Here is my comment on Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013).

In short, I found that the "China shock" weren't all it was made out to be.

The caveat is that I am often wrong. 1/11 I think that previous critiques of Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (ADH) have tended to concede a key piece of ground: they assume that manufacturing employment's share of the working population is the key dependent variable. 2/11

As Gavin Wright has explained in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the consensus view is that slavery––if anything––impeded the growth of American capitalism. Matt is correct in this. But I will show why that consensus view is a castle made of sand.🧵⚒️ 1/14

https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1957494016003789166

Consider the evidence that Wright presents to make his case. Figure 1 shows that farm values per acre were higher in the North compared to the South in 1860. 2/14

Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2015) is where the replication crisis comes to economics and political science.

Simply put, this chart is impossible. It implies that West Germany’s real GDP per capita grew by almost 8% per year from 1960 to 1990. But it clearly didn’t… 1/20 To put this in perspective:

- ADH (2015) was written by Ivy League professors.
- It was published in the prestigious American Journal of Political Science.
- It has 1,504 citations on Web of Science and 3,415 on Google Scholar.

2/20 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

In this article, Magness and Makovi have done a public service. They have accidentally shown how nonsense is being published in major economics journals.

As such, there are broader lessons to be learned from the Synthetic Marx Affair. Here goes… 1/15 Magness and Makovi’s article uses the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), an econometric technique designed to infer causality: .

It constructs a counterfactual control from a pool of donors to test for a treatment effect. 2/15journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

“Why the South Fought” is my latest paper on American economic history.

In it, I argue that white Southerners defended slavery because they had benefited from it. The idea that a mass of “poor whites” had been impoverished by slavery is a myth. 1/12 The paper tests my broader hypothesis is that American racism has proved so persistent because it has historically allowed one group to get ahead at the expense of another. 2/12

My paper “Accounting for Slavery” presents a new database of state-level GDP divided into 15 sectors for every census year in the US from 1839 to 1899.

I then use this new database to make a few gentle interventions in the slavery debates. 1/19 These data are more granular and frequent than anything economic historians have worked with before for the 19th century.

As such, I have been able to shed some new light on old questions. 2/19

Version 3 of my “Did Slavery Impede the Growth of American Capitalism?” is now available.

The econometrics––an event study of abolition and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) of the free-slave state border––is the same, but I have improved the interpretation section. 1/3 Fans of the “New Southern Economic History” may want to avoid this paper.

You’ll get a first indication of why I find that work unconvincing. Mine is a deeply revisionist take on what has been Accepted Lore for decades. 2/3

This is another problematic article from the French School of political economy.

This time, they argue that taxation isn’t what makes Europe more equal than the United States. A thread on why this is misleading. 1/14 In Blanchet et al’s terms, “‘Predistribution,’ not ‘redistribution,’ explains why Europe is less unequal than the United States.”

Yet in the Conclusion they state that “predistribution” includes policies that determine “access to education and health care.” 2/14

The idea that Americans are victims of inequality in the rest of the world––the central argument of Trade Wars are Class Wars––is problematic.

It is more likely to be the other way around. 1/6

https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1903678722260996207

Comparing Germany and the United States, for example, does not suggest that it is the former that has the inequality problem.

Rather, the United States stands out for its relatively low and regressive taxation. 2/6

Some have suggested that I look at this article by Piketty et al in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where they attempt to address the effect of gender on inequality.

So here it is, deconstructed.🔨 1/20 Now, of course, you might suggest that the PSZ article must be OK because it underwent a rigorous peer review process at a “Big Five” econ journal like the QJE. Nice one! 2/20

This is the most controversial graph from my new paper.

It suggests that Piketty’s “golden age of social democracy” after World War II only really existed in the United States if you were white and male. 1/5 The paper is available here: .... In footnote 9, I explain how Piketty makes it methodologically impossible for feminism to have had any discernable impact on inequality since the 1960s. 2/5 raw.githubusercontent.com/joefrancis50

My new paper is “The Autumn of the White Patriarch: Identity and Inequality in American Capitalism.”

