The hottest Economic History Substack posts right now

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Top Links 975 Real v. digital gold. Bulgarians & the euro. Soldiers as battery carriers & Tolstoy at the beach.

Chartbook ā€¢ 457 implied HN points ā€¢ 07 Jan 26
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. Real gold and digital "gold" are different; physical gold has long-standing monetary and cultural weight, while digital versions raise new questions about trust, ownership, and value.
  2. Bulgaria and the euro is a key issue, since adopting the euro involves political, economic, and social trade-offs for the country.
  3. Modern military life mixes technology and human costā€”soldiers can be treated like battery carriersā€”while cultural images like Tolstoy at the beach highlight surprising contrasts between war, technology, and everyday life.

Lessons from History: The Great Railroad Buildout

Muleā€™s Musings ā€¢ 661 implied HN points ā€¢ 17 Dec 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Infrastructure booms follow a capital cycle: rapid buildout driven by easy money, speculative overbuilding, a painful crash, and then consolidation and regulation.
  2. How projects are financed and how much the government supports them determines the scale and risk; big land grants, foreign credit, or big public programs can accelerate growth but also amplify failures when funding dries up.
  3. Watch prices, capacity utilization, and total capital deployed ā€” falling prices, empty capacity, and rising leverage are clear signals that supply is outpacing demand and an overbuild may be underway.

Economics Links, 1/5/2026

In My Tribe ā€¢ 318 implied HN points ā€¢ 05 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Smaller, non-kin family structures encouraged people to work with strangers and led to written laws, legal professions, and scalable institutions that make broad cooperation, entrepreneurship, and democratic checks possible.
  2. Major technological takeoffs happen when markets turn learning into systematic, profit-driven experimentation, evaluation, and evolution ā€” that commercial incentive structure let Britain scale the Industrial Revolution.
  3. Economic trajectories depend heavily on property rules and transaction frictions: heavy, complex state procedures reduce formal transactions, while informal conventions can enable bottom-up commercialisation as happened in China.

Why communist reformers always lost

The Works in Progress Newsletter ā€¢ 35 implied HN points ā€¢ 03 Mar 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Keeping prices stable mattered more than reformers realized; reforms that raised prices or lengthened queues often triggered panic and protests, so changes had to deliver fast, tangible benefits to avoid backlash.
  2. The order of reforms and a broad coalition of winners were crucial; piecemeal moves (for example, enterprise reform without realistic prices) were either ineffective or destabilizing.
  3. Reformers frequently misunderstood the secretive, complex systems they were changing, and entrenched interests used that complexity to block change; reforms succeeded mainly where planning was weak and people stood to gain.

Econ 210a :: Why the Agrarian Age Stayed Poor: Just What Was the Long-Run Trap Anyway?

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 92 implied HN points ā€¢ 11 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. For most of the agrarian age, technological progress was extremely slow and often fragile, so living standards stayed low and forward steps could vanish during collapses.
  2. Measuring the stock of technology is hard, but one useful idea is that idea-value grows with output per person plus part of population growth, and true wealth should account for variety and longer lifespans.
  3. From about 1600 onward growth rates rose sharply in stages (commercial, industrial, modern), producing a massive, qualitative gulf between preindustrial poverty and todayā€™s high material abundance.
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Top Links 965 Oracle's CapEx shock. The German credit crunch of 2022. Work-related deaths & Žižek "chats" with Kotkin about Stalin.

Chartbook ā€¢ 386 implied HN points ā€¢ 28 Dec 25
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. Oracle raised its FY26 capital expenditure outlook to $50 billion, a $15 billion increase from the prior guide, signaling much larger infrastructure spending.
  2. The German credit crunch of 2022 is highlighted as a significant financial event worth revisiting.
  3. The roundup also flags work-related deaths and a conversation where Žižek chats with Kotkin about Stalin, linking labor-safety issues with political and cultural debate.

Econ 196 :: Societies of Domination :: Pre-Class Assignmentā€”do before 2026-02-15 23:59 PST

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 76 implied HN points ā€¢ 12 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Pre-industrial agrarian societies were societies of domination where a small, often predatory elite extracted a large share of crops and crafts from peasants and artisans, typically by force or fraud. They were constrained mainly by the need not to destroy the society they depended on.
  2. Even inside that extractive, Malthusian system there were real but temporary efflorescences when material living standards improved for many people beyond the elite. These booms were limited and didnā€™t overturn the underlying structure of domination.
  3. Elites and later storytellers mythologized and glorified their actions, turning extractive rulers into heroic figures. Stripping away that heroic glaze helps reveal the predatory mechanics of power.

Top Links 964 Germany's little known-recession. China's connectors. Sudan's scale and slavery today.

Chartbook ā€¢ 343 implied HN points ā€¢ 27 Dec 25
šŸŒ International Economic History
  1. Germany's early-2000s recession was a significant but underrated turning point that reshaped parts of Europeā€™s economic landscape.
  2. China's growing network of infrastructure and trade 'connectors' is reshaping global supply chains and increasing its geopolitical influence.
  3. Sudan is facing large-scale violence and abuses amounting to modern forms of slavery, creating a severe humanitarian and human-rights crisis.

The City of Urumchi and its Oasis - Mikhail Pevtsov, 1895

The Library of Alexandria Ultima ā€¢ 8 implied HN points ā€¢ 16 Mar 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. The city is built around a large Chinese fortress and adjacent forts that house officials and a garrison, but the fortress is poorly sited and can be easily shelled from the surrounding hills.
  2. The native town is largely Dungan (Chinese Muslim) and there are clear ethnic tensions with the Chinese and Chantuus; Dungan numbers grew after past uprisings, which has made Chinese authorities uneasy.
  3. Trade is lively and mostly run by Dungans while local industry is minimal; the oasis has limited water and agricultural output so grain must be imported, even though nearby mountains hold coal, copper and a petroleum source.

Quick Essay: The Federal Reserve and Critical Moments in U.S. Monetary Policy

Chamath Palihapitiya ā€¢ 3871 implied HN points ā€¢ 15 Nov 23
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. Before the Federal Reserve, the U.S. had banking issues and crises, leading to the need for a central bank in 1913.
  2. The Great Depression prompted key reforms like the Banking Act of 1933 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.
  3. The end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 marked a shift to Fiat currency and the decline of the gold standard.

Pre-Class Assignment for Tuesday: 2026-01-27 :: Econ 196 :: Productivity & Technology

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 69 implied HN points ā€¢ 10 Feb 26
šŸšŒ Education Economic History
  1. The demographic transition radically changed population trajectories: a small change in long-run growth rates produces huge differences in population over centuries, so modern population levels are far higher than they would have been under the old growth regime.
  2. Using capability-specific measuresā€”like photons or lumen-hours for lightingā€”shows that technological improvements have raised practical living standards far more than conventional real-output or real-wage measures imply.
  3. Measuring prosperity requires both these capability-based metrics and attention to distribution, environment, and nonmarket welfare, and hands-on quantitative exercises (e.g., Python arithmetic) are a powerful way to teach what technology and growth actually mean.

Economics Links, 12/25/2025

In My Tribe ā€¢ 273 implied HN points ā€¢ 25 Dec 25
šŸ’¼ Business Economic History
  1. Productivity often comes from many small, practical, firm-level efficiency improvements and incremental innovations rather than a single big breakthrough.
  2. There are multiple competing explanations for why industrialization happens, so no single factor fully explains events like Britainā€™s early industrial revolution.
  3. Some argue protectionism or industrial policy can shelter and encourage domestic manufacturing investment, while others warn such policies often do more harm than good and that trade deficits can reflect productive capital imports. Being able to sustain attention and mental effortā€”cognitive enduranceā€”is becoming an important skill for many modern jobs.

Graduate Economic History: Spring 2026 (DeLong Segment)

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 130 implied HN points ā€¢ 21 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Take a very long viewā€”five thousand yearsā€”to ask why the world stayed poor for so long, why it later grew richer, and why that change has been uneven.
  2. Economic models like supply and demand are useful but are compressed stories that must be placed in their real historical and institutional context rather than treated as universal laws.
  3. In the agrarian era, technological advances and productivity gains mostly bought more people not better lives, so the shift to agriculture and settled states may not have clearly improved human flourishing; understanding why the Malthusian trap persisted and then loosened is key to explaining modern economic growth.

