PREVIOUSLY, ON EDGE OF THE AMERICAN WEST: urbino asked whether our era resembles the Gilded Age. I said yes and no: while there’s a lot of inequality now as then, but the inequality in the Gilded Age was measurable across states and so was a regional factor, while now this is less true. This matters, because owing to our quirkily endearing and frankly mad institution of the Senate (which is echoed in the Electoral College), regions matter more than people.1
Then silbey (Man of the People) said I was wrong, and ignorant of the nation’s midsection. Am I?
ANSWER:
As the excellent Kris James Mitchener and Ian W. MacLean, in “U.S. Regional Growth and Convergence, 1880-1980,” (Journal of Economic History 59, no. 4, 1016-42) find, “on average, states that had lower incomes in 1880 have grown faster than higher income states over the subsequent 100 years such that the gap in relative incomes between the lowest and highest income states is smaller today than in 1880 and differences in per capita income across states have declined over this period.” (1020)
And, they find, this is true even if you take into account the differences in prices across regions. So for example, on their data, the richest state’s personal income in 1880 is eight and a half times the poorest state’s, whereas in 1980, it’s only about one and a half times the poorest state’s.
So it’s true that the distribution of riches across states, and thus across regions, has become less unequal over time. Here’s a graph, showing standard deviations of state price-adjusted per capita incomes expressed as a percentage of the mean state price-adjusted per capita incomes, over a hundred years.
So I am right, right? Well, no: not exactly. But I don’t have time to explain why just now! So you can wait on tenterhooks, and guess why, till I can come back after teaching and elaborate.
1There is a reason other countries don’t look at the U.S. Constitution and say, “Oh, let’s copy the Senate. Because then the government can put a fence around an empty rectangle, call it a ‘state,’ and monkey with the membership of the greatest deliberative body in the world.” I’m not naming any state names, but you know who you are.
The Edge of the American West 
9 comments
January 9, 2008 at 11:56 am
urbino
Oh, hurry, hurry, hurry! You’re making me have to pee.
BTW, if Silbey is the Man of the People, does that make you the Slave of the Innuhrists?
January 9, 2008 at 12:12 pm
David Carlton
OK, but I think it’s mainly a *southern* convergence. By 1880 the southern states were abysmally poor, with PCIs collectively about 50% of the US average; as late as the 1930s no southern state was better off than the poorest nonsouthern state. The massive convergence of the South on US economic standards came between World War II and 1973; interestingly, that convergence produced the greatly enlarged middle class that is the current bedrock of southern Republicanism. One also sees downward convergence of the western states in the early twentieth century from very high [nominal] PCI levels, and a significant boost for the industrial Midwest in the 1940s. But the South was the big story, with consequences still incompletely understood.
January 9, 2008 at 12:17 pm
ari
David, do you have sources handy? And thanks for the comment.
January 9, 2008 at 1:09 pm
John
I’d be curious to see the figures for counties, not states. I know that doesn’t affect the Senate, but it still says something about regional disparities. As we know from the red county/blue county maps from recent presidential elections, breaking things down into smaller geographic units presents a more accurate picture of people’s daily lives than breaking things down by state does.
To illustrate, I live in an affluent, liberal neighborhood in Seattle. Conservative and/or less affluent neighborhoods in my county (and nearby counties) have somewhat of an effect on my daily life in that I frequently encounter people from those neighborhoods when going about my daily business and am more likely to visit those neighborhoods semi-regularly. But conservative and/or less affluent neighborhoods in rural Eastern Washington have virtually no effect on my daily life because I rarely visit them or encounter people who live there — it makes little difference to my daily life whether a particular area in rural Eastern Washington is in Washington or Idaho. (I actually do want to visit and get to know those areas of the state, but that’s beside the point for purposes of determining the extent of regional disparities in affluence.)
My guess is that there’s a much bigger difference between the richest and poorest counties (probably Fairfield County, CT and somewhere in the Mississippi Delta or the Appalachians, respectively) than there is between the richest and poorest states (New Jersey and Mississippi, I think), and I’d be curious to know whether that was also the case during the Gilded Age (I have no idea what the richest and poorest counties would have been then). I realize that county lines are just as arbitrary as state lines, but they still present a somewhat more accurate picture of things.
January 9, 2008 at 1:18 pm
urbino
Good point. I’m a lifelong southerner. My strictly anecdotal sense of the New South is that there is tremendous income disparity between areas that have urbanized (or suburbanized), and those that have remained rural (and extremely poor).
I have no idea what the richest and poorest counties would have been then
I have a suspicion that the poorest one might be the same as now, or very nearby.
January 9, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Why I am not as right as I’d like. (Or, cliffhanger resolved.) « The Edge of the American West
[…] January 9, 2008 in history and current events by eric (With reference to this post.) […]
January 9, 2008 at 4:20 pm
matt w
Buffalo County, South Dakota.
Six of the bottom seven are in the Dakotas. I believe the story here is that Native American reservations are very poor.
January 9, 2008 at 4:24 pm
matt w
Though it seems from that link as though Kentucky dominates the list even more if you look at median household income rather than per-capita income. Still, reservations: poor.
July 29, 2008 at 11:52 pm
beaten tracks « by the wayside
[…] Talk of how we’ve entered a new “gilded age” tends to center on questions of inequality, but it has also led a number of people to draw analogies (sometimes well, sometimes poorly) […]