Conversable Economist

Tyler Cowen serves as interlocutor in “Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth” (Conversations with Tyler, July 8, 2026). Mokyr (Nobel, ’25) has a genius for looking at broad trends, and then sorting out kinds of explanations are most plausible. Here are a few points that caught my eye.

Mokyr has a new book out called Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000, written with Avner Greif, and Guido Tabellini. Thus, some of the interview focuses on the question of how economic prosperity in Europe overtook that of China during these centuries.

[I]f you look at the world, say, around 800, at the time of Charlemagne, the difference between Europe and China isn’t very large. At some point, during the Middle Ages, you can see this divergence getting started. What’s happening is that, in Europe, there is more and more of a decline in the extended family or the extended kinship group, we call it clan, and instead, people get together and cooperate with other people to whom they are not related and with whom they do not share an ancestor.

Whereas in China, it moves exactly in the other direction. In China, you get more and more people getting organized by their extended family. The reasons for that are fairly complex. In Europe, it’s particularly the Catholic Church that played a major role here. This was argued quite a while ago by a guy, an anthropologist called Jack Goody, but your own colleague Jonathan Schulz wrote, what I think is one of the best papers on the subject, who pointed this out in great length and actually provided a fair amount of systematic evidence for this. In China, there is no Catholic Church. The imperial bureaucracy is more and more in cahoots with local clans to whom they actually outsource a fair amount of the things that they were supposed to do. As you move on out of this period of the Song dynasty into later dynasties, you see this thing growing. The problem in Europe is that the nuclear family, which became the fundamental building block of society, is too small to provide local public goods. You need to cooperate with others. What emerges in Europe, and quite spontaneously, is a bunch of things that provide these local public goods that you just don’t see in China.

For instance, we have something called universities. We have monasteries. We have autonomous cities. All of those things are what we call corporations. What it is, is people who are not related, but what they share is not an ancestor but an objective. Guilds have one kind of objective, universities have another one, and so on and so forth. That divergence in social organization turns out, in our view, to be one of the key components of the divergence between Europe and China. …

[W]hen you look at Europe in the 16th and 17th century, you can see that the capability of expanding the set of useful knowledge, including science, is just growing very rapidly. … That’s not just Newton and Galileo. There’s a whole body of work that is emerging. There’s really nothing parallel like that in China. China is a very sophisticated society in many ways. The literacy rates are high. They have a well-funded and well-organized system of education, but they don’t really continue their earlier forays into science and into new technology. Somebody actually went out and looked at Joseph Needham’s many volumes on Chinese technology and science, or Science and Civilisation [in China], as he called it, and he discovered something—which I guess we all knew, but they put numbers on it—almost nothing that Needham pointed out as an innovation happens after 1400. There’s complete stagnation setting in and some of the things that they knew how to make in earlier times, like the sophisticated clocks that they built in the 11th century, they disappear.

Here’s Mokyr in answer to a question about why the Romans did not have an industrial Revolution.

[B]oth Roman and Greek civilizations were, in many ways, creative, but the creativity did never really extend very much into the technological realm. Insofar that they did science, they were mostly uninterested in applying that science to day-to-day problems. That insight, the kind of knowledge that we have about nature, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and so on and so forth, that should be applied toward material improvement, that’s not an immediate and obvious insight, nor is it an immediate and obvious insight that progress, as we understand it today, is feasible and/or desirable.

These are all insights that arose in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. … [I]n Rome, what you see is a whole bunch of clever people, but they’re not that interested in technology. Let me give you one specific example, Tyler, that I have always found particularly intriguing, although I don’t have a good answer why it happened. … The Romans, certainly the upper class, were literate people, and they had glass, but they never invent spectacles. They don’t have optics, and they’re not interested in optics. There’s this passage in Seneca in which he looks at a glass that has water in it. He says, “Hey, it is interesting. The stuff that’s behind the glass actually is magnified.” But they never take the step of coming up with eyeglasses. You wonder why, because, clearly, if necessity is the mother of invention, this was a necessity. They never do it.

