Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution

Between 1750 and 1789, areas in France with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots

By Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau, and Marco Tabellini. 

"The French Revolution dismantled the ancien régime and redefined state power and institutions. It transformed society by abolishing feudalism and establishing modern bureaucratic and legal frameworks, and its influence extended beyond France, shaping institutions worldwide. While the Revolution’s causes were complex, historical accounts have long emphasized the role of fiscal institutions, particularly the extractive nature of taxation under the ancien régime. However, systematic evidence on the role taxation played in shaping the Revolution remains limited.

Our research examines how taxation shaped the emergence and escalation of unrest and its influence on political behavior during the Revolution’s early years. Using data on local per capita tax burdens around 1780, we found that bailliages (administrative districts) with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots between 1750 and 1789. Specifically, a shift from a bailliage in the bottom quarter of the tax-burden distribution to one in the top quarter—a difference of roughly 8 percent of per capita income at the time—more than doubled the number of riots during that period. High-tax bailliages were also more likely to be swept into the Great Fear of 1789, when rumors of aristocratic conspiracies spread rapidly across rural France, triggering attacks on manor houses and the destruction of feudal records and ultimately leading the National Assembly to abolish feudalism.

This relationship holds even after accounting for several factors commonly associated with revolutionary unrest, including the spread of Enlightenment ideas, increases in wheat prices, the local presence of aristocrats and clergy, and the size of tax police brigades. It also holds when we narrow the analysis to municipalities on either side of a tax border. One interpretation of these findings is that taxation depressed local economic development, impoverishing communities and thus leading them to revolt for material reasons.

The relationship between taxation and unrest stemmed primarily from taxes on goods rather than on income or profits. This aligns with historical accounts emphasizing popular hostility toward these taxes, viewed as especially regressive, enforced through intrusive state controls, and emblematic of the ancien régime’s fiscal inequities. Our research focuses on the salt tax and the traites, a system of internal customs duties. Together, these taxes accounted for over 20 percent of royal revenue by 1780, were deeply resented, and were among the first abolished in 1790.

Our findings provide evidence of widespread opposition to taxation. To examine this idea further, we analyzed the lists of grievances compiled and submitted to Versailles ahead of the Estates General in the spring of 1789. Areas with heavier tax burdens submitted more complaints against taxation, even after accounting for the total number of complaints submitted. This relationship holds only for the Third Estate and not for the nobility, consistent with the fact that commoners bore the brunt of taxation while the nobility was largely exempt. Our research also finds that inequality exacerbated opposition to taxation for reasons beyond its direct economic burden. Many complaints cited the unequal imposition of taxes across social groups and territories, as well as coercive extraction without corresponding public benefits.

The Enlightenment emphasized equality before the law and challenged inherited privilege and arbitrary power. Our findings show that riots were more common in areas with greater exposure to Enlightenment ideas, as measured by local book sales and subscriptions to the Encyclopédie. Local literacy rates do not seem to have played a significant role, indicating that the diffusion of ideas mattered more than access to reading per se.

Tax-related riots peaked in the 1780s, but the reason for this timing is unclear. Taxes on goods had existed for centuries, and the overall burden rose sharply between 1690 and 1760 but changed little thereafter. Instead, historians point to droughts that devastated harvests and drove up wheat prices in the 1780s. Our research uses historical data on temperature and precipitation and finds that hotter-than-average summers led to a larger increase in riots in high-tax municipalities than in their low-tax neighbors. Together with our evidence on tax disparities and Enlightenment exposure, these findings suggest that taxation created the structural foundations for unrest, while material hardship and ideological forces catalyzed long-standing grievances about fiscal inequality into open revolt.

While fiscal grievances fueled the Revolution from below, the decisions of representatives also drove the movement from above. We analyzed more than 60,000 legislative speeches delivered between May 1789, when the Estates General convened, and January 1793, when Louis XVI was executed. Our findings reveal that legislators from high-tax constituencies were about 70 percent more likely to discuss taxation, 60 percent more likely to criticize the ancien régime, and roughly 73 percent more likely to defend the Revolution in tax-related speeches than legislators from low-tax constituencies. These legislators were also more inclined to frame taxation as oppressive and call for fiscal reform.

Beyond fiscal debates, legislators from high-tax constituencies were more likely to demand institutional change, call for the abolition of feudal privileges, and criticize the monarchy in their speeches following the Great Fear of 1789. During the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792), legislators from heavily taxed constituencies were more likely to support abolishing the monarchy and to vote for the king’s execution during the National Convention in January 1793.

Note
This research brief is based on Tommaso Giommoni et al., “Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 34816, February 2026."

Note to Bessent and Congressional Republicans: Greedflation Is Still Bad Economics

By Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller of Cato.

"Republicans spent the better part of four years mocking the political left’s greedflation narrative—and rightly so. But lately they’re using similar arguments to deflect blame for high gas prices pushing up measured inflation. 