Lessons for Debt Control from Clinton's Success in the 1990s

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 222 implied HN points ā€¢ 01 Jan 26
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. When fiscal consolidation is credible and the central bank supports demand while technology cuts the price of capital, private investment can be crowded in and overall growth can accelerate.
  2. The 1994 bond-market selloff reflected unexpectedly strong tech-led growth and mortgage-backedā€‘security duration effects, not a market fear that deficit cuts would wreck the recovery.
  3. The 1993 deficitā€‘reduction package paired tax increases with spending caps and expanded the EITC, which helped working families and longā€‘run growth, while much of the political opposition was partisan theater rather than a unanimous professional economic judgment.

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Yes: Pre-Modern Economies Were Meaningfully "Malthusian" (Which Does Not Mean Incomes Were Stable)

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 76 implied HN points ā€¢ 04 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Pre-modern economies were essentially Malthusian: slow technological gains could raise living standards only temporarily because higher incomes typically led to faster population growth that eventually offset those gains.
  2. Random shocks and long-run eventsā€”like plagues, good harvests, trade booms, or imperial peaceā€”can produce centuries-long rises, falls, and plateaus in incomes and urbanization even inside a Malthusian system.
  3. Cultural and institutional factors (luxury tastes, marriage customs, infanticide, larger trade zones) can raise average incomes and create long "supercycles," but they do not by themselves produce sustained, compounding livingā€‘standard growth for the broad population.

Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Seminar: Special Topics in Economics (Spring 2026)

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 123 implied HN points ā€¢ 21 Jan 26
šŸšŒ Education Economic History
  1. The course is a quantitative, long-run tour of global economic history covering everything from early humans and the rise of agriculture to industrialization, globalization, and modern attention/info/biotech economies, with a focus on causes of growth, inequality, and institutions.
  2. The pedagogy stresses hands-on data-science methodsā€”sampling, estimation, forecasting, simulation, and counterfactual modelingā€”designed to let both humanists and quants learn to model parts of the world economy without prior coding experience.
  3. There are firm expectations: mandatory pre-class readings and a short assignment answering five questions (including on using AI/LLMs), and prompt submission is required to shape the next class session.

CROSSPOST: SAM BOWLES: The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 138 implied HN points ā€¢ 16 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Enduring economic inequality isn't inevitable; it arose when certain technologies and institutionsā€”landā€‘limited production (like plows), protoā€‘states to enforce property, and slaveryā€”made material wealth heritable and defensible.
  2. For thousands of years after the Neolithic, aggressive egalitarian norms and institutions (communal storage, public eating, antiā€‘dynastic burials, even destroying productive assets) actively suppressed lasting inequality, but Bronzeā€‘Age shifts broke those norms and made inequality durable.
  3. The modern knowledge and care economy could either repeat Bronzeā€‘Age enclosure through things like intellectual property or be steered toward greater equality by democracy, unions, social insurance, and redistributive policy, because stronger intergenerational transmission of material wealth nonlinearly amplifies inequality.

On the Birth of Science as We Know It: Thinking Out Loud: Thursday Economic History

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 153 implied HN points ā€¢ 08 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Modern science grew when artisans' instruments, mathematical methods, printing, and new institutions came together to make empirical, publicly verifiable knowledge practical and rewarding.
  2. Political fragmentation and intense status competition among elites raised the payoff for being right, so innovators could gain support and influence instead of being suppressed by a single dominant authority.
  3. Religious shelters, academies, and print networks lowered the cost of checking and sharing results, letting experiments and reproducible methods scale into a lasting scientific community.

The Utility of Wealth and the Distribution Of Income

David Friedmanā€™s Substack ā€¢ 422 implied HN points ā€¢ 17 Nov 25
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. Being rich today is much better than being poor, but even those with less money still enjoy comforts that were unimaginable in medieval times.
  2. People today face risks when choosing careers, but the rewards are not as drastically different as they were in the past, which affects how much they are willing to gamble for higher income.
  3. Income inequality exists, but unlike in medieval times where the extremes were much larger, modern income differences lead to different levels of competition for high-paying jobs.

Rates of pay for newsletter writers in the sixteenth century

The Common Reader ā€¢ 1311 implied HN points ā€¢ 13 Jul 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Between 1594 and 1640, writers of newsletters in Lucca earned between 15 and 50 scudi a year. The highest paid was Lucio Aresi from Venice, who earned 50 scudi because of his skills.
  2. In other parts of Europe, like Augsburg and Britain, news-writers made good money too. For example, John Pory received Ā£20 a year in the 1620s for his weekly newsletter.
  3. This history of early news-writing shows that writers were valued and paid well, similar to todayā€™s newsletter creators like those on Substack.

