Our paper now

I do love flying in to Boston, it's like a city of sails on the water. Weekend is all prep for NBER SI, reading econ history paper, good times.

And today a swan's nest, right on the banks of the river

Vienna. Wildflowers on the walk to the train

Does Harvard build a couple of spin offs now?

98 million pairs of shoes produced in Britain in 1907

Sometimes I feel like documenting the most quotidian moments of life in Western Europe. This whole terrain will be foreign to peoples of the future, as I am reminded every time I read biographies of workers in 19th c England

Industrial Revolution probably improved living standards more than any other revolution before or since. It'd be neat to quantify this, and without overlooking the many people who were harmed in the churn

Have come to terms with the fact that I don't really understand or remember much until I write it out & work through it. So I'm going to blog. Primarily for myself. Would love it to be a little useful for others. Many thanks to @johanfourieza.bsky.social, whose conference on this was inspiring

The 12th Australasian Cliometrics Workshop will be held 14 Nov 2025 at Monash Uni, Melbourne. Proposals accepted thru 14 July, full papers due 31st Oct. More info: Quoc-Anh Do ([email protected]) & Laura Panza ([email protected]) ECR & grad students particularly encouraged 📉📈🗃📗 #AcademicSky

Vienna at sundown

Thousands of books have just arrived at CSH and I can't help myself, I've nabbed a few just for the cover art and title. Any Booth map will do for me I guess #econhistory

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜 What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox? My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%. 🧵👇 1/6

Good discussion taking place on whether researchers should be responsible for sharing their findings, or whether it should be someone else. Specialization etc. Someone said "the researcher might not be the one who shares the story, but they should know why it matters"

Do we have a 4th Industrial Revolution Pope?!

@delong.social sharing thoughts on the use and abuse of economic history

Day 1 of the workshop on communicating research in economic history. Very glad to see this space developing #econhist

Faulkner

Really delighted to have arrived in Stellenbosch for this workshop on disseminating Economic History. Organized by @johanfourieza.bsky.social with keynote from @delong.social

Tawney Lecture at EHS Guido Alfani: Economic inequality in preindustrial societies

Man I love a railroad graph In this case it's part of a fascinating and bleak story of indigeneous dispossession. I'll post the paper if it's ok with the authors.

I'm going to have to write an entire paper showing how bad false positives in Linking actually are. People are surprisingly dubious about this.

The absolutely stunning sunset in Vienna as I leave to Dublin & the EHS in Glasgow. My team at CSH is superb, and I always regret leaving. Excited to meet people in Dublin & then go on home to economic history. I better have some useful findings one day, I have been given much

it's easy to think that academia is outdated, worthless etc but the fact that we are consistently the first targets for repression by dicators and wannabe dictators suggests we are still doing something useful and good for free societies despite our best efforts to fucking suck super bad

Thinking with history, not just about it

Susskind is on fire in parts of his book, Growth. "Indeed, if Jesus himself could not convince everyone to give up their material possessions - in Matthew 19:24 'again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye...' - then it is unlikely degrowthers will be able to do it either"

This conclusion is sickeningly optimistic. I'm a little pleased with it, not going to lie.

"La machine est le redempteur de l'humanite, le Dieu qui rachetera l'homme des sordides artes et du travail salarie, le Dieu qui lui donnera des loisirs et la liberte" Marx's son in law, with another one of the liberatory takes on labour saving tech

Churchill

I just learned that higher, technical education in the UK was originally funded, in 1889, by... the whiskey tax. Delightful. Will be buying a Macallan in honour.

I’ve put together a short list of opportunities for early career academics willing to come to Europe: www.cvernade.com/miscellaneou... This mostly covers France and Germany for now but I’m willing to extend it. I build on @ellis.eu resources and my own knowledge of these systems.

This is the astonishingly beautiful building I'm lucky enough to work in. I think there are genuinely some enlightenment values at the Complexity Hub, proud to be part of this. Also, the building itself makes me want to organize an econhist conference, maybe next summer :)

Absolutely not. We don't start incarcerating people based on identity. God have mercy

open.spotify.com/episode/5QFu... This one was so superb!

🚨 Migration as escape valve from Malthus 🚨 1) high fertility or late fertility transition -> spread of diasporas 2) Age of Mass Migration -> transition to modern growth www.nber.org/papers/w33542 @nber.org @romainwacziarg.bsky.social

Laugh crying right now

I had forgotten that Becker alludes to the more expensive, "high quality" children as Cadillacs, and the "lower quality" ones, Chevrolets.

I mean, is it controversial to suggest that the dynamics of skills biased tech change have been responsible for sustaining the middle class? Is there a paper on this?

How did the US become a land of opportunity? In a new paper, we show that the country's pioneering role in mass education was key to its rise in intergenerational mobility from 1850 to 1950. "America's Rise in Human Capital Mobility" with Harriet Brookes Gray & Hugo Reichardt

I'm rather surprised at how quiet the historians are right now. It seems like a time that calls for at least a few historians

History of knowledge people: do we have any decent assesment of density (or complexity) of knowledge across the different empires in historical context?

Yep. I think this is a time to live your values.

There's a document circulating that is tracking PhD admissions paused/reduced and faculty hiring freezes in America right now. Dozens of the former, fewer of the latter so far. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

We'll be seeing a wave of this in America. If NIH stays frozen American universities will slump into collapse. The impact will be felt in science communities around the world. I know we've all been trained to be studiously neutral, but the role of science in society is being rewritten right now &

I've been a bit quiet recently, because I used to live in a world where it was feasible to keep your politics distinct from your academic work, but that is no longer the world we live in. The role of science & knowledge more broadly has itself become heavily politicized

It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.

Note to self to download this

Brave new world? What do people think about this line of thought: 1) we have been in an SBTC world for 110 years. New tech required new skills. This drove skills premiums & led to the rise of middle class incomes. It drove a huge higher education industry. The economy 1/3

Roses are red Violets are blue You should finish your current papers Before starting something new