The only thing that you see happening in Rome, and even that was very constrained, is they do come up with water mills, but the water mills remain, by and large, tools for grinding wheat, wine, and corn. They don’t actually take it to the kind of extremes that Europeans did in the Middle Ages, turning it into sawmill and fulling mills, which is why factories were known as mills. They never do that. I think the reason is because the people who made things, the artisans, the workmen, and the people who knew things and studied things, which is the scientists and the mathematicians and the teachers, never talked to each other.

What’s more, the scientists essentially looked upon hard work and manual labor with a great deal of contempt. Both Plato and Aristotle make these points, but the Romans took it over. It was a slave society. Slave societies often look at manual labor with a great deal of condescension. In the end, I think that’s what stopped them. The other thing is, I think that if you don’t have a concept of progress and you don’t think that by studying things and investigating things and doing what we would call research in order to make the world a better place, at least from a material point of view, if you don’t have that concept, there’s not going to be an Industrial Revolution.

A primary task of the Federal Reserve, separate from using monetary policy to set interest rates, is that it carries out bank “supervision”–which refers to taking a close look at a bank’s finances and record-keeping to be sure that the bank isn’t taking on too much risk. Often, this process is resolved by not giving the bank a top-level ranking in certain categories, but still saying that the bank financials are overall satisfactory. But when the situation at a given bank is more dire, the Fed has power to bring enforcement actions against the bank to require compliance. A look at the data leads Aaron Klein and Cameron Connell to ask: “Why is bank enforcement declining?” (Brookings Institution, July 8, 2026). They offer this figure on the number of enforcement actions brought by the Fed each year.

The story here is clearly not a standard “Democrats regulate, Republicans don’t” story. There’s a modest decline in Fed enforcement actions from the tail years of the Obama administration into the first Trump administration. Bu tthe big decline happens with the pandemic in 2020, and then continued through the Biden years and into the second Trump term.

Broadly speaking, there are two possible explanations for less enforcement. One is that there is less need for enforcement: in this case, perhaps the financial regulations imposed in the aftermath of the Dodd-Frank of 2010 have led to banks taking less risk, and so the regulators have less to do. The other possibility is that the bank supervisors aren’t looking closely enough or moving fast enough: for example, Fed bank supervisors were still gearing up to start enforcement actions against Silicon Valley Bank when a bank run drove the bank into insolvency in 2023. Without inside information into bank balance sheets and some combinatino of perfect foresight and perfect hindsight, it’s hard to prove which explanation holds a greater share of the truth.

But Klein and Connell come at the question from another direction. You see, the Fed does not supervise all banks, and is not the only regulatory agency that does bank supervision. Some banks and thrifts are chartered by the national government and regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); the Fed supervised bank holding companies and some of the banks that are are chartered at the state level; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation supervises banks chartered at the state level that do not choose to be members of the Federal Reserve system. The issue is that the patterns of enforcement actions for the OCC and the FDIC don’t match those of the Fed. Here’s what their number of enforcement actions look like over time.

The other two enforcement agencies see a decline in enforcement actions in the late 2010s, although it’s a considerably smaller decline for the OCC. However, the other agencies also see a rise in enforcement actions in the last few years, although it’s a bigger rise for the OCC. Klein and Connell sum up:

Enforcement actions against banks by federal regulators are declining. By this measure, bank supervision has become more lenient in the past decade. Declines in enforcement vary substantially between regulators, with the Federal Reserve standing out for substantially laxer enforcement. The Fed’s nearly 50% decline in enforcement actions since COVID leads one to wonder whether the banks they regulate are that much more compliant or whether the Fed is choosing not to issue formal enforcement actions. Given the natural similarity between the generally smaller, state-chartered banks the Fed and FDIC share authority over, it is hard to imagine that the state member banks the Fed regulates are behaving that differently than the state non-member banks the FDIC regulates. Nor that issues are being resolved prior to the need for an enforcement action at that much of a different rate.

There’s a lot of talk about “digital currency,” but as far as I can tell, my bank account and retirement account, along with my credit cards and mortgage payments, have already been maintained in digital form for many years now. I benefit from greater speed, less paperwork, and probably greater accuracy, too. The genuinely new idea at present is “tokenization.” Tobias Adrian dispassionately lays out the potential risks and benefits in “Tokenized Finance” (International Monetary Fund, Note/2026/001, April 2026).