The High-Wage Thesis isnā€™t even wrong!

Something to Consider ā€¢ 159 implied HN points ā€¢ 26 Jul 24
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. The High-Wage Thesis suggests that higher wages encourage investment in technology, but this idea is poorly supported by evidence. It means that just because wages are higher, it doesn't necessarily lead to faster innovation.
  2. Instead of focusing solely on labor costs, we should consider the absolute costs of resources like coal that made certain technologies more practical. This could explain some innovations without relying on the idea of higher labor costs.
  3. The assumptions behind the High-Wage Thesis might not hold true, and questioning these assumptions can lead to a deeper understanding of economic history and industrial innovations. It shows the need for careful examination of widely accepted theories.

Niall Ferguson: Our Own Gilded Age

Common Sense with Bari Weiss ā€¢ 932 implied HN points ā€¢ 21 Aug 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. The late 19th century, known as the Gilded Age, had a lot of economic growth but also significant inequality, similar to trends we see today.
  2. Television shows like HBOā€™s 'The Gilded Age' can reflect our current society and its values, showcasing a contrasting elite compared to modern times.
  3. For deeper insights into societal changes, reading historical texts like Mark Twain's work may provide more clarity than watching dramatized versions on TV.

Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx's 1859 "Preface"

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 123 implied HN points ā€¢ 08 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Material productive forces tend to shape how people organize work and property, and that organization in turn constrains laws, politics, and ideas; this soft form of historical materialism is broadly reliable.
  2. Big technological shifts cause major social stress and force institutional reworking, but change more often happens as rotating sectoral churn with institutional lag than as synchronized social revolutions.
  3. Grand stage theories and millenarian claims about historyā€™s inevitable arc toward a single utopia are weak, and ideological or non-economic conflicts often matter on their own, so anyone using a broad theoretical label should say which specific claim they are defending.

WEEK 2: Malthusian Economics :: Graduate Economic History :: Spring 2026 :: Econ 210a

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 76 implied HN points ā€¢ 22 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. It took tens of thousands of years for humanity to move from small bands of foragers to hundreds of millions of farmers and then to billions of postā€‘industrial people.
  2. During the long Malthusian agrarian era (roughly -5000 to 1500), technological gains mostly increased population rather than improving most peopleā€™s lives, leaving life nasty, brutish, and short for the majority.
  3. The shift from hunting and gathering to farming often produced worse biological living standardsā€”people tended to become shorter, sicker, and more unequal under early agriculture.

Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 92 implied HN points ā€¢ 13 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Since about 1870, economic change looks more like rotating upheavals in leading sectorsā€”sector-by-sector creative destructionā€”rather than a single, synchronized economy-wide Marxian revolution.
  2. Marxā€™s argument bundles several ideas: a stage theory of history, the claim that productive forces conflict with relations of production, and the view that economic shifts reshape legal, political, and ideological life.
  3. Itā€™s useful to keep the insights about technology, institutional lag, and ideological conflict, but reject the millenarian, deterministic claim that a final social revolution is inevitable.

Many Victorian cities grew by tenfold in a century

The Works in Progress Newsletter ā€¢ 55 implied HN points ā€¢ 03 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Cities in the nineteenth century grew hugely while getting better: wide, connected street networks, modern sewers, running water and mass transit let homes become larger and more affordable relative to incomes.
  2. Governments used regulated monopolies, concessions or municipal companies and charged users enough to pay for big upfront costs. That alignment of private profit and public benefit let operators build coherent, nonā€‘duplicative networks.
  3. Since 1914 many of those arrangements unraveled and were replaced by zoning, price controls and subsidies, which slowed growth and worsened housing affordability. Cities that want faster growth and more housing should consider permissive building rights, coordinated street planning, and financing models that align private incentives with public goods.

February 9, 2026

Letters from an American ā€¢ 33 implied HN points ā€¢ 10 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Bad Bunnyā€™s Super Bowl halftime show drew record viewers and used Puerto Rican symbols and history to push back at critics who said he isnā€™t American, framing Puerto Ricans and Latin America as part of 'America.'
  2. Puerto Ricoā€™s unequal relationship with the United States was shaped by lateā€‘19thā€‘century economic interestsā€”especially the sugar industryā€”and by racial politics after the Spanishā€‘American War.
  3. Legal decisions created a long political limbo: early rulings made Puerto Ricans 'noncitizen nationals' and citizenship came in 1917, but residents still cannot vote for president from the island and have only limited congressional representation.

