-acceptable genealogical narrative. Oedipus, on the other hand, who reveals his familial transgressions under extreme emotional duress[18], must necessarily be evicted from his polis for his violation of its secondary prescriptions since the assertion of his status along family lines implicates his other behavior. The tragedy of Oedipus and Ion is that the knowledge they gain of their parentage, which should shift them from their marginal social positions into the sociopolitical centers of their respective poleis , actually means that they cannot claim their rightful places in society. The knowledge of their parentage is inextricable from the knowledge that either they or their parents violated the secondary prescriptive norms of their genealogically-based society. Despite its claims to being inherent, providing clear order, and unifying the polis , (blood) autochthony failed in almost every one of these respects, as does any other basis for social organization and delineation of citizenship. In order to preserve and reproduce this order, the reproduction of individuals needed to adhere to secondary behavioral prescriptions that blood-based membership entails, lest their entire family lines be contaminated. Due to the different natures of Ion’s and Oedipus’s social crimes, as well as the secrecy of sensitive information or lack thereof, Ion is able to pass within the polis while Oedipus must be expelled in order to preserve the social myth. However, neither is able to claim what is rightfully theirs: the title of citizen. Endnotes [1] Autochthony: n., The quality, state, or condition of being autochthonous; an instance of this. Autochthonous: (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists. Oxford English Dictionary, “autochthony” and “autochthonous,” OED Online, December 2018. [2] Polis refers to a Greek city-state. Here, more specifically, it refers to the people allowed within government in Athens, the people who constituted the voter base and who were included in all aspects of civic life. [3] Dokimasia : n, The term δοκιμασία and the related verb dokimazein were used in various Greek contexts to denote a procedure of examining or testing, and approving or validating as a result of the test. Oxford Classical Dictionary , 2016, "dokimasia." [4] At the time in which Ion is set, the requirement for citizenship was having one Athenian parent, not two, as it was after Pericles’ citizenship law. For Oedipus, the distinction is irrelevant because both of his parents are Thebans—or, in his father’s case, a naturalized Theban ruler. [5] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond , Trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83. [6] Demetra Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion,” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013), 15. [7] Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus , trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 92, line 9. The exact blood-based social conventions Oedipus violates that lead to his expulsion from Thebes will be explored later. [8] Passing, or being perceived and accepted as something other than what one actually is, is certainly an important part of any strictly-delineated social order. For example, in the post-Jim Crow era, certain people who would legally have been considered African American could “pass” in their daily lives as white. Passing is especially important in relation to Euripides’ Ion, but further discussion is not within the scope of this paper. [9] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 15. [10] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus,” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 331; 334. [11] Sophocles, 132, lines 8-9; 136, lines 14-15. [12] Ion is the son of the sun god Apollo and the Athenian princess Creusa; Oedipus is the son of two Theban monarchs. Thus, both theoretically should be included in their respective poleis on the basis of blood, especially since it is the blood of the elite. [13] James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. [14] Euripides, Ion , trans. H.K. Lee (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997), 503. [15] Euripides, Ion , 403. [16] Kasimis, “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership,” 13. [17] Vidal-Naquet, “Oedipus Between Two Cities,” 334: “There is one place where stasis [social division] finds a special home: It is Thebes,…an anti-city.” [18] Euripides, Ion , 104, lines 17-18: “Nothing so sweet / As death, death by stoning, could have been given me.” Oedipus’s distress comes from his internalization of the prescribed external social standards, which hold so much weight as taboo that he, as a metonymic citizen, feels anguish from actively breaking these rules, even if unaware he was doing so. References Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Euripides. Ion . Translated by H.K. Lee. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1997. Kasimis, Demetra. “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’s Ion.” Political Theory 41(2):231-256 (2013). Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2014. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus . Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus.” In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Edited by Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Journal Features Online Features & Interviews Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Steven Pinker Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Paul Krugman Vol. II | Issue II JPPE Interview Yanis Varoufakis Vol. II | Issue II Foreword Editorial Board Vol. II | Issue II Vol. II | Issue I Sheldon Whitehouse United States Senator from Rhode Island Vol. II | Issue I Foreword Editorial Board Vol. II | Issue I Vol. I | Issue II Nicola Sturgeon First Minister of Scotland Vol. I | Issue II John R. Allen President of the Brookings Institution Vol. I | Issue II Foreword Editorial Board Vol. I | Issue II Vol. I | Issue I Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island Vol. I | Issue I Greg Fischer Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky Vol. I | Issue I Foreword Editorial Board Vol. I | Issue I

The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics Volume IV, Issue I scroll to view articles Volume IV Issue I Philosophy Authenticating Authenticity Authenticity as Commitment, Temporally Extended Agency, and Practical Identity Kimberly Ramos Can Pascal Convert the Libertine? An Analysis of the Evaluative Commitment Entailed by Pascal’s Wager Neti Linzer The Growing Incoherence of Our Higher Values Aash Mukerji The Necessity of Perspective A Nietzschean Critique of Historical Materialism and Political Meta-Narratives Oliver Hicks Read More Politics The Unchurching of Black Lives Matter The Evolving Role of Faith in The Fight for Racial Justice Anna Savo-Matthews From Bowers to Obergefell The US Supreme Court’s Erratic, Yet Correct, Jurisprudence on Gay Rights Sydney White Predictive Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System Evaluating the Racial Bias Objection Rebecca Berman Read More Economics God Save the Fish The Abyss of Electoral Politics in Trade Talks––a Brexit Case Study Eleanor Ruscitti The Black Bourgeoisie The Chief Propagators of “Buy Black” and Black Capitalism Noah Tesfaye Breaking Big Ag Examining the Non-Consolidation of China’s Farms Noah Cohen Read More Applications for JPPE Now open! See Available Positions