Is There Such a Thing as Economic History?

Who is Leah Boustan?

Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Princeton University and this week’s guest on The Mixtape with Scott. Her research has to date largely focused on two of the largest demographic events in US history: the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to industrial cities in the North and West in the mid-twentieth century, and a period of mass migration from Europe to the US from 1850-1920. She is author of two books related to both topics:  Competition in the Promised Land (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success (PublicAffairs, 2022) with Ran Abramitzy.

Leah’s work with Ran on immigration to the US takes advantage of large digitized records from the Census which they linked together so that they could follow individuals over decades. This allowed them to trace out the fortunes of migrants across multiple waves of the Census to ask and attempt to answer several fundamental questions like:

* Did immigrants of the past pull themselves up “by their bootstraps” as the stories are often told to us and remembered?

* Did the children of immigrants move up America’s economic ladder as fast as their “peers” — children, in other words, of established residents?

* Does assimilation today by immigrants happen at a similar or different speed as those in the past?

The conversation was enriching for me, as all of my interviews with Leah are. In Leah you see, also a unique story of entrance into economics — through high school debate, not mathematics, where she grew to love studying the nuances of public policy from an objective yet passionate research-oriented point of view. The roads we take through our lives look like a straight line in hindsight but as we’ve seen with other guests are anything but at the time. Leah became an economist the way she became an economist, but I think it is a story nonetheless that many can identify with.

And an article in economics that she thinks about a lot? Goldin and Katz 2002 JPE, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions”.