US tariffs are not paid by other countries. That’s a lie through gritted teeth. US tariffs are taxes on Americans. They are paid by Americans who buy anything made with any ingredient from abroad. (All of us.) Cost: $2,600–3,100/yr. for the average American. @kclausing.bsky.social of @piie.com —>

How does Quebec compare to other provinces in terms of social mobility? The Montreal Economic Institute's @vincentgeloso.bsky.social shares the results of a recent study with @eliasmakos.bsky.social:

Now forthcoming at University of Chicago Press: my book on how America between 1870 and 1940 had the world’s first massive and egalitarian growth episode — it was the lean and mean egalitarian growth machine

📢 New initiative: we are launching a monthly virtual seminar in French Economic History to share and discuss the latest research in the field! 🌍 Open to all interested in #econhist. 👉 Info & updates: sites.google.com/view/vwfhe/h...

In liberal democracies, you can trust agencies like the BLS to be non-partisan. Not out of virtue, but bureaucratic self-interest

Tellement pleutres! L’exemple à suivre c’est Franz Boas. Boas fut l’un des rares, à son époque, à s’attaquer frontalement aux thèses du racisme “scientifique”, démontant leurs prétentions pseudo-savantes alors que peu osaient le faire. Je veux être Boas. Vous voulez juste ne pas faire d’efforts!

Pleutres! Raisonnement faiblard de pleutres incapables de voir que leur paresse nourrit fascisme, extrémisme et illibéralisme. Débattre, c’est désarmer l’adversaire et immuniser contre le pire. Refuser ce combat, c’est avouer implicitement une faiblesse et encourager les périls. Pleutres!

Ces lâches se cachent derrière un pseudonyme pour défendre la liberté de mouvement et les droits des immigrants. Depuis 2018, je défends sans cesse celles-ci publiquement (voir images) et je reçois du vitriol sans cesse. Ces pleutres et lâches sont ceux qui alimentent les ennemis des immigrants

Ces clowns ne savent pas que je rejette la pertinence du concept de compatibilité culturelle. Cependant, ils ne saisissent pas que c’est l’argument le PLUS IMPORTANT auquel il faut répondre. C’est pourquoi il faut faire l’effort de répondre. Seuls les pleutres refusent l’effort intellectuel…

Il faut vraiment vivre dans le délire pour penser cela. ACD,c’est la personne à qui il faut répondre pour défendre l’immigration. C’est le steelman qu’il faut débattre. Mais ici on a les faiblards intellectuels qui pensent qu’on gagne la bataille des idées en choisissant d’affronter des nains.

Should Canada Post go private? Montreal Economic Institute's @vincentgeloso.bsky.social joined @eliasmakos.bsky.social:

@vincentgeloso.bsky.social What is artificial intelligence 'slop' and why is it ruining your internet feeds? @mitchjoel.bsky.social talks to @eliasmakos.bsky.social:

The paperwork has been filed and I am happy to announce that my dissertation has been successfully defended! Thankful to my fantastic advisor @markkoyama.bsky.social and amazing committee @jonathanschulz.bsky.social @vincentgeloso.bsky.social @ndjohnson.bsky.social

I am happy to share that this is now published!

Co-authored with @vincentgeloso.bsky.social and @jrhall1066.bsky.social

In a 1932 essay, the economist Percy Wells Bidwell discussed the role of tariffs in fueling the Great Depression: “if protective tariffs were in reality a cure for business crises, they would long ago have had a chance to demonstrate their efficacy.”

Tomorrow the US Administration imposes the heaviest taxes since the 1930s on Americans who buy imports. In this new brief from @ucsandiego.bsky.social, leading economists Evenett & Muendler estimate the harm to US workers in all 50 states—> econweb.ucsd.edu/muendler/dow... | cc @piie.com

🎉Today's the day! See you at @tlrhub.bsky.social for the Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Lecture by Prof. Jane Humphries ceph.ie/events/27-02... @tcdeconomics.bsky.social @tcdssp.bsky.social @quceh.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk #Economics #EconomicHistory #NSRPproject

Say you’ve got very good causal IDENTIFICATION. Can you say you have causality, can make a causal general claim, and can say what “THE causal effect” is? NO We explain why in new article at Journal of Causal Inference. www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

No particular reason

Postes Canada peine à s’adapter : baisse des lettres, hausse des colis. Il est temps que le fédéral envisage la privatisation et la concurrence libre pour moderniser le service postal face aux nouvelles réalités. www.lapresse.ca/affaires/ent...

