"God is dead", Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed in 1882. What happens to politics when societies become increasingly secularized? In a new working paper, @essobecker and I examine the case of Germany. github.com/huggingbeard/p… Most people stayed nominally Christian for the longest time. We first create measures of "Shallow Christianity" - indicators of a lack of deep-rooted religious belief in interwar Germany. We use three - naming patterns, superstition, and the share of notables who enter religious

Did slavery facilitate Europe's early rise to riches? Steve Redding @ReddingEcon, Stephan Heblich, and I focus on the single biggest slave-trading nation, Britain, and revisit the famous "Williams hypothesis". We combine theory and geographically disaggregated data to show that areas with more slavery wealth were less agricultural, had more cotton mills, adopted more steam engines, had higher per capita wealth, and employed more people in manufacturing. We use weather shocks to slave traders wealth to document an exogenous link running from slave

A propos the current heat wave (34 degrees in Zurich today, heat advisory in place) -- it is utterly amazing to me that collectively, people in Northern Europe seem to have decided that they should just suffer in moral superiority, rather than use AC. Sure, 20-30 years ago, when some regulations (like those in the canton of Zurich) were passed banning or limiting AC use, much of the power came from fossil fuels. But today, photovoltaics are cheap + super-efficient; importantly, there is a "natural hedge" here = you only need AC when there is lots of sun