Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2015) is where the replication crisis comes to economics and political science. Simply put, this chart is impossible. It implies that West Germany’s real GDP per capita grew by almost 8% per year from 1960 to 1990. But it clearly didn’t… 1/20

“Why the South Fought” is my latest paper on American economic history. In it, I argue that white Southerners defended slavery because they had benefited from it. The idea that a mass of “poor whites” had been impoverished by slavery is a myth. 1/12

Logging out. Back to the manuscript.

The sad thing about historians being economically illiterate is that they either have to ignore what economic historians say or accept it on faith.

Public Service Announcement: Avoid Harvard University Press www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

I wrote a short essay reflecting on what “AI” means for academia. All my academic friends should probably now disown me. open.substack.com/pub/thepoorr...

Why are Homicides so High in Latin America? This essay is a literature review of the intersecting drivers of violence, including @chrisblattman.bsky.social's new book which I strongly recommend! :-) www.ggd.world/p/why-are-ho...

The man at left separated the mother and baby at right. The mother is now in Venezuela. Baby daughter, in foster care in the US, exact location unknown. Dad? He's in CECOT prison without trial — because he had tattoos.

This should be obvious, but my research on slavery is not “policy oriented.” Even if slavery contributed to growth in the US, it does not mean that it would contribute to growth anywhere today. And even it did, it is still an abomination and should be abolished for all time.

In my new paper, I argue that slavery facilitated the growth of cotton exports in the 19th-century United States. To see why this is controversial, we must enter the rabbit hole of how economic history is currently taught in American universities… 1/20

In my new paper, I argue that slavery facilitated the growth of cotton exports in the 19th-century United States. To see why this is controversial, we must enter the rabbit hole of how economic history is currently taught in American universities… 1/20

Everyone has to make the difficult choice between cheap, high-quality electronics or… corn syrup?

Reviewer 2 says that I completely ignore the role of institutions. I say, “hold my beer.”🤣

"An Israeli attack on [a] freed Palestinian prisoner killed him, his wife & 4 children... the blast was so violent paramedics were unable to recover a single body from the family of 6, but were left to collect shredded flesh and body parts from the street outside the residence"

"The soldiers reloaded their magazines and kept shooting even after it was clear that no return fire was coming from the other side – and despite the cries of the aid workers who tried to identify themselves." From Haaretz. archive.ph/4vam4

Can any intrepid economist spot what was special about American cotton up to 1860?

I look at close to 100 stories a week and even more outside of work. I’ve done this ten years. This is among the most horrific things I’ve ever read — testimony from dying children whose access to medicine has been cut off by the Trump administration. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

In São Paulo, I presented what I call “the Latin American paradox” Why is it that Latin Americans are actually quite supportive of gender equality, and yet we see high femicides? My answer: a weak state, drug wars & conflict give rise to generalized violence

My parents worked in factories. Spark plugs, poultry, plastics, etc. They told me in no uncertain terms not to follow them. Their attitude was representative of an entire generation. America CHOSE to deindustrialize. In part because few people enjoy factory work, especially in non-union shops!

Video footage shows the moment an Israeli airstrike struck a UNRWA flour distribution center in Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, earlier today.

“It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” (Acts 26:14)

My paper “Accounting for Slavery” presents a new database of state-level GDP divided into 15 sectors for every census year in the US from 1839 to 1899. I then use this new database to make a few gentle interventions in the slavery debates. 1/19

Version 1 of “Accounting for Slavery” will be the real banger, but my wife wants me to cultivate the vegetable patch, so it will have to wait until Monday.

Version 3 of my “Did Slavery Impede the Growth of American Capitalism?” is now available. The econometrics––an event study of abolition and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) of the free-slave state border––is the same, but I have improved the interpretation section. 1/3

Version 2 of my “p-Values on the Free-Slave State Border” is now available. To recap, it is a critique of a recent attempt to apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to the slavery debates. 1/4

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IMO the direction to go with studies of the 19c US state is to ask not how or to what extent the state could exert its will--which seems to be the preoccupation of a lot of western and Reconstruction historiography--but to ask how the state formed a will in the first place. We all agree now that...

Stalinism will be required to stop foreigners undermining our national values.

The emphasis should be on unionizing service work to raise wages and expanding social benefits.

Trump's tariff announcement rattle global markets. But if we zoom out and look at trade more generally it is a continuation of frictions in international trade that have started since at least 2016. Much focus has been on trade in goods, when actually trade in services has...

wen trade embargo on his own country?

Today, in my column for @us.theguardian.com, I stress three points about Trump's current assault on higher ed institutions. Quick 🧵 Full piece here: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In 25 years of covering national security, I’ve never seen a story like this: Senior Trump officials discussed planning for the U.S. attack on Yemen in a Signal group--and inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Some have suggested that I look at this article by Piketty et al in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where they attempt to address the effect of gender on inequality. So here it is, deconstructed.🔨 1/20

Cruelty and idiocy are not a great combination. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

If US wants to change tax policies to eliminate global imbalances, instead of raising tariffs against VATS under reciprocal tariffs alibi, bettet to do it by imposing a VAT to fund a single payer system that shaves 3% of GDP off HC consumption & acts as a fiscal devaluation for employers. -

It was a good (and very useful) thread. Taking it down is quite unfortunate. The reason for taking it down — critiques about neglecting similar historical situations — is proof positive that academics are suited to police discourse but unsuited to produce generative action.

You’re thinking of income as a proxy for consumption; I’m thinking of income as a proxy for power. We are not the same.

If one person is dependent on the other for food and shelter, it always leads to an inequality of power. And if you assume an equal split throughout human history, you end up with a very anachronistic view of past inequality.

This is the most controversial graph from my new paper. It suggests that Piketty’s “golden age of social democracy” after World War II only really existed in the United States if you were white and male. 1/5

My new paper is “The Autumn of the White Patriarch: Identity and Inequality in American Capitalism.” This is the key chart. It shows how white men’s share of national income has fallen since the 1960s. Imho, this is why we have such identity politics on the US right today. 1/11

The AI-hallucinated Census of 2030 is going to be epic.

The excellent Zimbabwean financial historian Tinashe Nyamunda (now U of Glasgow) is presenting to the Global Economic History Seminar on Monday 17th, 17:15 GMT, in the Audit Room, King's College, Cambridge, on the financial origins of the Anglo-Boer War. Also on Zoom

Oh, so that's why he loves to do "Roman salutes". I had just assumed he was a Nazi.

Have we passed peak intelligence? In international tests, student scores for reading and maths sunk to a new low. US teens are struggling to concentrate & evaluate information. The excellent @jburnmurdoch.ft.com Warning: this thread is dark 🧵

This is a big reason why the US outlook is so difficult to evaluate. We still have no idea how far DOGE will get, because despite their claims and stated ambitions, there is no actual evidence they are cutting govt spending