In the current conventional form of digital currency, money flows between institutions and their balance sheets: my credit card company pays the restaurant for my meal, at the end of the month my bank pays my credit card bill, my employer puts money into my bank account, and so on. The institutions in this system provide checks and balances, making sure the payments are correct. For example, maybe 2-3 times each year year I get an email from my credit card company asking if I have authorized a certain transaction. My answer is often “yes,” but sometimes “no.” As Adrian writes:

In traditional architectures, trust is embedded in regulated intermediaries, layered institutional processes, and the sequencing of settlement over time. … Financial sector policy frameworks have evolved around institutions, balance sheets, and markets that operate with temporal frictions: end-of-day settlement, batch processing, and delayed reconciliation. These frictions are not only costly to end-investors, but they also provide temporal buffers that allow exposures to be netted, liquidity to be mobilized, and authorities to intervene before settlement becomes final.

In the current form of digital money, the safety of transactions involves each main party having their own account, or “ledger,” which records payments made and received. Maintaining and checking these records involves a behind-the-scenes series of delays and double-checks, which imposes costs and fees. But tokenization is different. As Adrian writes:

Tokenization enables financial claims—including money, securities, and derivatives—to be represented as programmable digital tokens recorded on shared ledgers. This capability allows for real-time atomic settlement, collapsing multiple stages of the traditional financial value chain into a synchronized process … Tokenization challenges crisis management and resolution frameworks that are built around nationally domiciled institutions, territorially bounded infrastructures, and jurisdiction-specific legal authority. In tokenized systems, transactions are executed on shared ledgers spanning multiple jurisdictions, allowing assets, liabilities, and collateral to move across borders at machine speed and without a clear geographic anchor. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the global, continuous operation of tokenized finance and resolution regimes that rely on jurisdictional control over institutions and locally situated assets, as the key levers of control may instead lie in governance keys, consensus mechanisms, or smart contract logic operating across borders.

As Adrian puts it, the fundamental shift here is that instead of financial transactions being carried out, monitored, and double-checked by an interlocking set of institutions–each with their own ledger–a tokenized financial system would shift these responsibilities to the programming and infrastructure behind the tokenized system. There are obvious concerns about such an approach, which Adrian enunciates clearly:

As financial logic migrates into smart contracts, governance must extend beyond institutions to algorithms. In tokenized financial institutions, smart contracts calculate margin requirements, execute collateral transfers, and initiate default procedures. These functions are central to systemic stability, yet they are increasingly encoded in software. Therefore, the governance challenges concern not only code quality but also the processes that design, validate, modify, and, if necessary, override code.

Algorithmic risk differs from traditional operational risk in important aspects. Errors can propagate instantaneously and autonomously, without human intervention (FSB 2024). A faulty price feed or coding error can rapidly trigger cascading liquidations before authorities respond. The very features that make smart contracts efficient—speed, determinism, and automation—can also amplify the consequences of design flaws or data errors.

Therefore, effective governance requires multiple layers of control. Formal verification and independent audits should be mandatory for systemically important contracts. Change management processes must be transparent and subject to regulatory approval. Crucially, tokenized systems should incorporate clearly defined ex-ante intervention mechanisms in governance frameworks that allow contract execution to be paused or adjusted under predefined emergency conditions.

Tokenization embeds governance in code, which could be referred to as “code is law.” In important financial entities, legal mandates for stability must ultimately prevail over automated execution. Embedding this principle into technical design is one of the central policy challenges of tokenization (see Garrido 2023). When assets exist as tokens on a distributed ledger, questions arise regarding the applicable law, the location of the asset, and the enforceability of claims in insolvency.

Legal uncertainty is a major barrier to scaling tokenized systems beyond pilot projects. Market participants require clarity on whether tokenized records constitute a definitive proof of ownership and whether the settlement finality achieved on a ledger is legally recognized. Without such clarity, tokenized markets risk remaining fragmented and peripheral. A dual-layer legal approach is likely to emerge as best practice. Smart contracts define operational rules, whereas traditional legal agreements establish rights, obligations, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Legislators and courts must clarify the relationship between these layers, ensuring that legal certainty is preserved even as execution becomes automated.