How writing about nineteenth-century cities changed my mind

The Works in Progress Newsletter ā€¢ 39 implied HN points ā€¢ 06 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Planning matters: nineteenth-century cities show that deliberate street networks and unified transport planning solved collective action problems and produced better urban outcomes. People even chose covenanted neighbourhoods, showing real demand for development control.
  2. Ownership type isn't the main issue: both municipal and private providers ran good infrastructure when systems were funded by user fees and allowed to be profitable. Those incentives and the risk of bankruptcy kept suppliers responsive and efficient.
  3. Monopolies can be useful for infrastructure: single operators often gave better coordinated, expandable networks and profitable supply than chaotic competition. Time-limited concession systems ā€” where cities owned assets but hired private operators ā€” combined the benefits of competition with monopoly coordination.

The New Vertigo Years

Novum Newsletter ā€¢ 983 implied HN points ā€¢ 23 Jun 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. The early 20th century felt a lot like today, full of anxiety from rapid changes in society and technology. People were unsure about the future and how to adapt to modern life.
  2. Many in both past and present times struggled with feelings of exhaustion and a fragmented sense of self, leading to mental health issues. In both eras, people looked for new ways to start over as they faced overwhelming changes.
  3. Information overload has been a common challenge, then and now, where rapid access to news can cause confusion and anxiety. The rise of mass media in the past parallels todayā€™s digital information explosion, both stirring public emotions and sometimes spreading falsehoods.

The Problem of Longitude and Social Coordination

SP-AND-EX ā€¢ 33 implied HN points ā€¢ 27 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Portable chronometers solved the longitude problem and turned ocean navigation from guesswork into precise, repeatable global mapping, massively accelerating trade and exploration.
  2. Large-scale civilization depends on shared measurement and coordination systemsā€”like common timekeeping, language, and record-keepingā€”and improvements in those systems can dramatically boost social and economic coordination.
  3. Crypto and distributed ledgers are presented as a planet-scale method for inscribing state and value tied to time, but the big question is whether they represent a true paradigm shift or merely an incremental improvement.

The Curious Case of Karl Marx's 1859 "Preface"

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 53 implied HN points ā€¢ 10 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. A compact formulation of historical materialism and the baseā€“superstructure idea has proved durable, even though the fuller work it accompanied offered little detailed critique or practical guidance.
  2. That formulation bundles six related claims: a near-millenarian end to old domination, a stage theory of modes of production, a Hegelian sense of historical progress, the idea that ideology reflects material conflict, and the view that relations of production both constrain and must adapt to technological change.
  3. Being a meaningful Marxist means taking one or more of those claims and developing them into rigorous, testable theory with clear implications for knowledge, politics, and human flourishing; without that development the claims remain largely rhetorical.

Tuesday Economic Growth Blogging: The Preā€‘Modern Treadmill Was Real on Necessities, Not on Technology, or Luxuries, or Culture, or Means of Domination

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 146 implied HN points ā€¢ 20 Nov 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. For necessities and conveniences that affect reproductive fitness, average living standards stayed near subsistence from about 3000 BCE until the 19th century, leaving people nutritionally stressed and population growth very low.
  2. The Malthusian treadmill applied to necessities and reproductive outcomes, but it didnā€™t necessarily constrain luxuries, culture, or the technologies and institutions of domination, which follow different dynamics and matter for overall welfare.
  3. Human technological capacity for producing necessities rose a lot long before living standards visibly improved, so technology expanded steadily even while material wellbeing stayed near subsistence until the Industrial Revolution.

(Largely) HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: ā€œWestā€, ā€œNorth Atlanticā€, or ā€œDover Circleā€?

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 61 implied HN points ā€¢ 03 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Labels like ā€œthe Westā€ or ā€œGlobal Northā€ are too vague, and a more useful term is ā€œDover Circleā€‘Plusā€ ā€” the set of societies in, settled from, or that copied the economic and institutional model that emerged after 1500 around the Dover area of England.
  2. That model depended on specific institutional and social features ā€” church rules that broadened trust, legal systems that bound rulers, competitive protoā€‘nation states, selfā€‘governing cities that empowered merchants, and fragmented elites ā€” which together created social flexibility and room for experimentation and growth.
  3. Telling history as a continuous ā€˜Western Civilizationā€™ torch is misleading: the Dover Circleā€™s rise was gradual and contingent, not an ancient unbroken lineage, and its global dominance was secured only over centuries through both hard power and cultural influence.

