We’re proud to congratulate Dr. Raffaele Saggio, and coauthors, on his recent receipt of the 2025 Aigner Award from the Journal of Econometrics. Read about the award: economics.ubc.ca/news/ubc-pro...

The Economic History Review has published a virtual issue collecting the contributions of 2025 Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr in the journal. I had the privilege of writing the introductory essay. You can read it here, together with Joel's articles and reviews. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

A @voxdev.bsky.social column on the impact of public education through the lens of economic history, by my (former) student Ben Milner @benjaminlm.bsky.social. voxdev.org/topic/educat...

When I first installed Mac OS 26.1 Tahoe, I hated it. After using it for a few days, I now hate it a lot more. What a piece of junk. Every dynamic element (like autocomplete of URLs / search / addresses) is sluggish, and I am on an MacBook Pro M3 Max with 128 GB of RAM.

Hi all, please spread the word and we hope everyone can make good use of this new data drop: cmfdata.org The full surviving establishment-level Census of Manufactures manuscripts and digitized data from 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880!

The Middlebury Department of Economics is seeking a two-year VAP for 2026-28, any field. The would be a great gig: brilliant colleagues (present company excepted), curious students, friendly vibes, gorgeous location. Please apply / spread the word. apply.interfolio.com/177226

The Iona building, home to @ubcvse.bsky.social, earlier today.

And now for English speakers, our column with Ran Abramitzky in VoxEU reviewing the contributions of Joel Mokyr, sprinkled with a personal touch or two. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Para los hispanohablantes, comparto nuestra columna con Tommy Murphy en el diario La Nación de Buenos Aires, repasando las contribuciones de Joel Mokyr, Premio Nobel de Economía 2025. www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/un-...

In private sector, Bessent made his money by betting that Central Banks would not be able to control their currencies. In government, he is betting that Argentina’s, of all countries, will manage to do so.

Today @justinwolfers.bsky.social woke up and chose violence.

"Bob Fogel said to me once: For economics to work without economic history is like an evolutionary biologist without paleontology. You just miss 99.5% of all the species that ever walked on this earth." Joel Mokyr www.youtube.com/live/__0sGvj...

Elated at Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize! You can find numerous accounts -now multiplying by the minute- of his scholarly contributions. Today I want to celebrate the man and the mentor.

Meet the Vancouver School of Economics’ 2025/26 PhD job market candidates! View their profiles here: economics.ubc.ca/people/phd-j... @plbeauregard.bsky.social

Next Monday (Oct 6) the two-days conference "Inequality & History" will begin, hosted by @dondenacentre.bsky.social at Bocconi University (Milan). Join us to explore & debate inequality across history, from Classical Antiquity until today! Remote attendance possible; QR code in the program below👇

Zotero 7 rocks. That's the skeet.

Gilles Postel-Vinay et Jean-Laurent Rosenthal - A Capital’s Capital Two Hundred Years of Wealth and Inequality in Paris À paraître en février aux Princeton UP

Gasp! It's almost as if, God forbid, the market can address healthcare shortages! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

"large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty". LLMs getting ever closer to human behavior. www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

No exaggeration to say there's a sentiment in urban planning that society should be limited to the living standards that were affordable in the 1920s. You don't see this implicit argument in many other areas of social and economic policy.

Time for the annual reminder to graduate programs. Your recommendation form should have two steps, and two steps only: 1. Upload your letter in PDF format. 2. Submit. National University of Singapore, you are doing it wrong. #nameandshame

It has started. “I’ll be missing class today. Will you be covering anything important?” No. I never cover anything important in class.

Asking ChatGPT to find typos in a document and list them by page number is its kryptonite.

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

My research team (w/ @andyferrara.bsky.social, Sam Bazzi, Eric Chyn, Martin Fiszbein, and Thomas Pearson) is hiring a full-time economics postdoc for the 2025-26 academic year! If you know someone who might be interested, see the link below.

When MSNBC is the last bastion of free market economics.

I did not post about Battacharya’s @washingtonpost’s op ed because I couldn’t find the right words to describe a “scientist” who did his best to undermine trust in vaccines, and now says that vaccines should be abandoned because they haven’t earned the public’s trust. This is the right word.

I cancelled my subscription to The Economist when they endorsed the invasion of Irak. 24 years later, they have only gone downhill from there. Who exactly do they hire to write this crap?

The Schrödinger housing market, in which you want buyers to pay low prices for their homes, but developers to get high prices for their builds. www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...

Every article about meeting the AI challenge in college classrooms: "The professor lovingly curated immersive activities that spurred critical thinking in the 16-student audience." Thanks. Where do I sign up to teach these 16-student classes? We need enrolments of 120 just to break even.

Economic history has lost one of its greats.

Yes, traffic cameras work, but it's a myth that people hate them! Survey after survey shows that most people support automatic enforcement (and often want more of it). This is a false controversy, fed by a minority of disgruntled drivers & journalists seeking narratives with conflict.

The opinions of @theglobeandmail.com’s editorial board are not really opinions. They are “the truth”.

It's a massive problem. "Do your own research!" sounds like excellent advice, but most of us are simply not competent to research complex questions of medical science. So the question becomes, how do we establish forms of authority to which it is rational to give free consent? [...]

RIP Tom Lehrer. (Glad we didn't all go together). tomlehrersongs.com

Bang-on thread on the disease affecting Canadian universities.

The BC government just dragged a panel of experts through the mud for making the tough calls they were appointed to make. I am so glad to have coverage decisions made by politicians without medical expertise reacting to social media mobs. MAHA on the left. vancouversun.com/news/member-...

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

Get price survey teams on the ground, quick! #econsky www.fox2detroit.com/news/helicop...

Trade war already resulting in benefits: local fruit stands are carrying Egyptian and Peruvian oranges, rather than the usual Florida crap.

Nobody: Condo management company: "Here's your new AI-powered digital assistant, which will double the time it takes to get anything done!" Also, it's called HODA, which in Spanish reads as "fooling around" or "fuck". HODA can help you! Text HODA! Talk to HODA! Your life is better with HODA!

Full screen mode. Zoom in. Keep zooming in.

Not only has @washingtonpost.com become a mouthpiece for fascism, it can't even do basic math.

Hopefully the tariff bullying and 51st state bravado was worth destroying one third of US wine exports. And that's just a single industry. www.ctvnews.ca/business/art...

Some rather disturbing details in this article, particularly regarding an interview given by a French government minister. Academic freedom is not just something whose absence elsewhere is to be regretted, it is non-negotiable in any free society.

The anti-vaxxer playbook: - Fire Chief Medical Officer and leave position vacant. - Appoint anti-vaxxer ministers. - Actively campaign against vaccination. - Complain that no one is getting vaccines. - Cancel public funding for vaccinations. www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/arti...

A brilliant deep dive into the ossified and dogmatic structures behind the widening gap between public health and scientific evidence. canadahealthwatch.ca/2025/04/18/t...

I get the sentiment that underlies this. I too think we should strengthen ties with the EU. Economically, militarily, socially. But EU *membership* would be a very bad thing. The basic reason is we are not in Europe. Geographically, economically. (Also legally. Article 49 says must be European.)