Birthright citizenship faciliates assimilation as my buddy Alex Nowrasteh points our using papers that rely on German natural experiments

The best book on the dark side of the econ profession is this by Tom Leonard

New working paper with Justin Callais, Gary Wagner and Alicia Plemmons on entrepreneurship and migration within the USA papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In honor of Jimmy Carter, here’s a reminder that airline deregulation is good

Conservative anti-immigration arguments about protecting the jobs of American workers are at odds with their defenses of school choice that reject the idea that public school teachers should be shielded from competition

Its also worth noting that while immigrants do commit more crimes than natives in some countries like France, the United States has been an exception since 1870 (recent paper shows they commit as many or fewer crime depending on the year)

The range of estimates here stretch from “nice to have” to “utterly transformative”. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

A lesson for healthcare: LASIK has gotten cheaper because it exists within a free market (from @humanprogress.bsky.social)

Communism is worse for the environment than capitalism

When I see a comparison of US medical costs and European medical costs

Excellent chart. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Kid in the background is a legend

Great Economic History podcast on inequality and capital shares podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/t...

“even if there is broad agreement that new Trump tariffs will likely be inflationary for the US, it is far from obvious that the optimal response of monetary policy to these tariffs should focus on fighting these inflationary effects via monetary contraction” cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Excited to see this WP by @mpbitler.bsky.social and Ted Figinski - new evidence on the long-term effects of Food Stamps using admin data, plus cool analyses of how the program built onto existing infrastructure in the Commodity Distribution Program #EconSky www.nber.org/papers/w3318...

My friend Marian Tupy pointed out to me that overdose deaths in America have been falling

Air pollution deaths in the world

The independence of the Federal Reserve is by (Congressional) design. www.nber.org/papers/w33174

I like this paper. A deep dive into Swedish ball bearings in WW2. files.ehs.org.uk/wp-content/u...

The Southern Economic Association is by far the best conference in the econ profession. Open, collegial, with hundreds of participants presenting across all fields. No elitism, no rudeness. Just genuine engagement, as it should be #SEA2024

Lorenzo Pesaresi from UZurich has his JMP showing minimum wage can actually worsen the labor market power problem used to justify it. He echoes earlier works by Yale Brozen in the 1960s and Rober Bunting in the 1960s www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5977m...

I just generated, using the AI tools of NotebookLM, a 10 minute summary of my article (with Linan Peng in European Journal of Law and Economics) on the origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I uploaded it here on YouTube youtu.be/hfm_D91LORM

I've been at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa today presenting new research. Thanks to Giuliana Freschi, Giacamo Gabbuti and Alessandro Nuvolari for inviting me. I use daily fog events in turn-of-the-century London to measure the short- and long-run health costs of pollution for children.

I also recreated this chart by @vincentgeloso.bsky.social Too many quickly dismiss any causal claim as being single-causal/'deterministic', then counter despairingly that all phenomena are inherently omni-causal. I try to get them to shift to and evaluate within the 'likely range'.

In my undergrad teaching, a persistent task is getting students to write better essays. I am putting together some slides on how to answer essay questions that ask students to evaluate causal questions (e.g., "Did geographic luck cause the Rise of the West?".) Just put together this diagram.

Fiscal stimulus contributed to inflation but in an unexpected way. For a given movement in inflation, more implicit revenues can be raised when outstanding debt is large. Thus, governments used fiscal stimulus to lower fiscal pressures — causing regressive redistribution www.nber.org/papers/w31838

The median voter theorem does not always work, but it works pretty well most of the time. No one can expect to win with huge deviations from median. Changing the median voter’s mind by non-political means is always superior