The war in Iran has predictably spiked oil prices. The price of the US crude oil benchmark rose over 40 percent in March, and gasoline prices now average above $4 per gallon. As a result, the energy consumer price index was up 10.9 percent in the second-largest single-month increase in the series’ 60-year history. Buoyed by those rising energy prices, overall CPI was also up—0.9 percent in the same month. 

Overwhelmingly, that’s the result of markets pricing in the likelihood of protracted war in Iran and supply chain disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Already, the war has caused $50 billion worth of oil lost—nearly a month of total US oil demand. 

For economists, the price change is an unremarkable consequence. This is what happens when the supply of a good falls, especially one for which the short-term demand is relatively inelastic given oil’s downstream importance. Indeed, with oil being a critical input to so many other industries, sharply rising oil prices are one of the few supply shocks with the power to make the overall price level spike—producing a so-called transitory inflation.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the war in Ukraine disrupted global energy and food supply chains in a similar way. But this occurred at the same time the Federal Reserve had just allowed a huge monetary expansion, and Congress was borrowing like crazy. The result was soaring economy-wide spending, as people shed money balances and bought assets, goods, and services. This effect was ultimately hugely more consequential in driving the uplift in the price level we saw over time.

Democratic politicians, as members of the incumbent party, faced massive pressure to do something about the cost of living, and predictably they reached for an explanation that didn’t implicate their own support for “running the economy hot” through monetary and fiscal stimulus. Some, including Biden, blamed Putin’s war in Ukraine. But many, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA) and later the president again, also advocated the greedflation or “profit-led” theory of inflation. 

Senator Warren argued that price increases were primarily driven not by excess consumer spending (from the inflated supply of money) or supply disruptions, but by corporations tacitly squeezing excess profits from consumers given the shrouding effect of the supply-shock cost rises. The best evidence supporters of that theory could muster was unconvincing: Nonsense reports conflated the producer price index with input costs, politicians made slipshod comparisons between corporate profits and the inflation rate, and researchers listened in on earnings calls for evidence that firms were using inflation as pretext.

Warren herself seems sincere in believing that this short-term exploitation can arise from periods of cost shocks; she also condemned companies she said were price gouging following Trump’s summer 2025 tariff chaos and last month pressed the Federal Trade Commission to investigate companies raising prices after war in Iran broke out—especially in gasoline, fertilizer, and airlines. But her misguided arguments are now finding convenient use by Republicans too. 

In a House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed rising fertilizer prices on “a handful of companies that have basically taken over the market.” 

A day before that, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned retail gas stations to lower prices soon. As crude oil prices fall, Bessent said he’d be looking “to keep the retail gas stations honest,” adding, “I’m sure the president will call out anyone who’s a bad actor.” That comes at the same time CNN reported Republicans were actively searching for a midterm strategy post–Iran war: “The White House has also sought new ideas for taking on rising prices, such as accusing gas station operators of seizing on the war to gouge consumers at the pump.” Of course, we saw similar browbeating against companies after the Liberation Day tariffs.

But corporate greed or price gouging has never been a plausible theory of price changes, let alone inflation. Corporations with substantive market power don’t need pretext. They can always extract high prices by artificially limiting supply. And firms without market power that try to pocket a windfall invite undercutting by rivals; that’s especially true of hypercompetitive retail gas stations. When prices rise simultaneously across an entire industry—nay, across the entire world—the far simpler explanation is either a demand shock or a common cost shock—precisely the sort a war-driven supply shock produces. Consumers have to be willing and able to pay the higher prices, after all.

A lot of politicians around the world seem to get upset if prices for retail gas spike on inventory that was acquired at lower cost. They regard that as unfair “gouging.” Few of them, I suspect, insist on selling their homes for the price they paid for them. But fundamentally, this misunderstands the role of market prices, which reflect the relevant scarcity of the products in each new context. The opportunity cost for firms of selling oil below what the market will bear today is the price that could be obtained elsewhere in the world. Firms also need to replace inventory at the new market price. So, yes, they might make a short-term accounting profit on some inventory, but this is quite transitory.

More important, prices must rise to allocate scarce goods toward those with the highest willingness to pay and to prevent shortages. The profit received is an incentive to ramp up production and end a shortage. Companies who don’t raise prices don’t miraculously have more gasoline to give—we’re still $50 billion worth of oil short. And because charging below market prices would be crystallized into a shortage, consumers aren’t left better off in aggregate. The times when a consumer benefits by finding gas at below-market prices are inevitably offset by the times they find no gas at all—either because earlier customers tapped the supply or because the time cost of waiting in line for gas isn’t worth it.