I admit to skepticism about a broad-based shift to tokenized finance in the near term. I can see the potential benefits of a dramatic reduction in transactions costs, especially for transactions that are small, or international, or both. But trying to set up a single global financial ledger with a “code is law” framework seems to me a utopian project, with the stability of national and global economies at stake. Perhaps this just confirms my status as a 20th-century fuddy-duddy. But I’d prefer to see tokenized finance bubble up through the private sector first, and if and when it shows viability, scaleability, resilience, and stability in that context–or in response to the specific and limited problems that arise–then we can talk about possibilities for making tokenization more widespread.

The most recent Federal Reserve Payment Study has published data for 2024 on “core noncash payment methods used in the United States by consumers, businesses, and governments, including payments by general-purpose and private-label cards, automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, and checks. This release also covers ATM cash withdrawals.” 

One way to summarize the results is to look at the value transferred by different method; another is look at the number of noncash payments. You would expect these to be quite different. For example, imagine a person who has their paycheck automatically deposited at their bank and has their mortgage payment made automatically by a transfer from their bank. that person might quite likely have a greater number of credit card payments and checks than those two big bank transfers, but the amount of value in the two big bank transfers could be greater than the total value of credit cards and checks.

Here’s a figure showing the value from different noncash transactions. Again, this includes consumer, business, and government noncash payments. The value of bank transfers is way up over the last 25 years or so–and in particular transfers received as a credit to bank accounts. The value of noncash payments by check is gradually falling. It’s striking to me that the total value of credit card payments looks so small in this graph.

Here’s a figure showing the number of noncash payments made by these different methods. It was unexpected to me that the number of transactions made via non-prepaid debit cards was so high: I suspect many of these debit cards make payments directly from bank accounts. Credit card payments are also up, especially since the pandemic. The fall in the number of checks is especially apparent–indeed, the number of checks is now well below the number of bank transfers. The number of banks transfers is low, although the average value of such transfers must be high to account for the figure above.

In this study, the Fed is just estimating value and volume of non-cash payments–not doing policy recommendations. But it’s important to remember that with every non-cash payment involves, some party is being paid a small amount to make that payment. When you talk about several hundred billion payments for trillions of dollars, those transactions fees received by the parties carrying out the payments can add up to large numbers.

Thomas Jefferson wrote out the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but he did not do so alone and without guidance. After all, he had been a member of the Continental Congress that summer, listening to the discussions about what a Declaration should say. Jefferson was also part of a five-person committee that also included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. After the committee produced a draft, additional changes were made by the Continental Congress before a final version was created.

Back in the 1950s, a professor named Julian Boyd worked back through the documentary record of edits and changes–which include handwritten notes inserted on top of Jefferson’s early draft–to create the “original Rough draught” of the Declaration. These day, of course, one can run the original draft of the Declaration available through the Library of Congress and the final version available from the National Archives through the “Track Changes” command in Word. Some of the changes are just capitalization and punctuation. Some are more meaningful. Here are the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence in Track Changes:

When in the courseCourse of human events, it becomes necessary for aone people to advance from that subordination indissolve the political bands which they have hitherto remained, &connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal & independant station to which the lawsLaws of nature &Nature and of nature’s godNature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the changeseparation.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable;self-evident, that all men are created equal & independant, that fromthey are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that equal creation they deriveS rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness; thatHappiness.–That to secure these ends, governmentsrights, Governments are instituted among menMen, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, –That whenever any formForm of government shall becomeGovernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the rightRight of the peoplePeople to alter or to abolish it, &and to institute new governmentGovernment, laying it’sits foundation on such principles & organising it’sand organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. prudenceSafety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governmentsGovernments long established should not be changed for light &and transient causes:; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. butBut when a long train of abuses &and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object,Object evinces a design to subjectreduce them to arbitrary powerunder absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government &Government, and to provide new guardsGuards for their future security. such.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; &Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to expungealter their former systemsSystems of government.Government. 

OK, maybe you have to work as an editor (like me) to appreciate this kind of stuff. But I do find it fascinating. The first sentence originally refers to “advance from that subordination,” which is changed to “dissolve the political bands.” No admission that Americans were ever subordinate!

