Maybe 19th-century technological change wasn't deskilling after all:

A graph style that should get more love is the Stevenson-Wolfers arrowplot:

I guess one has to squint a bit to see it :-) What was even more interesting in the Abramitzky piece to me though was the U-shape over the past century:

Maybe the world before Malthus wasn’t very Malthusian at all.

The bad might outweigh the good, but at least we got more EH in econ journals after AJR (2001):

Ah, the good old days when children were cheap enough that you could hire one to use as a counterweight.

Bonus material: The rise of working women in big cities was also mirrored in a growing demand for political change. The support for female suffrage (here measured by signatures in Sweden's largest suffrage petition) was highest in big cities and closely associated with FLFP rates across parishes.

Interestingly, the increase in employment in large cities is matched almost one-to-one by decreases in marriage and childbearing. This appears permanent and not due to temporary delays. Also replicates in the US!

As expected, the FLFP effect is driven mainly by service sector work. The figure below shows the tight link between service sector size at the destination and female migrants’ employment.

Using new US census links by @kaseybuckles.bsky.social et al, we find that this pattern replicates in the US as well! This is very cool as we ran this long after writing up Swedish results.

This figure shows our main result: how employment differs for women migrating to parishes of different size, compared to non-movers.

A structural shift towards services (providing “respectable” jobs for women) is seen as a key driver of FLFP. While a post-WWII phenomenon in the aggregate, we show that big cities were 50 years ahead of other regions in terms of service sector size.

We first use census data from Sweden, US, and UK around 1910 to show that female employment spikes in the most populous regions of each country.

Exclusive content for my five followers: Child labor didn't disappear before WWI due to legislation, it disappeared because we automated it away.