Seminars

State legislatures enacted numerous public-health laws during the twentieth century, most of which likely had negligible effects on mortality. Using data on the universe of state-level public-health laws and regulations, I test whether these laws, taken together, account for a meaningful decline in mortality. To address endogeneity, I instrument for public-health legislation using the legislative calendar, session length, and legislator salaries. Both OLS and IV estimates indicate that public-health laws reduced mortality, whereas other laws or repeals of public-health laws did not. Legislatures were particularly effective at reducing deaths from tuberculosis, influenza/pneumonia, and childhood diarrhea. Additionally, more-prolific legislatures passed more effective laws. A text analysis of the laws shows that housing/tenement and drug-safety laws are most associated with falling mortality. The universe of public-health laws can account for approximately two-thirds of the mortality decline during the study period.

This article examines the intellectual and political vision behind the U.S. national economic planning movement in the second half of the 1970s. It follows an organization called the Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning (ICNEP), which was the major force behind economic planning during the decade, centering the roles of the two chairmen: United Auto Workers president Leonard Woodcock and Harvard economist Wassily Leontief. The article posits that national economic planning offered a unique vision and a novel response the crises of the 1970s, distinct from mainstream Keynesian or neoliberal prescriptions. Concerned with growing democratic demands on the economic system in the 1970s, planning was pitched as a response to fears that special interests and social conflicts were paralyzing normal policymaking channels. It traces the political conflicts surrounding two key bills which incorporated planning ideas, to understand the evolution of the movement. Planners ultimately failed to convince policymakers that their ideas were politically workable, in part due to business opposition and in part because attempts to forge a broader social constituency opened planners up to the same accusations of politicization they sought to surmount. Yet, ironically, some of the ideas of planners found new force in the neoliberal era in the form of targeted supply-side state interventions to bolster select industries. Planners had sought to tie these techniques to a more just national vision, which incorporated organized labor. It was only in shedding the institutional role of labor, however, that the economic interventions initially championed by planners became seen as politically acceptable.