Antebellum Wage Widening Once Again

Abstract

We welcome the appearance of Scott Grosse's note as an opportunity to repeat our call for new archival research on antebellum trends in the distributions of earnings, income, and wealth.' We hope that our American Inequality and the present exchange will help stimulate such empirical exploration. Since Grosse reports no such exploration and no new evidence, however, is no reason to revise our tentative conclusion about antebellum earnings inequality: after decades of quiescence or narrowing, nonfarm wage gaps widened between about 1816 and abodt 1856. Grosse offers no new data. Every piece of documented information comes from sources we had used and cited in American Inequality. There might appear to be an illusory exception, an offhand and undocumented sentence by Adam Smith, who had somehow heard what carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers earned in distant New York in 1773.2 Directed by us to the richer wage statistics volume of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Grosse now cites other scraps we had previously seen for the 1770s. These hardly represent fresh data about the contested trends after 1816. Instead of hunting up new data, Grosse selectively sifts through those we had already cited. His procedure seems to be as follows: First, even though Williamson and Lindert cited the whole published literature on the issue of antebellum wage gaps, find some series they did not reproduce in the book. Sure enough, some strengthen their argument while some do not. Next, ignore most of the series that confirm the Williamson-Lindert view and make excuses and complaints about others. It is an excellent formula for revisionism, even if it does not advance knowledge. Grosse repeatedly acknowledges evidence supporting our view, to dismiss it frivolously. He concedes that was a sustained rise in teachers' pay advantage over common labor, but sweeps it away as if offering better pay for teachers of given quality were not the same thing as a rising skill premium. He notes that machinists on average underwent a rising pay advantage, but complains that the overall averages hide a mixture of machinists from different industries. To solve the sector aggregation problem of apples and he then dumps apples, oranges, and other fruit across the page. Oddly enough, among the sectoral figures he presents for machinists, is one pair of observations from the same industry, and this happens to support our view: the skilled-wage ratio for cordage works was only 1.33 in 1840, while the ratio for 1850 was 1.61. While this cordage-works evidence supports our view, we prefer our own attempts to construct fixed-weight wage differentials, based as they are on larger samples. His reading of the evidence from northeastern textile mills is equally odd. He admits that Nickless's data fully support our view, but chooses to fret that there may be no single trend, since the series jumps suddenly-and maintains that increase