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Ariel Ron

@arielron.bsky.social
3K followers 961 following 1.1K posts

ag, energy, econ & political history @ SMU // director Clements Center for Southwest Studies // web: arielron.net // book: Grassroots Leviathan (Johns Hopkins UP 2020) bit.ly/2CjHK1G // review: bit.ly/3xiKlja

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Ok. Next point: I agree that these are all constructed categories and that's important to teach, but I don't think that critique alone is enough for a core curriculum.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The usual trinity is gender-race-class. Is economy a replacement of the last? Why do it this way?
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The Clements Center's fellowship competition is now open. Details here: jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70425. Deadline is Jan 11. Feel free to contact me directly with questions.
jobs.h-net.org
Clements Center for Southwest Studies – Fellowships in the Study of Southwestern America | H-Net Job Guide
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
these are important things people need to know!
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
your book is in the video Gautham
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Thanks Brad
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The Clements Center's fellowship competition is now open. Details here: jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70425. Deadline is Jan 11. Feel free to contact me directly with questions.
jobs.h-net.org
Clements Center for Southwest Studies – Fellowships in the Study of Southwestern America | H-Net Job Guide
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Whatever you do don't let the vitreous matter get into the grass tho
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Just reading manure letters: "when urate is made, it is essential first that the urine should be putrid before the gypsum is added for then alone will ammonium be produced"
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Ofc Fordist-like models broke down in Europe too so I’m not sure how generalizable the idea is but I think the ag productivity gains there were also dramatic
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Modern ag poilcy, i.e. price supports, from McNary-Haugen to AAA, was meant to boost farm household spending in part to maintain the domestic market for manufactured goods. But rapidly rising ag productivity from the 40s and 50s emptied the countryside, decimating the rural consumption sink. 2/2
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Quack theory for today: the rise of ag productivity in the 20c broke Fordism. The original F was premised on farm household consumption, bc mass manufacturing meant substituting capital for labor, so even high-paid labor could never generate enough demand. 1/2
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
"market of the beast" is a rather evocative phrase, perhaps there's a use for that
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
There has to be a full accounting of these people, the deportees and deporters both www.nytimes.com/video/world/...
nytimes.com
Video: Deported From the U.S., Trapped in a Prison in Africa
Roberto Mosquera, a Cuban immigrant who has lived in the United States since 1980 and completed a prison sentence in 1996, was arrested by ICE last year and sent to a prison in Eswatini, a country in ...
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
The amount of university required language on each syllabus has gotten more and more out of hand. Syllabuses are not contracts, that's a ridiculous way to approach teaching, and the more we turn them into quasi-legal documents the further we get away from a sane classroom environment.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Just inherited this beaut
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Good essay but the instinct to blame capitalism alone is strange given the disastrous communist famines of the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward. The problem is more general than capitalism. In any case, food inflation is bad but famine is less likely today than 50 or 100 years ago.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
I'm really not sure what to call them, got any other ideas? My thought is that they let you get goods quickly, leaving final payment for later while still making a paper trail. IMHO only the vouchers qualify as IOUs. QM checks are drawn on Treasury and certs of indebtedness are 1-year duration.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Had to make myself a flow chart of how the Union financed Civil War procurement with a hierarchy of intermediate and final forms of payment.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
🙏
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Very confused by these pages from an 1867 chemistry book that seem to suggest that a water molecule contains only one hydrogen atom? What am I missing? digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ld8bujg
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
How do you read this name? Andrew Zane?
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Nicolas Barreyre has a short and very constructive essay on the "new history of capitalism." I think he makes an especially valuable point that we've reached a point where we can begin to re-engage with some of the economic historians who trained as economists. usabroad.unibo.it/article/view...
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Pre-ordered!
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JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
My book Against Money, coauthored with Arjun Jayadev, is coming out from University of Chicago Press on May 5. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
press.uchicago.edu
Against Money
A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card ...
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Don’t forget the sixty year olds
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Man I hate it when social scientific papers use parenthetical citations and forget to include the full citation in the bibliography. Go try to google (Smith 2011) with no additional publication details. One advantage of footnotes is that this kind of thing happens much less often.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Terrifying
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Put yourself in shoes of someone in a oil & gas importing country Its triage: which hospitals get fuel, which industries shut, which crops get fertilizers? Those who don't have deep pockets in a bidding war pay in increased hunger, lost wages and shrinking economies. tinyurl.com/PolycrisisWesleyan
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
If your government is half blob, half swamp… you might be in imperial decline. Could write a whole Jeff Foxworthy-style standup routine around this format
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Dave Jones @cleanpowerdave.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia x7 in Botswana x6 in Sudan x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia 🧵
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Heatmap News @heatmap.news · 08/04/2026
A toll on the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax, but ... it still kind of is? @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social does the math of what Trump’s latest astounding act of climate policy means: heatmap.news/energy/trump...
heatmap.news
Trump Finally Found a Carbon Tax He Can Love
A toll on oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax ... but it also isn’t not.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
@provenwinner.bsky.social
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Civil War Era Article Workshop Sponsored by the Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era
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advait @advaitarun.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
I am slowly working on a thesis for why the US is dogshit at scaling up cleantech and, frankly, I think it's going to make nobody happy??
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Has anyone written a piece comparing resistance to the Embargo to our current tariff politics? @gauthamrao.bsky.social this is your beat, no? source: Mashaw, The Administrative Constitution
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
lpeproject.org/blog/the-pol...
lpeproject.org
The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy
At the core of Jason Jackson's Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry is a longstanding conversation among Indian modernizers about how to identify and nurture the ‘right’ kind of capitalists.
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
endnotes are an abomination
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
WSJ editorial board is lagging behind its news room
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Alternatively, people cannot be disappointed or disillusioned, so there’s room to improve if it’s not a complete disaster
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
lol I guess I have to imagine something very terrible and cringe?
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
When people say AI can't think or understand, I guess they mean this. I asked ChatGPT to convert an old article chart into a vector image file. It's visually similar(ish), but it misses the chart's point and so fails to reproduce it in a way that's even remotely correct or useful.
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Basic Books Group @basicbooksgroup.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
"Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better," by @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social & @gnrosenberg.bsky.social, is now available!
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
There’s a larger point here, I know, but it’s hard not to laugh at this as terminal business brain
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Quite enjoying the WSJ hit piece on Noem
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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
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