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…

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/

How did the institutionalist paradigm come to dominate the study of economic history? In short, it was because the institutionalists won the American Civil War of 1860-1865. 1/🧵 Before the Civil War, there were two schools of thought on the origins of the United States' development, which we can call the institutionalists and the structuralists. 2/

An explainer on why liquidity conditions have eased somewhat recently.

https://twitter.com/joefrancis505/status/1601855508993941504

My understanding of the RRP dynamics is plagiarised from @Johncomiskey77 and you should follow @dharmatrade for the latest data.

Jerome Powell's speech at the Brookings Institute on November 30th seems to have only been announced yesterday. Notably, it is just two days before the Fed's pre-FOMC comms blackout begins.

morningstar.com/news/marketwat…

1/ Last time, Mary Daly was the last Fed speaker before the comms blackout. She helped spark the current stock market rally with her comments that it was time "to start talking about stepping down" on interest rate hikes.

dailyfx.com/news/fed-s-mar…

2/

The stock market rally of the past few weeks seems to have been driven by investors taking money out of money market funds and putting it into equities, in anticipation of a pivot from the Fed.

1/ As a result, the Reverse Repo Facility is being drained, increasing liquidity in financial markets, while equities have been pumped by strong inflows.

https://twitter.com/agnostoxxx/status/1593623366619041793

2/

There has been a correlation between liquidity and stocks since 2020. Initially, it was quite loose, but it has become tighter.

There was also previously a 2 or 3 week lag from liquidity to stocks, but that has now gone to a few days.

The question is why.

1/ Michael Howell of @crossbordercap has long emphasised the importance of liquidity to financial markets. He wrote the book on it, so I would defer to that for the basic relationship.

books.google.co.uk/books?id=f87YD…

2/

This month's Treasury General Account bounce came a bit earlier than I expected.

The federal government normally pays its bills at the start of each month, releasing funds from the TGA, which in turn provides liquidity to financial markets.

1/ This liquidity injection has become more important as overall financial conditions have tightened.

At the beginning of September, it fuelled a bounce in the stock market that was abruptly brought to an end by the release of August's CPI data on the 13th.

2/