An economic crisis in your teens can alter your behavior for life, Ulrike Malmendier and others find | The Washington Post
Last year, Ulrike Malmendier released a working paper with coauthor Leslie Sheng Shen analyzing decades of data to estimate how high unemployment shaped consumers’ psyches in the long term. Her research was featured, along with research by Christopher Severen, in a recent Washington Post article.
“The line wasn’t supposed to dip downward like that.
Americans’ transit behavior changes slowly, if at all. But in chart after chart, economist Christopher Severen noticed people born around 1964 had a different relationship with cars than those born before or after them. They drove less and used transit more.
Severen might have dismissed it as a coincidence if he hadn’t realized the babies of 1964 would have been learning to drive around 1979 or soon after. That’s when Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power and Iran’s oil production cratered and gasoline prices jumped more in a year than they have at any time since, Labor Department data shows.”