This is the key chart. It shows how white men’s share of national income has fallen since the 1960s. Imho, this is why we have such identity politics on the US right today. 1/10 The paper is available here: .

In it, I trace the origins of this historic shift to the successes of the civil rights movement and feminism since the 1960s and ’70s. I argue, however, that white male identity politics were not an inevitable response. 2/10 raw.githubusercontent.com/joefrancis505/…

Once upon a time, the idea that academia might destroy capitalism did not seem so absurd.

In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter argued that the expansion of higher education would lead to the emergence of an underemployed academic precariat. 1/16 Schumpeter predicted that malcontented academics would demand socialism, and capitalism would be destroyed.

In the 1960s, it seemed possible that this prophecy would come true. Protests racked universities, with students and faculty demanding change. 2/16

This is probably my favourite US Embassy cable. It’s from March 22, 1976, and describes a meeting in which Peronist union leaders conspired with the military to purge the labour movement. 1/ I had to go through a lengthy FOIA request to get this document, but it is now available here: .

Is there any other record of this meeting? 2/ joefrancis.info/wp-content/upl…

I made more or less 6,000 pages of documents from the US Embassy in Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the early ’70s available online: .

They mainly relate to economic issues and should be of interest to historians working on the period. 1/drive.google.com/drive/folders/… There is no particular order to them, but they have been OCRed.

More details can be found here: . 2/thepoorrichnation.blog/p/6000-pages-o…

Here’s a brief explanation of why this table explains the importance of the Marshall Plan to Western Europe after WWII. 1/

https://twitter.com/MkBlyth/status/1778427487782940808

Above all, the Americans wanted to avoid a Communist takeover. The problem was that European currencies were massively overvalued: as you can see in the table, their official exchange rates were significantly above their PPP exchange rates. 2/

Today I signed a contract with@politybooks for “The Poor Rich Nation: Why Argentina Fell Behind” 🥳. To celebrate, here’s a thread that summarizes the book’s argument as I currently see it. 1/ In the nineteenth century, there was an unprecedented boom in Argentina’s terms of trade due to (a) trade liberalisation, (b) the industrial revolution, and (c) cheaper transportation. They improved by roughly 2,000 percent from the 1780s to the First World War. 2/

Here’s a video on “Milei and the Maddison Project: Tracking Argentina’s Decline”.

I describe my preliminary estimate of Argentina’s GDP per capita relative to the United States. It suggests that Argentina hasn’t experienced a century of continuous decline. 1/ Instead, there was one big structural break during the Second World War. I was surprised to find this, and it is making me reevaluate Argentina’s history, as I describe in the video. 2/

In my PhD dissertation, I thought I had refuted the “golden age myth” that Argentina was once “one of the richest countries in the world”.

In retrospect, however, I actually showed that it wasn’t one of the most developed countries. 1/ etheses.lse.ac.uk/918/
In Chapter 5, I showed that according to various variables – political institutions, health, education, purchasing power of wages – Argentina lagged behind the most developed countries circa 1913.

It wasn’t, therefore, one of the most developed countries in the world. 2/

The Total History Initiative is my new project. It's just a little seed, but my dream is for it to grow into something bigger. It has a website () and its own Twitter account (@totalhistoryin).

This thread outlines my goals for the project.total-history.org The project has grown out of my book on slavery and the making of American capitalism, which is tentatively titled ‘King Cotton and the Whale’, and should be out in fall 2024.

It's probably time to write a requiem for the stock-'net liquidity' correlation.

Why? He dying, if not dead.

1/ To clarify, I'm referring to the Fed's total assets, minus the Treasury General Account and the Reverse Repo Agreements.

It's supposed to have been driving stock market prices since the Covid Crash. You can see the correlation using weekly data here.

2/