The opening sentence of the second paragraph refers to “sacred” truths, but in a time when readers took the connection from “sacred” to the text of the Bible quite seriously,this is altered to “self-evident. ” However, in the first paragraph, “laws of nature” is amended to include “Nature’s God,” which in a way replaces the reference to the “sacred” that was cut. Similarly, Jefferson’s first draft just refers to humans being “created,” which is changed to “endowed by their Creator.” The last sentence of the second paragraph starts with a call to “expunge” the former system of government, which is amended to “alter.”

One of the biggest changes from the rough draft was that in the list of grivances against the King of England, Jefferson included this entry in the rough draft:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The passage is notable in a number of ways. It shows that there was a considerable anti-slavery sentiment among those attending the Continental Congress. It is a clanging historical irony that a slaveholder like Jefferson was writing fierce moral denunciations of slavery. It’s historically accurate when Jefferson blames the existence and persistence of American slavery in 1776 on King George III and previous kings of Great Britain, who after all had ruled over the area for decades. It’s intriguing that Jefferson mentioned British efforts to weaponize the slave population.

The practicalities of declaring treason against Great Britain ultimately drove the members of the Continental Congress to remove the anti-slavery sentiments. Benjamin Franklin may never have said: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately” — but the sentiment was nonetheless true. It’s unwise to be definitive about counterfactual historical scenarios. But if the northern eight US colonies had insisted on the anti-slavery language, but lost the support of some or all of the southern colonies, and then tried to declare independence on their own, the British would not have had to devote military resources during the Revolutionary War to, say, blockading the harbor at Charleston or dealing with guerilla warfare tactics led by Francis Marion and others across the South. The US Revolutionary War might well have been lost, and at least some of signers of the Declaration could have been imprisoned or executed–and mostly forgotten today by anyone but historians of the period.

I wrote this short essay about the “pursuit of happiness” for the editorial page of the StarTribune newspaper, where it was published on July 3.

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Opinion | What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness?

The authors of our founding document were deadly serious about a goal we might see as whimsical.

By Timothy Taylor

When the five-person committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared it to be “self-evident” that there was a right to “the pursuit of Happiness,” what manner of happiness did they have in mind?

In a declaration explaining why the signers felt compelled to commit treason against their existing government and to prevent “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny,” it seems unlikely that they were foreshadowing the whistling cheeriness of the 1988 Bobby McFerrin hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

When you are announcing that you “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for the purpose of fighting a Revolutionary War, it seems unlikely that they were thinking of the giddy, throbbing happiness of the 1986 Beastie Boys hit: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”

The authors of the declaration — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — were not being playful, whimsical or ironic. They were deadly serious about “the pursuit of happiness.”

Drawing on a long philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece, they believed that happiness was the result of living a virtuous life. Franklin wrote that “virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.” Jefferson later wrote: “Happiness is the aim of life. Virtue is the foundation of happiness.”

Naturally, any self-respecting modern American will quickly stand up and declare: “No virtue-monger gets to tell me what cookie-cutter set of rules I am obligated to follow.”

For 21st century Americans, this notion of happiness as virtue may seem self-contradictory. After all, isn’t virtue almost by definition dry and boring: that is, about discipline and abstemiousness, not the freedoms of fun and pleasure?

But as understood by the authors of the declaration, happiness isn’t about the feels. Instead, in a tradition going back to Aristotle, virtue was understood to be developed through a lifetime of practice. The goal is a deeper and richer satisfaction gained as a person grows into a full and flourishing existence. It’s about taking seriously the idea that you can pursue a version of your best self.

Of course, the pursuit of happiness may not succeed. Real life is messy. Personal goals can change. Families can quarrel. Marriages and friendships can crumble. Health and finances can go sour. Happiness, virtue and flourishing are never guaranteed.

The Nobel-prize winning novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad in 1932 and lived there for 18 years before receiving a scholarship to Oxford and moving to the United Kingdom, offered a paean to “the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness” in a 1991 essay, in which he wrote:

“Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition.

“It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.

“It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaims the “Right of the People … to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Americans have disagreed for 250 years over how best to enunciate the foundational principles of their government and how to organize its powers, and it seems right and proper to me that such disagreement should continue. But the lodestar of such discussions is that people have a “self-evident” and “unalienable” right to pursue their own concept of their own happiness. The concept was radical then, and remains so today.

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.

