For background, New York's Tammany Hall was founded as part of the Tammany Societies, which were groups dedicated to celebrating Native American culture, from its titles, to the languages, to the dress.
This group's early meeting locations were, appropriately, called "Wigwams".
Early on, Tammany membership was for "native-born patriots" only. But on April 24, 1817, hundreds of Irishmen broke into a meeting and demanded entry.
A few years later, Tammany let them in and embraced universal manhood suffrage.
Here's how some people saw that idea:
These immigrant groups were eventually leveraged by Democratic New York Mayor Fernando Wood to break Tammany's back by ousting the Bank Democrats from the Hall, elevating his own stature in the organization.
This sort of internal politicking continued and, eventually, William "Boss" Tweed became the hall's Grand Sachem and the man who would earn the hall its reputation for corruption.
Tammany had by now long been focusing on naturalizing immigrants to elect Democrats: immigrants go in, Democratic votes come out, as the picture shows.
But Tweed made earning votes more about patronage: vote for us, earn a cushy job—and don't forget to tell your friends!
That's what the paper is about: the effect of patronage on Democratic party performance and the performance of the NYPD, 1900-16.
To identify patronage hires, Leucht looked at police applicants who did poorly on the department's standardized tests but nevertheless got hired.
The rules say you need a score of at least 70% to get on the force. Anyone hired under that cutoff must have been a patronage hire.
Since this graft often happened on ethnic lines, one way to identify patronage hires above the line is to exploit that fact, to clear effect:
And this strategy worked for Tammany: when a patronage hire happened, the number of registered Democrats in that hire's neighborhood greatly increased.
This probably also matters for politics, because registered voters predict party wins.
But maybe these newly-registered voters don't go out and vote like non-patronage Democrats.
Well, as it turns out, they do: electoral support goes up, and it goes up closer to the recipient.
In the period after these cops were hired, they were rewarded with promotions if they helped out the Democratic party more.
Moreover, unlike regular cops, they were no less likely to receive a promotion if they were issued fines.
Now as it turns out, cops who did better on their standardized exams earned fewer fines in the line of duty.
But patronage employees did worse on those exams, and due to corruption, they could get by doing less, too. So patronage robustly associated with earning more fines:
These patronage employees received 22.6% more fines for negligence than their meritorious counterparts.
On a subset of employees with test scores, it was possible to show that test scores were valid, but they didn't explain this gap:
The Tammany machine engaged in handing out the "spoils" of political wins until the 1930s, and the machine worked: patronage politics made Democratic voters, and it also made negligent cops.
The abandonment of meritocracy had consequences.
Bill the Butcher died an opponent of Tammany less because of this and more because he hated the Irish, but given what Tammany did, it was good that at least someone opposed it.
Among them were the "Enemies of the people"—the bourgeois educated elite.
Despite having everything taken from them, their descendants are more educated than their peers today.
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Areas near Gulags today which had greater numbers of "Enemies of the people" in the past are now more developed, as indicated by satellite imagery of nightlights.
The economic benefits of having these immiserated intellectuals' descendants in an area today are visible in other ways.
For example, a one standard deviation increase in an area's "Enemies of the people" comes with 65% higher profits per employee and 22% higher average wages.
Here's a chart of interest rates over seven centuries.
But something stands out: Where are all the Jewish loans?
Jews have had a reputation for making loans for centuries, but this analysis explicitly omits them. The reason is simple: Jewish loans were different.
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In the premodern world, religious restrictions on moneylending abounded.
Since states were weak and Christians had no ability to charge usurious rates, Christian finance was handicapped. So the enterprise came to be dominated by Jews, who weren't similarly restricted.
Rulers were not unaware of this. In fact, they regularly made attempts to attract Jews to their towns and cities.
Sometimes town representatives would even beseech their lords to let them bring Jews to their towns because, TL;DR: 'think of the poor people!'
Have you ever wanted one page that tells you where Americans have come from over America's whole history?
I just wrote it!
Here's how the U.S. population looked prior to when it began collecting immigration statistics:
Immigration statistics began being formally collected with the passage of the Steerage Act in 1819.
Between then and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1882, here's where immigrants came from:
Between the passage of the Immigration Act of 1882 and the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, American arrivals remained mostly European, but there were internal changes:
China has been trying to get young people to player fewer video games for years.
In 2019, they tried to limit players under 18 years of age to 1.5 hours of daily play. Did that work?
The answer seems to be "No".
First, look at total playtime before (red) and after (cyan).
The dataset used here is massive and included 2,486,192,234 unique gamer profiles.
Here's how things look for the percentage of people involved in heavy play (i.e., <4 hours per day, 6 days per week).
Here's the odds of heavy play before and after China's regulation went into place across 50 different countries from another of these authors' datasets.