🧵Now that the book is completed, I want to tell you in this thread why America, between 1870 and 1910, actually was enjoying fast growth in living standards for the bottom 90% -- as fast the improvements for the top 1% & faster than the improvements for the top 10% #econtwitter The story usually told is that inequality was rising. I dispute that in full. For reasons that historians know and agree but never aggregated as corrections to measurement. There are five big corrections.

🧵The United States' weird position on this chart has not as much to do with health care as one would first think.

1. The US has a high rate of car fatality and car ownership. The mortality is concentrated among young people and they heavily reduce life expectancy at birth.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1866752366986530985

1 (continued): If you shift to life expectancy at 65, which is bound to be less affected by this, the US is not as much of an outlier (see big black dot).

Thread: Let us be clear -- the work of Gabriel Zucman should be taken with a major/huge grain of salt. Largely because he and his colleagues have been sloppy as hell. I will not mince words here and list the litany of sloppiness #econtwitter

https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/1669349694739476481

First, you have to understand the following thing: the work of Zucman with Piketty and Saez (henceforth PSZ) builds heavily on a 2003 paper in QJE. I revisited the data, assumptions and methods of that paper in two published papers -- one at Economic Inquiry and the other at EJ

Rien de surprenant si vous connaissez la littérature sur le système de santé cubain (voir liens dans le fil) #polqc

journaldemontreal.com/2023/06/15/ces… sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This paper in NBER (summarized at WAPO) is not saying what many think it says. It says that the state can get more revenues by auditing the rich. It doesnt say the rich cheat more! #econtwitter

https://twitter.com/BrianCAlbrecht/status/1668986738126073856

Why? I used to be interested in illegal work, sidelines, underground economy etc. I can tell you that cheating at the low-end of the ladder is easier because the sums are smaller and easier to hide.

Thread: This is a poor reading of Hayek.
The Use of Knowledge in Society (AER, 1945) does not say what Acemoglu *thinks* it says. Prices are not aggregative devices. They are knowledge-economizing devices that are cheaper than *any* other devices. #econtwitter

https://twitter.com/DAcemogluMIT/status/1660269222621069315

The problem starts with fact that there is a great deal of knowledge that is simply tacit and impossible to code. Moreover, the *value* of that tacit knowledge is impossible to code as well. For example, riding a bike is hard to express into a book/code. So is coding its worth

A 3-facts thread on what happens when your economic history is as bad as Edward Baptist's but on the right:

1. Yes, Black Americans are really amongst the richest people on Earth. But that says very little about counterfactuals where slavery never existed.

https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1641889336873431040

2. No, Africa would be better off. We know that more rugged areas in Africa (ruggedness made the slave trade harder) are richer than less rugged areas. This is strong supportive evidence that where the slave trade could flourish, the worst off people were.

Personal experience: I shopped a replication papers showing that the famous Piketty and Saez paper in the QJE was sloppily made, had tons of typos and tons of huge historical errors (like omitting that all state/local gov employees didnt file taxes) and told that it didnt matter

https://twitter.com/jrgptrs/status/1632019678661955586

This was ultimately published in the Economic Journal -- doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea…. It showed that this was an immensely flawed paper.

Thread: New paper available at Social Science Quarterly (cc. @SSQ_Online) with @casey_joe on the myth of wartime prosperity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ss… #econhist #econtwitter We take inspiration from Robert Higgs' 1992 "Myth of Wartime Prosperity" in the Journal of Economic History but shift from the USA to Canada.

Thread: Forthcoming in Southern Economic Journal, @JustinTCallais and I have a piece titled "Intergenerational Income Mobility and Economic Freedom" #econtwitter We argue that @MilesCorak and others were right to point out that income inequality reduces the chances at upward *relative* intergenerational income mobility. However, we also argue that this effect is mitigated by the role of institutions.