Douglas A. Irwin offers a brisk overview of a great American tradition–specifically, “America’s been arguing over trade for more than 250 years” (Peterson Institute for International Economics, July 1, 2026). I won’t rehearse the arguments here, but instead offer a couple of his big-picture graphs.

The first shows imports (blue line) and exports (red line) as a share of GDP from 1790 to 2025. Two patterns jump out at me. One is that from about 1840 to 1970, US imports and exports tended to hover around about 5% of GDP. From about 1970 up to around 2010, trade as a share of GDP rises dramatically, but in the last decade or so it has levelled off. The other pattern worth noting is that during most of US history up through the early 1990s, imports and exports were in rough balance, with occasional exceptions. But for the last 30 years or so, US imports have consistently exceeded exports. To put it another way, total US consumption (including imports) has been exceeding total US production (including exports). While the standard political tendency is to blame other countries for not buying enough US exports, addressing the trade deficit in a real way will require facing up to the question of why the US economy consumes more than it produces–which in turn will require coming to grips with the enormous US budget deficits.

The second figure shows US tariff rates from 1790 to 2025. The average tariff rate can be calculated in various ways: in this figure, the black line shows average tariffs only for imports where tariffs apply, while the blue line shows average tariffs relative to total imports, including the imports where tariffs don’t apply. The big-picture pattern here is that tariffs where much higher for much of US history, then drop off dramatically after the Great Depression and World War II, before the recent Trump bump to tariffs. It’s also interesting to consider the size of the gap between the two lines; if tariffs are applied to most imports, then the black and blue lines appear quite similar, as they did from 1790 up through about 1870. But then tariffs start being applied much more selectively to specific industries and goods, so the tariffs applied to those imports are higher than tariffs considered in the perspective of total imports.

A final point not illustrated here is that US federal spending was typically around 2% of GDP for the first 130 years or so of US history. But after the sequence of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, federal spending rose substantially, and has averaged about 21% of GDP in the last 50 years. The sources of federal funds are primarily individual abnd corporate income taxes, along with payroll taxes, with tariffs much less needed as a revenue source since around 1950.

Christopher Jeffrey interviews “Mervyn King on his career and big ‘mistakes.’” The subtitle reads: “The former BoE governor speaks with Christopher Jeffery about the value of transparency, lessons from the GFC [global financial crisis], the need to track broad money and tie short-term funding to haircut collateral, and danger presented by non-banks” (Central Banking, June 30, 2026, free registration required). The interview is delightful and insightful throughout, but here are a couple of points that caught my eye in particular:

On central bank transparency:

The great tradition in central banks was the opposite of transparency. At the Bank of England [BoE], there was a famous session in the 1930s, when the then deputy governor, when asked if the bank had considered publishing a report on any of its activities by a parliamentary committee, said: “Well, I have considered it, but I can’t say that I have considered it for long enough to have reached a conclusion.” When asked “Well don’t you think you should explain?”, he said: “It would be very dangerous to give reasons for our actions.” Even more recently than that, 40 years ago, the Federal Reserve never published a statement about the interest rate that it was setting. Market participants had to go into the market and infer the interest rate that the Fed was setting.

And I remember the very first year that I joined the Bank of England full-time, in 1991, Paul Volcker came over to London … and said he wanted to have dinner with the new member of the Bank of England … [A]fterwards I said to him: “Give me one word of advice for a new central banker.” And Volcker, who was 6 feet 7 inches tall–so he certainly looked down on me–just said: “One word, Mervyn: `mystique’.”

I came to the view that we had to go in the opposite direction. And, in 1992, when Britain was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, we had to develop a new domestic framework for monetary policy. Although Britain wasn’t the first to introduce inflation targeting –we followed New Zealand and Canada–we were the first major bank to push explanations of policy to the forefront.

What King calls the “pawnbroker for all seasons” method of preparing for the next crisis:

I think the secret here is to deal with many of these problems before the crisis hits. That’s why I proposed a system where banks pre-position collateral with the central bank. And the central bank says you cannot issue more short-term funding–anything that rolls over within three or four months–then the amount of money the central bank is willing to lend against the collateral that the bank has pre-positioned, allowing for the haircuts that the central bank would impose. If it’s a very obscure financial instrument that we don’t really understand, the central bank might impose a haircut of 90%. If it’s long-term government bonds, it could be just 2% or 3%. … That would be a massive improvement on where we are now. …

Certainly, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are moving to do more pre-positioning of collateral. … It has the great benefit that, done properly, bank runs would just disappear as a threat. I think regulation will carry on developing in that direction. I don’t expect any central bank to suddenly say they’ve “seen the light”, and want to adopt a “pawnbroker for all seasons”. They’ll use their own language … But people are making progress in that direction, and the Bank of England has gone further than anyone else.