The increasing frequency with which politicians reach for the greedflation myth is troubling. It reveals that lawmakers aren’t interested in reckoning with the consequences of their policies. When voters swallow the greedflation myth, they give cover to the bad policies that actually caused price hikes and absolve the lawmakers who pushed for them. With Warren and the Democrats, it was strong support for overly stimulatory monetary and fiscal policy. With the Trump administration, it’s explaining away the impact of tariffs and a conflict they started. 

Voters and consumers shouldn’t let this happen. Supply shocks raise prices, and wars are supply shocks. Loose monetary policy devalues the dollar. At a minimum, governments that go to war or government institutions that enable excess monetary creation bear responsibility for the inflationary consequences, not the people and companies that have to respond to those consequences." 

Is each American generation doing better?

From Tyler Cowen. 

"We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

That is from Kevin Corrinth and Jeff Larrimore in Demography.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis."

From Fatal Conceit to the Friendly Skies: How Deregulation Made Flight Affordable

By Jeffery L. Degner AIER. Excerpt:

"With FDR’s creation of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in 1938, its designers claimed that it would centrally administer, “safety-related rulemaking, accident investigation, and economic regulation of commercial airlines.” Eventually, it would go far beyond such broad claims and do far more than that, engaging in price-fixing and the prevention of new entrants, just to name a few. Ultimately, the hubris of social engineers led them to declare what “fair” prices were across the airline industry.

In a 1975 report, no less than liberal senator Edward Kennedy admitted that “the Board’s experience suggests it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to develop a cost-based ratemaking system that uses fair procedures and keeps fares in such an industry low.” In a more damning admission, “This is not to say that inherent defects are the only cause of the CAB’s failings. These may, for example, also reflect the human tendency to listen more closely to representatives, such as those for the industry, who are powerful, well-informed, and can reward regulators with future jobs or contracts.”

The ultimate effect of this centralized planning was to “control prices, restrict entry, and confer antitrust immunity.” In brief, the CAB was used to create a government-backed cartel in the interest of existing large carriers. In what amounted to a public confession of crony-capitalism, the CAB’s days were numbered. 

In the wake of the report, American Airlines was allowed to discount its fares up to 45 percent in an attempt to see whether airline travel could be “made available at a price all can afford.” Once this mild form of price competition was allowed, rivalrous competition showed suspicious legislators and regulators that allowing competition did indeed create greater value for consumers. Eventually, Senator Howard Cannon along with bipartisan supporters including Ted Stevens and Wendell Ford helped pass the Airline Deregulation Act in February of 1978. 

Since industrial leaders at the time, like Delta Airlines, had grown accustomed to the many protections they received under the CAB, they lobbied against the deregulatory move. They made claims that “free entry” and “free exit” were “untested concepts” that would result in the concentration of the industry into the “hands of only a few carriers…causing service deterioration at smaller cities and in smaller markets.” Delta’s doom-mongering didn’t materialize in either the short or long run. 

In the nearly 50 years since the abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board, routes and flexibility have proliferated, and prices have declined continually. In fact, the last three decades have seen inflation-adjusted domestic airfares fall from $614 in 1995 to $397 in 2025. Further, the industry continues to grow, nearly doubling the number of employees since 1990. Prior to deregulation, air travel was undoubtedly a luxury good. Now, it has become so affordable that 80 percent of Americans with annual household income below $50,000 have taken flight at some point in their lives." 

 

 

 

BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue

Tweet from NX Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.

 

The Human Progress Index (HPI) shows an even more dramatic improvement in human well-being since 1990 than either the UN’s HDI or the Augmented HDI

Tweet from Chelsea Olivia Follett. 

 

The WTO Isn’t Dead, but America Is Breaking It

Reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Jamieson Greer’s frustration with the World Trade Organization is understandable, but his op-ed ignores how the U.S. unwisely accelerated the organization’s decline (“Another Fish Story From the WTO,” April 8).

The American middle class has prospered in the era of open trade, and U.S. manufacturing job declines—driven mainly by productivity gains—long predate China’s WTO accession. The U.S. was the WTO’s chief architect and reaped significant economic and geopolitical value from the system. Its retreat, which began before the administration, ignored these realities and instead prioritized U.S. farm subsidies and trade remedies, often resisting the disciplines Washington demanded of others.

Fealty to these and other insular political issues stymied multilateral negotiations and motivated four separate U.S. administrations to neuter the WTO dispute settlement by blocking Appellate Body appointments. Washington’s participation in disputes has also ground to a halt. You can’t complain about the rules of the game after you stop playing and strangle the referee.

Worst of all, the U.S. has been a bad-faith abuser of the rules it helped write, blowing through tariff bindings and invoking narrow WTO exceptions for national security and balance-of-payments crises to maintain President Trump’s global tariff wall.

Mr. Greer is right to decry the WTO’s consensus problem and the abuse of certain rules by other WTO members. The institution does need reform. But members’ continued participation shows the institution isn’t dead. And reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing.

Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome

Washington

Mr. Packard is a trade policy fellow and Mr. Lincicome is Vice President for Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute."