The recording of the Tawney Lecture on "Economic Inequality and Social Mobility in Preindustrial Societies", which I had the honour to deliver in Glasgow last spring, is now online! Thanks @echistsoc.bsky.social for inviting me. ehs.org.uk/multimedia/t...

It’s always great to see that the world supply of soy (or virtually any other commodity) is indeed perfectly elastic. Gotta say that this tariff brought in a heap of revenue. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/b...

This is The Dumb Place.

From a new paper by @mjdcurtis.bsky.social, David de la Croix, et al. The Little Divergence in 'academic human capital' (kind of publications index) btw northern & southern Europe started ca 1500. Northern Germany diverged from central & southern German areas after the Thirty Years' War.

Working at the office today and somebody put the following out for free on the break room table. Nice try. I’ve been in this game long enough to know when some phd student in the experimental group is running a behavioral study.

I was going to tweet this last year but somehow I was impeded… “When [economic] growth does, and does not, reduce poverty” www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi... — A great literature review by a team including @paddycarter.bsky.social and @paulsegal.bsky.social

When your little cousin’s new bed looks more attractive than your old one…

Sometimes the Devil tempts you and you just have to force yourself to look away.

Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.

There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

The good news is that my Wife need never worry again about me taking my wedding band off. The bad news is that jiu jitsu is still really difficult and my guard passing sucks (which is why I jammed my fingers into the mat really, really, hard).

I bought these two guys during COVID lockdown. Just transplanted them to bigger pots. Feels like a win for everybody.

One thought I have when I read various hand wringing commentaries about Professors using AI to grade papers is that they’re being a little precious regarding the quality of human TA graders (let alone the grading of the professors themselves).

Thank you for the excellent coverage of our article, @economist.com! You can find the full piece here: nber.org/papers/w33976

I believe we can teach data analysis/ econometrics with Python. From OLS to machine learning and event studies. Scripts for 42 case studies. #pyfixest for regressions. (With Stata and R to compare) Check out the revised Github.com/gabors-data-analysis/da_case_studies

are there any conservatives left that know that the Road to Serfdom didn't refer to social security or government funding for healthcare or even regulation. It was about the sort of central planning of economic decisions that Trump and Vance are trying to normalize

Hate to admit, I have absolutely no idea what every single word in this sentence actually means, with possible exception of a "no", which means "quite likely"

Economic genius Donald Trump explains how he comes up with tariff rates

👇👇

Historians - as you think about the new semester, consider this first-day exercise as a way to get conversation going about what historians *actually* do, and the context within which we do it. catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

An economics class will teach you the definition of “unemployed” and how to interpret these numbers…

This really feels like a defining post of our time

Several ppl sent me this extraordinary chart crime. Thank you I love it

For the first time in four decades, a new algorithm has improved upon the speed limit for calculating the fastest route to every point in a network. @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social‬ reports: www.quantamagazine.org/new-method-i...

Peter Temin, economic historian at MIT, has passed away. He worked both on problems of understanding the past (e.g. "Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression?") and how how the past shapes the present (e.g. "The Vanishing Middle Class.") Terrific scholar and mentor, generous critic.

Stuck in a broken down “people mover” on the tarmac at Dulles. God bless America and her impressive infrastructure.

On cue . .

If anybody is heading to Lund for WEHC next week, come see me present new research with @malikaltaf.bsky.social on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India". www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/om1q6...

Me packing a dress shirt and reading the tag… “wrinkle free, huh. Challenge accepted.”

I have never felt more confident that the government has zero evidence of extraterrestrial life.

No, I will not save the dates. I know it's not simple, but either the AEA starts holding the annual meeting at a reasonable time of the year, or I'm afraid it will continue to wither away, now that we have mercifully stopped the crazy business of having in-person job interviews in hotel rooms.

The look the LLM model gives me when I give it my student's essay and ask it if it wrote it.

New Gretchen Reynolds article just dropped at the Post. www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/202... My favorite line: "In which case, the fundamental problem isn’t that we’re moving too little, meaning more exercise is unlikely to reduce obesity much."

Hovering over the "play" and "record" buttons on the cassette player, waiting for the DJ stop talking so you could tape a song off the radio

Publication day!

I haven’t followed the Epstein stuff closely but I’ll say this: When it comes to the public’s mood, you never know precisely what is going to push people over the edge. People aren’t following every story. They’re not getting their news and ideas in systematic or predictable ways.

I accidentally typed "wap" into the googles instead of "wapo" when I wanted to check the news. And now I suspect my musical tastes have drifted away from the cultural mainstream...

Creating a fake dataset to defend the legitimacy of your manipulated datasets for your research about dishonesty *infinite chef's kiss*

ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/news-flash... More underwhelming results for polygenic scores

"Overall, this is a compelling, methodologically rigorous, and clearly articulated study. Incorporating these recommendations should strengthen the paper significantly, ensuring it meets the high standards of top-tier peer-reviewed economics journals." Ah, GPT 4.5, you remain my greatest advocate.

Leavitt without a trace of irony: "When you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. I think any common sense, open-minded person knows the truth about the precision strikes on Saturday night. They were wildly successful."

This is Sirius. He wanted to show off all of his best unconventional tricks. 14/10 what an absolute pro

Full screen mode. Zoom in. Keep zooming in.

Tukey xkcd.com/3104/

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

The German language remains undefeated.

Just want to post a bit of a bland corrective on polling commentary that I'm seeing on my timeline. Since Trump ordered the National Guard to CA, his numbers have declined -- but not by as much as the most viral polls suggest (= most extreme)

These attacks have become not only more frequent and large-scale but also increasingly concentrated.