King was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 1998 to 2003, and then Governor from 2003-2013. The interview is a good place to see what the issues of the time looked like on the other side of the Atlantic: for example, the UK bank run at Northern Rock in September 2007, which was a canary in the coal mine for the financial crisis that followed; the question of how to act in advance to make central bank interventions in a crisis less needed; how quantitative easing starts off as an emergency measure in 2008, with no one expecting that it will last more than a few years; and the reaction of the European Central Bank when the euro crisis hit from 2010-2012.

Where do jobs come from? The economic answer is relatively straightforward. Employers provide a desired good or service, and they hire workers with the range of skills they need to provide that good or service. But from a worker point of view, the answer looks much less straightforward. How do I find these employers who are hiring? In particular, where are the employers who want my skills and are willing to pay the compensation I would like to receive for those skills? If the employer wants someone with more experience, or additional skills, how can gain that experience or acquire those skills? It is historically quite unusual for most workers to feel more than modestly satisfied with their ability to access the jobs, pay, benefits, and working conditions they prefer.

Even in the mighty US economy, with an unemployment rate under 4.5% since late 2021, the Gallup poll reports that more worker view themselves as “struggling” than as “thriving“; more than half of US workers say that they have their eyes open for a new job even though only 28% think it’s a good time to be looking for a new job; and and less than one-third of employees report that they are “engaged” at work.

But the question of “where the jobs come from” may be even more pressing in developing countries where the number of young workers looking for jobs is on the rise. The World Bank has published The Global Jobs Challenge, edited by Tommy Chrimes, M. Ayhan Kose, and Kersten Stamm. From the “Executive summary”:

Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) face a jobs challenge of historic proportions. Over the decade to 2035, around 1.2 billion young people in these economies are set to reach working age, the largest youth cohort the world will likely ever see. Yet global economic growth is at a multi-decade low, constraining job creation prospects. Many of these young people live in economies ill-equipped to confront the challenge. Although projections for employment over the next decade are highly sensitive to underlying assumptions, an illustrative extrapolation suggests that, of these 1.2 billion young women and men, just over 400 million would be employed in 2035, while about 300 million would not be in employment, education, or training. Jobs are at the heart of development: they provide income, purpose, hope, and dignity, while strengthening social cohesion and stability. Job creation underpins growth, poverty reduction, and shared prosperity. Creating sufficient job opportunities for this large wave of young working-age people is thus a pivotal development challenge and a potentially transformational opportunity.

These demographic pressures are especially severe across Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia.

One central fact here is that while governments will of course hire some workers, government employment is not likely to be the primary driving force behind additional jobs for the future. After all, government jobs are ultimately paid for by taxpayer revenue. The question is how government can encourage an expansion of high-quality private sector jobs. As the chapters of the report discuss in detail, three broad areas of policy are for the government to support “foundational infrastructure (spanning physical, human, digital, and natural capital), a business-enabling environment, and private capital mobilization—as central to efforts to boost job creation.” The report also emphasizes five industries with high potential for job creation in developing economies: “infrastructure (including energy), agribusiness and farming, health, tourism, and value-added manufacturing.”

If the current US economy is a hotbed of worries over the number and quality of jobs, the parallel concerns in many developing economies can generate incandescent political heat. But as the report notes, “[g]rowth and job creation are both likely to be driven by the private sector, but they will be shaped by government policies. The public sector must play an enabling role …” But the forces of politics can make it hard for governments to focus on their important and irreplaceable role as enablers of job growth, rather than announcing heavy-handed interventions that overpromise what they can deliver.

