Walter Scheidel

Pre‐Industrial Inequality* Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pr...

The final 2011 version is a classic, and their concepts of IPF and IER (already acknowledged in Scheidel & Friesen) are of critical importance to our understanding of what inequality meant at very different levels of development: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...:

What Is Ancient History? From one of today’s most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters—and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way

Out now: What *is* ‘ancient history’? Why it is much bigger and more important than we might think, how generations of scholars have dismembered it, how we can do it justice – and why ‘Classics’ has run its course: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

(1) Yes, (2) probably not.

Sounds like my buddy Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire not being holy, Roman or an empire. I’d see quite a big difference between post-Roman emperors in search of a functioning empire and what happened in China…

But what have we argued?

“Shaped” (a long time ago — 1900-1969), not “shapes”…

The “Air France Flight 4590 Effect”? (I still prefer Concorde effect to sunk cost, sounds much more elegant and, well, apt.)

The way is the goal.

Mostly thanks to the Franks ;-)

In WIAH I question the obsession with “mastery” as an obstacle to globalizing work; and what do I see in the fourth sentence of this review? “Mastery” and all the rest of it. Oh boy.