🧵1/ The half-life of a grudge. Britain crushed the 1857 revolt in northern India with mass reprisals centered on Lucknow. For decades after, districts closer to that violence vaccinated their children less against smallpox and the effect faded as the generation that lived through 1857 died off.

@alextaylorecon.bsky.social and I have a new paper. Using embeddings of ~800k book titles in Europe 1450-1650, we find higher market access made a city's print output more topically broad and mainstream. Also, useful-knowledge content predicts city growth. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/iez0u...

Zion’s cool

As DINKWADs (look it up) we were contractually obligated to make a big deal out of Stanley’s first birthday.

Encountered the peak of survey responses today: Q: "What are your thoughts about the use of AI in teaching, research, or your broader academic work?" A: "This survey took too long and I have to get to a meeting." Feel like this response is more informative than intended...

Trump is slurring his words so bad we had to rewind to make sure he didn’t say “Hormone Straight”

Did a series of videos with Markus Brunnermeier on Claude Code (more to come) Video 1: Getting Started with CC open.substack.com/pub/paulgp/p...

Bad year to be locked into a big summer road trip thanks to non-refundable hotel reservations!

Increasingly worried academic success in quantitative fields will be determined largely by your ability to drop $200/mo on a Claude Max plan. Unrelatedly: it's frustrating that some departments, as a rule, won't pay for subscriptions.

Here's a quick guide to setting up an R LSP for Claude Code in #rstats: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0... Note that it uses the `languageserver` package at the moment, since I don't believe ark is exposed for a standalone mode yet.

It ain't perfect, but with supervision it's the real deal. Robustness checks that would've taken me weeks, done in hours.

Black History includes a profound oral tradition. In the Green Book Project, we’re using that oral history to map out how Black people navigated segregation. Your contributions to the community map preserve history. Share: greenbookproject.org.ohio-state.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

So, I've spent most of my professional life on what Bluesky would surely consider "the right," and I think what's going on here is that so much of the action there is top-down and ultimately donor-driven that some of these folks genuinely can't wrap their heads around...

From politics to theater to outright evil. I don't know when we made each transition, but politics and theater are in the rearview now.

Applications for the Economic History Association Graduate Dissertation Fellowships are due in two days (January 14) eh.net/graduate-dis...

Finals?? Grading??

If you are at the Southerns, come say hi and listen to some interesting economic history presentations! We will be in room “Edison” all day today

How did France become one of Europe’s biggest printers of vernacular books, and how did it shape its linguistic and political development? My paper w/Jacob Hall, "The King’s French," shows how a 1539 language mandate changed printing, standardized French, and strengthened national identity. (1/12)

How did France become one of Europe’s biggest printers of vernacular books, and how did it shape its linguistic and political development? My paper w/Jacob Hall, "The King’s French," shows how a 1539 language mandate changed printing, standardized French, and strengthened national identity. (1/12)

This, but also a hidden underlying resentment that comes from working for too long on a project and knowing every problem with it.

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!

After using fixest to output my regression tables in R for so long, one project is forcing me to figure out Stata's esttab for the first time... Why is it so hard to output a tabular environment so I can do caption, label, footnotes, and width customization in Latex?

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

The latest front in the attack on academia: The coffee shop near campus no longer does faculty discounts because of the tariffs (they mostly use Brazilian beans).

Though I primarily focused on voting in my Monumental Effects paper, some specifications did show this negative effect on lynchings. I always thought it'd be worthwhile for someone to run down that question in a more thorough manner. Great to see more Confederate monument work!

New APSR sure to spark discussion argues: Confederate monuments actually reduced violence against Black people historically & that their recent removals have increased anti-Black hate crimes Monuments "act as a substitute for performative violence in constructing a white supremacist social order"

⚠️ Virtual Workshop in HPE info ⚠️ @adajkanu.bsky.social is presenting a project on "Colonization and the Politics of Belonging in Nigeria" on Thursday! Martha Wilfahrt (UC Berkeley) will discuss. Let me know if you're not on our email list already and would like to be!

Excited to host the All California (formerly All UC) economic history JM conference tomorrow — proud to keep this tradition alive and looking forward to the papers! events.berkeley.edu/events/event...

Good morning!

Looking for rising stars in Historical Political Economy? 🌍📚 Check out this year’s job market candidates: www.broadstreet.blog/p/hpe-candid...

In trying times, may we all strive to find the peace Stanley finds in a simple beam of sunlight

Modern life is basically dependent on nerds you will never meet building software & spreadsheets you will never see What the Trump admin dares to ask is: what if we just shoved as many of those folks as we could find into a locker.

If anyone has hot takes about how to teach principles of macro right now while meeting the following two goals, I'm all ears. 1. Teach my students key principles of macro policy 2. Talk about directly relevant current events without seeming absolutely hysterical

Classes starting back today got me like

"tariffs, by definition, cannot be inflationary" says the guy Trump just nominated to be in charge of defining and measuring inflation. (He also also wrong. He's playing with MV=PQ reasoning, and assumes a supply shock won't ↓Q.) [Source: www.aging.senate.gov/download/05/...

I received a very insistent demand for belly scratches this morning...

Who needs more than 5 years in right wing think tanks to run a major statistical bureau anyway?

*Sigh*

🚨 Are you interested in Historical Political Economy? 🚨 At the Virtual Workshop in HPE (VWHPE)—organized jointly with @dkofanov.bsky.social & @tinepaulsen.bsky.social—we discuss state-of-the-art research on a regular basis. ‼️ We have just issued a new call for papers. ‼️ Link & info in post #2.

Positron lives up to the hype, especially if you already use VS Code for other things (for me, LaTeX and Python). Well done @posit.co. Switching from RStudio immediately!

Being an absolute menace while Dad is trying to write a paper is exhausting work. In case you were wondering, yes. This is a dachshund puppy page for the foreseeable future.

Well my productivity for the rest of this summer just took a hit. Having a gremlin in the apartment is a little distracting. Happy to have Stanley join our family!

🤢🤢🤢 Bad on multiple levels.

As the US Army celebrates it 250th birthday, Trump is celebrating the enemy that tried to defeat it.

You should absolutely do your own research, nothing is stopping you from applying for a predoc job, taking your GREs, applying to a PhD program, passing your qualifying exams, passing your dissertation defense, writing a paper you will come to hate and revising it for two years to satisfy strangers.

As a lapsed Catholic... If Vance takes this as a sign and changes his ways, I'll start going to mass again.

The second edition of The Effect is now available for preorder! This version has a whole new chapter on Partial Identification, a considerable update on staggered treatment and control variables in DID, and zillions of other little updates throughout. www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...

This. The reason dictators insist on so much pro-regime *performance*—statues, parades, loyalty oaths—is because it cements their power. When people see others *performing* dissent, it unleashes their own dissent, as @timurkuran.bsky.social has shown—> link.springer.com/article/10.1...