Thread: I hate this graph because of its implicit message (i.e., we dont do this anymore). It ignores so much evidence about industrial innovation in byproducts development 1/n

https://twitter.com/fiona_mugure/status/1546429841876127752

My friend and colleague Pierre Desrochers (we co-authored four articles together on markets and the environment) for example showed how many byproducts from waste were developed in Britain during the industrial revolution cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Thread: This is for a working paper of mine. Its testing whether the Conquest of Quebec by the British in 1760 was marked by a change in market integration. This graph shows the coefficient for Qc City prices on the lagged price in Qc City #econhist #econtwitter The idea is that market integration should lead to prices in other regions at time t should become more relevant than in region i at time t-1. A falling coefficient on the lagged prices should be indicative of this.

Thread: As my @Georgetown colleague and friend Jason Brennan, the defense of @KevinMKruse’s plagiarism is sickeningly depressing. The correct answer is to evaluate the extent of Kruse’s misbehavior and produce the punishment in function to the degree of the offense 1/n If everything @PhilWMagness said is true but nothing more, a minor punishment is warranted (e.g. Inviting more referees each time Kruse proposes article or book). If its everything and more, the punishment should be ramped up. 2/n

Thread: My paper on revisiting income inequality in the USA is now online at the Economic Journal @RoyalEconSoc. Let me explain why it matters here. But first, just look at this graph which summarizes it all

doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea… #econtwitter #econhist #inequality #Economics 1) In the paper, we find that the estimates of income inequality in the US over the 20th century suffer from three massive flaws pre-1960.

Econ Thread: My paper on the strange experiment of playing card money in 17th-18th centuries Canada (image below) with Bryan Cutsinger and Mathieu Bédard was accepted in the European Review of Economic History #econhist #econtwitter This is a *very* strange monetary experiment in economic history. The governor of the colony printed money on the back of playing cards to finance expenditures when he ran out of coins. The "notes" were backed by incoming coin shipments.

Thread: Now forthcoming in Public Choice: how rent-seeking explains asylum expansion in America between 1870 and 1910 (co-authored with Ray March). #econhist #econtwitter

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Few people know that the asylums in American asylums expanded 10x in terms of absolute numbers and close to 4x in per capita terms between 1870 and 1910.

Given the massive drop in JOE listings on the econ JM, here is some source of hope: if you are a candidate that goes into the private sector this year and you apply to return to academia next year, I will take that as a strong signal of your commitment to research #econtwitter Last year, I did the job market interviews for my university (@kingsatwestern) and it was painful because I had to say "no" to very decent candidates. One of the main deciding factors for us was the commitment to research and teaching abilities.

New working paper with @JustinTCallais where we study the allocation of lighthouses in antebellum America. #econhist #econtwitter

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… People have heavily debated whether markets/states can/need provide public goods. Essentially, people have debated whether public goods are market failures and (if they are) how frequently do these failure happen.

My friend @CorneliusEcon asked me about how I read all the books I buy (i.e. my "Book Harvests") and here is the short answer: I dont! At least, not immediately. And this is actually how I end up reading them. Weird? Here is a thread on reading and research #econtwitter 1st: Buying books is important -- they are a capital good. Books are, however, unlike other capital goods. They last much much much longer and their depreciation rate is low as hell. If you accumulate them, you create a high stock on which you can produce

I do not do rant. But, following @TomPhilipson45's resgination from CEA, many people on #econtwitter have taken digs at the acting chair, Tyler Beck Goodspeed. Why? Because his PhD is not in economics and he has few citations. These are cheap shots! So let me do what I do best which is to simply state some facts about Goodspeed. Obviously, you can dislike his work. You can dislike his politics. You can dislike who he decided to work for. However, his work as an academic is *off-limits* if you want to say he aint an econ

This tweet is not meant as a brag. Not at all. But since earning my PhD in 2016, I have published close to 50 papers in multiple journals and I think there are lessons worth sharing about the joys/methods of doing research #econtwitter 1a. Dont give a shit about where the paper will land. Write the best paper you can. If you play the long game (i.e. caring about economics, economic theory and economic history), the rewards come in the form of a large capital stock for you to build on.