A Brief History of the Global Economy: 1908ā€“2026

European Straits ā€¢ 25 implied HN points ā€¢ 26 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. Technological revolutions reshape how goods are made and how economies grow. The shift to oil, automobiles, and mass productionā€”centered on Ford-style assembly linesā€”gave the US industrial dominance and sustained productivity gains.
  2. After WWII the US built a new international economic order using Bretton Woods, the dollar, the IMF, and the Marshall Plan to stabilize currencies, rebuild allies, and anchor global trade. This American-led framework helped spread the mass-production model across Western Europe and Japan.
  3. A postwar compact between big firms, organized labor, and governments fueled a ā€˜Golden Ageā€™ of rising productivity, higher wages, and broad middle-class growth. The 1971 Nixon Shock ended the dollarā€“gold peg and moved the world toward a fiat dollar system that enabled the rise of global value chains.

Top Links 752 Phases of economic history/ascendant economic ideologies. China's renewables megabases & how banana bunches are organized.

Chartbook ā€¢ 600 implied HN points ā€¢ 28 May 25
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. There are 752 important phases in economic history that show how economies have changed over time.
  2. China is creating large renewable energy projects, which could have a big impact on its energy future.
  3. An interesting way to understand economics is to look at how bananas are organized, showing how we can learn from everyday things.

The Modernity Machine III

Breaking Smart ā€¢ 49 implied HN points ā€¢ 24 Dec 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. A civilization-scale modernity machine was built to maximize legibility, making people, land, goods, time, beliefs, and violence enumerable and interoperable rather than prioritizing ideals like truth or justice.
  2. That success generated unavoidable byproductsā€”too many actors (excess agency), too much information, and too much scaleā€”which fragmented shared narratives and overwhelmed any single system's ability to integrate them.
  3. After crossing a complexity threshold around 1600 the system began a phase transition into a different logic that favors divergence, proliferation, and local meaning, and this shift cannot be repaired from within the original machine.

To be young, perchance to dream

Global Inequality and More 3.0 ā€¢ 951 implied HN points ā€¢ 28 Dec 24
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. The historical view of the assassination in Sarajevo changed over time depending on political climates. Initially, it was seen as justified but later viewed negatively as political perspectives shifted.
  2. The Young Bosnia movement was driven by a mix of national unity desires and social injustices. Many members came from impoverished backgrounds and sought change, inspired by various revolutionary ideas.
  3. Literature and poetry significantly influenced the Young Bosnia activists. They saw themselves as heroes and believed in dramatic actions because they felt the political system was against them.

Top Links 751 Thinking of history from my space. The real wage growth gap & measuring infant mortality right.

Chartbook ā€¢ 443 implied HN points ā€¢ 27 May 25
šŸ’¾ History Economic History
  1. There's a focus on understanding history from different perspectives, which can deepen our knowledge of the past. It's important to think critically about how history is written and shared.
  2. Measuring real wage growth is a complex issue, highlighting inequalities that persist in today's economy. Knowing where wages stand can affect how we view economic progress.
  3. Infant mortality rates serve as a significant indicator of a society's health and well-being. Accurate data and measurement can help us address key social issues effectively.

Thoughts on Inflation

America in Crisis ā€¢ 139 implied HN points ā€¢ 01 May 24
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. The reduced-price model shows how cycles in prices correspond to inflation, especially during wartime when inflation tends to be higher due to deficit spending.
  2. The quantity theory of money explains the relationship between economic activity, money supply, and inflation, showcasing the importance of monetary factors in historical economic events.
  3. Analyzing the current inflation outlook using the money balance model highlights the potential for continued inflationary pressures and the challenges the Federal Reserve faces in managing inflation through interest rate adjustments.

Reconsidering the "2020s as 1940s" Analogy

The Overshoot ā€¢ 550 implied HN points ā€¢ 08 Mar 23
šŸ’° Finance Economic History
  1. The global economy faced crises in different time periods, revealing government responses can impact recovery.
  2. Excessive debts before a crisis can hinder growth post-crisis, affecting employment and national income.
  3. Governments borrowing and spending during emergencies can lead to positive outcomes, improving sectors and reducing debt burdens.