I’ve seen a new thing. #tentonatesla

I’m about 100 pages in, but so far this book is fantastic! www.amazon.com/Furious-Mind...

Everybody! I’ve found the guiding document adopted by university administrators… www.cia.gov/static/5c875...

A @voxdev.bsky.social column on the impact of public education through the lens of economic history, by my (former) student Ben Milner @benjaminlm.bsky.social. voxdev.org/topic/educat...

I liked it better when the goal of an econ phd first year was to survive MWG and avoid embarrassing yourself too many times in class

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)

All roads lead to Rome, they say. - And finally you too can find out if that's true! 😉 With "The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads", #Itiner-e, a high-resolution dataset and detailed map created in a collaborative ongoing project: www.newscientist.com/article/2503... via @newscientist.com

🚨 New Version 🚨 The new and extended version of our paper on dealing with spatial unit roots in regressions, now *forthcoming at the Stata Journal* under a new title! w/ @essobecker.bsky.social @jvoth.bsky.social Relevant to anyone who uses spatial data ! Link and more information in🧵(1/n)

I love random discoveries. I've been listening to this album a lot recently. open.spotify.com/album/3pfs0b...

I've been thinking a lot lately of a quote from Leo Strauss: A theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a practical crisis. The Constitution has collapsed as a meaningful organizing framework for American politics, but like the Roman Senate meeting in 603AD, some things keep going.

Guy whose concern about the No Kings rally is that there’s a lot of evidence constitutional monarchies do a better job than republics of avoiding personalistic politics.

"No way I am going to retire. Even if my students are retiring, not me." ❤️

Congrats to Joel Mokyr on the Nobel Prize. I'll take this opportunity highlight one of his less mentioned works: "Demand vs Supply in the Industrial Revolution". A great example of how to combine theory with history. tinyurl.com/yv8ed8mj

Elated at Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize! You can find numerous accounts -now multiplying by the minute- of his scholarly contributions. Today I want to celebrate the man and the mentor.

Mokyr's work could not have been done today in most economics departments, but the irony is that his work would not fit in history departments today, either. Methodologically he seems more 'history' than 'economics' to economists, but the content and reasoning are too 'economics' for most historians

I just checked JOE and I count 3 adds for economic history positions (I’m not counting the “any fields”). There seems to be a bit of a gulf between what the Nobel committee is recognizing and what Econ departments think they should be doing.

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...

Thanks for the heads up "K9 advantix II large dog". For use on dogs only. Got it.

“I’ll declare war on you if you don’t give me the peace prize” is an incredible bit

Was thrilled to write this for @broadstreetblog.bsky.social (which I recommend for anyone interested in historical political economy) www.broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-...

Science marches on. Also, I’m not eating this.

questions mount

Pierre Bourdieu was on to something… #theinheritors

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.