Employers will often choose to provide paid sick leave to some of their employees. About 15 years ago, neither the US federal government nor state governments required paid sick leave, but about 63% of US employees worked in jobs that had at least paid short-term sick leave. Since then, 18 US states and lots of cities and counties have started requiring paid sick leave, and by 2023, about 77% of US employees had jobs with at least short-term paid sick leave. Stefan, Pichler Christopher Prinz, Stefan Thewissen, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth describe the evidence from the US experience, along with international comparisons and the underlhying economic tradeoffs, in “The Economics of Paid Sick Leave” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2026,  40:2, 215–42. I work as Managing Editor of the JEP.)

Before the rise of US state and local government mandates for paid sick leave, the benefit was not distributed equally across the workforce. The authors write:

In 2011, based on calculations from the National Compensation Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 63 percent of all US jobs came with (voluntary) paid sick leave provision for short-term sickness. However, heterogeneity by job type was substantial: 76 percent of full-time employees but only 28 percent of part-time employees had paid sick leave coverage. Further, private-sector employees in large firms with more than 100 employees were more likely to be covered by paid sick leave than those in firms with fewer than 100 employees (74 percent versus 54 percent). Unionized jobs had a higher probability of coming with paid sick leave than nonunionized jobs (72 percent versus 63 percent). Notably, the income gradient was steep: only 33 percent of jobs in the bottom quartile of the wage distribution offered paid sick leave, compared with 86 percent in the top quartile.

Even in a situation without government requirements, employers have two main reasons for providing paid sick leave: it can help to attract certain kinds of employees (if the employees place a high value on paid sick leave), and it can discourage sick employees from coming to the office and infecting other workers. To put it another way, sick leave for some can lead to less need for sick leave by others. On the other side of the tradeoff, paid sick leave raises the possibility that workers will use it for an extra day off, now and then. In particular, firms may be concerned that if they offer a paid sick leave benefit, while other firms do not, they are more likely to attract employees with a greater likelihood of being sick.

In an effort to balance these concerns, countries have different rules about paid sick leave, as shown in the table. For example, a number of countries require being sick and staying home for several days before you can claim paid sick leave. A number of countries require a doctor’s note to verify the sickness. The “paid” part of paid sick leave can be 100% of normal pay, or less, and it can either be paid by the employer, or paid by an insurance fund into which the employer has already paid. Most countries have a line between short-term and long-term paid sick leave, with the amount received by the sick worker being reduced when the long-term category is reached.

Paid sick leave in the US (and Australia) operates differently than in most other countries. The standard design for sick leave policies in the US has the employee build up credits for sick leave over time, and then use those credits when claiming sick leave. (A common rule is to accumulate one hour of sick leave credits for every 40 hours worked.) This approach has the advantage that a sick employee is, in a way, spending their own resources from their own personal account. It also protects employers against hiring someone who, soon after being hired, starts taking extensive sick leave for which the employer has to pay.

In contrast, most other countries have a social insurance fund for the costs of paid sick leave: a standad pattern is that employers pay into the fund for short-term leave and general tax revenues covers long-term sick leave.

The overall challenge for design of paid sick leave, as the authors write, is to minimize “inefficient absenteeism,” when workers are out of the workplace with paid sick leave and don’t really need to be, and “inefficient presenteeism,” where sick workers come to the office even though their productivity may be quite low and they have a risk of infecting others. As the authors point out, there isn’t a consensus on the best constellation of rules for defining paid sick leave; for example, requiring employees to take a few unpaid days of sick leave before claiming sick leave is intended to discourage overly casual use of paid sick leave, bu tin practice, ti can lead to the worker being out of the office longer–after the sick leave payment kicks in.

But it’s interesting to note variations across countries in the amount of sick leave that is claimed. Say that a worker spends 240 days/year at the workplace (five days per week, but with some holidays and vacation). Thus, a sick leave rate of 1% per year means the average employee misses 2.4 days/year of work; a sick leave of 4% means that the average employee is missing about two weeks of work each year.

Comparing large economies at the extremes these sick leave rates, the authors write: “Thus, when employees have no access to paid sick leave, as continues to hold true in many states and professions in the United States, many employees will work sick and the costs of presenteeism will be high as workers spread contagious diseases and have low work productivity. On the other hand, a generous sick leave system like Germany’s, where employer mandates require a 100 percent replacement rate for up to six weeks per sickness episode, leads not only to high employer costs, but also to an inefficiently high share of workers who call in sick, thereby raising the costs of absenteeism.”