Noel Johnson

I've been thinking a lot lately of a quote from Leo Strauss: A theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a practical crisis.

The Constitution has collapsed as a meaningful organizing framework for American politics, but like the Roman Senate meeting in 603AD, some things keep going.

Guy whose concern about the No Kings rally is that there’s a lot of evidence constitutional monarchies do a better job than republics of avoiding personalistic politics.

"No way I am going to retire. Even if my students are retiring, not me." ❤️

Congrats to Joel Mokyr on the Nobel Prize. I'll take this opportunity highlight one of his less mentioned works: "Demand vs Supply in the Industrial Revolution". A great example of how to combine theory with history. tinyurl.com/yv8ed8mj

Joel Mokyr at the 2011 conference in his honour at Northwestern.

Elated at Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize! You can find numerous accounts -now multiplying by the minute- of his scholarly contributions. Today I want to celebrate the man and the mentor.

Mokyr's work could not have been done today in most economics departments, but the irony is that his work would not fit in history departments today, either. Methodologically he seems more 'history' than 'economics' to economists, but the content and reasoning are too 'economics' for most historians

The adds are for Colgate, Grinnell, and Bocconi in case you’re wondering.

I just checked JOE and I count 3 adds for economic history positions (I’m not counting the “any fields”). There seems to be a bit of a gulf between what the Nobel committee is recognizing and what Econ departments think they should be doing.

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

Somebody actually sat down and wrote these two sentences, one after another. www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/u...

Thanks for the heads up "K9 advantix II large dog". For use on dogs only. Got it.

“I’ll declare war on you if you don’t give me the peace prize” is an incredible bit

Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean How new technology reshaped the political equilibrium of the early Iron Age through violence.

Was thrilled to write this for @broadstreetblog.bsky.social (which I recommend for anyone interested in historical political economy)

www.broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-...

Science marches on. Also, I’m not eating this.

questions mount

Pierre Bourdieu was on to something… #theinheritors

Tawney Lecture 2025: Economic inequality and social mobility in preindustrial societies - Economic History Society

The recording of the Tawney Lecture on "Economic Inequality and Social Mobility in Preindustrial Societies", which I had the honour to deliver in Glasgow last spring, is now online! Thanks
@echistsoc.bsky.social for inviting me.
ehs.org.uk/multimedia/t...

China Bought $12.6 Billion in U.S. Soybeans Last Year. Now, It’s $0.

It’s always great to see that the world supply of soy (or virtually any other commodity) is indeed perfectly elastic. Gotta say that this tariff brought in a heap of revenue. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/b...

This is The Dumb Place.

From a new paper by @mjdcurtis.bsky.social, David de la Croix, et al. The Little Divergence in 'academic human capital' (kind of publications index) btw northern & southern Europe started ca 1500. Northern Germany diverged from central & southern German areas after the Thirty Years' War.

Working at the office today and somebody put the following out for free on the break room table. Nice try. I’ve been in this game long enough to know when some phd student in the experimental group is running a behavioral study.

I was going to tweet this last year but somehow I was impeded…

“When [economic] growth does, and does not, reduce poverty”

www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi...

— A great literature review by a team including @paddycarter.bsky.social and @paulsegal.bsky.social

When your little cousin’s new bed looks more attractive than your old one…

Sometimes the Devil tempts you and you just have to force yourself to look away.

Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.

There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

Speaking of jiu jitsu, this is world class trolling on the wikipedia page for BJJ: