iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Both! But the vast majority of my sources are typed

Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

For Computational History I wrote about my AI workflow for turning photos of archival documents into OCR’ed PDFs and structured metadata in Zotero—a huge time saver in the archive and when I’m taking notes after.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

In the Business History Review, I review @dygottlieb.bsky.social's excellent YUPPIES

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Are there any grad students/emerging scholars working on Mexico during the Volcker Shock/1980s debt crisis? Please DM!

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Not already published, and no, I don't--what do you recommend reading?

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

I’m working on an interactive version as well

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

My new masterpiece: vibe-coded chart showing the collapse of the New Deal financial order and rise of Wall Street, by flow of deposits from small to big banks. From 1990 to 2024 NYC banks more than double their deposit share. Small banks and thrifts go from more than half of deposits to <20%.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

The decline of TT Assistant Professor jobs in History, thanks to @bschmidt.bsky.social’s database of H-Net job postings observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/h...

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

I built a NotebookLM-like RAG (a semantic search engine) for my Zotero library, optimized for the documents I have as a historian (books, articles, scanned primary sources, Congressional docs). Try for yourself: github.com/freshaf/zote...

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Stephen Miller "rejects the vision that shaped the post-1945 world, the conclusions reached by ordinary soldiers and national leaders, by preachers and poets, by the survivors of genocide and the remorseful publics that vowed never again." timothyburke.substack.com/p/a-wrong-th...

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

The closest is Capitalism Journal, where IIRC the latest issue is always open-access muse.jhu.edu/issue/55045

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE - Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics-Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 2024

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Try to play "spot the neoliberalism" here and you see something interesting: 1. with the brief but notable exception of 2000-05, housing's share of wealth was on a secular decline from the Volcker Shock through the Great Recession 2. Retirement funds become more important instead

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Another way to think about it is the evolution of asset classes and derivatives to be ever more remote from real investment. CDOs and interest rate swaps have underlying bets that affect home prices and government borrowing, but sports betting just amplifies domestic violence.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

What's happening in sports betting now is an even stupider version of what happened in banking and investing in the 80s/90s: regulatory arbitrage that in theory offers better consumer prices and choices but ultimately fuels social and economic instability. www.wsj.com/finance/kals...

wsj.com

Kalshi’s Competitiveness Still Limited Despite Parlay Debut

Analysts say the prediction market platform’s new product is bare bones and could bring legal scrutiny, giving traditional sportsbooks an edge.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Harry Braverman really did anticipate the dynamics that drive AI, the separation between conception and execution becoming so complete that no human is needed for the latter

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Thank you! It’s still in progress!

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

An example of what's missing in our accounts of financialization and deregulation: an explanation of why Wall Street's #1 political priority in the 1980s is _defending_ Glass-Steagall.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

But another, led by Reagan Treasury Secretary Don Regan, celebrated the utopian possibilities that the “securities state” promised: a line of credit to every consumer, capital for every business, and no need to worry about steering the economy away from inflation or deflation again—the market would

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

But this process wasn’t the inevitable result of deregulation or technological change, but was contested by policymakers. One group, led by Paul Volcker, worried about how the breakdown of the institutional structure of economic security could destabilize American capitalism and society

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Using new and neglected archives of financiers, banks, trade associations, and policymakers, I show how Wall Street expanded through and then took over the midcentury economic security state of regulated banks, thrifts, and pension funds

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

My dissertation project, “The Securities State: Washington, Wall Street and the Financialization of America, 1979-1992” asks how and why Wall Street become the central force in intermediating credit, savings, investment, and liquidity throughout the entire US economy

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Thrilled to announce that I've been awarded the 2025 John E. Rovensky Fellowship in US Business and Economic History from the University of Illinois Foundation and @businesshistoryc.bsky.social!

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

This is insulting, he should settle for nothing less than Ambassador to Turkey

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

If you're interested in a preview of my dissertation project: "Wall Street’s role isn’t just about markets...It’s about legitimacy, about how the government tries to deliver economic security without doing it directly.” global.columbia.edu/news/how-wal...

global.columbia.edu

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

J Levy's "Accounting for Profits" is really brilliant but a big blind spot is it doesn't talk at all about cash flow. A cash-flow focused accounting history of the 20th c US would center Penn Central as much as GM!

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

TIL the turn to cash flow vs profits in accounting and finance really began after the collapse of Penn Central

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

The better version of "wax on, wax off" is shifting US higher ed to an Oxford tutorial model that emphasizes 1-1 or very small group oral discussion. But at scale that would require many more instructors, and realistically that's not happening any time soon.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

I don't love this framing but I think it succinctly captures what we in the humanities are out here doing: teaching skills that at best are used for individual human flourishing and civilizational advancement, and at worst for training the next generation of managers

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

I think my teaching in the age of AI position is basically "wax on, wax off": forcing students to arbitrarily work without AI (ie blue books) forces them to learn valuable, lifelong skills (ie critical reasoning) that they would/could not otherwise. It's about karate, not waxing.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

But that perception of safety in “realness” is exactly why the 2008 crash was so significant—the assets that no one wanted to buy were the very ones believed to be safest. The false security of the real was the problem, rather than a contemporary tulip mania.

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

It’s very illuminating that the 2008 financial crisis was driven by the collapse in asset-backed securities, the most “safe” and “real” financial assets, backed by actual cash flows (ie mortgage payments) and even physical assets (homes). The opposite of crypto, or ‘00 dot-com 1/

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Anyone interested in joining a roundtable on new directions in the history of US economic thought at the S-USIH conference in Detroit this November? Feel free to share with anyone interested, email alf2212@columbia.edu

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Aaron Freedman @freedaaron.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Trump and Musk are unfortunately operating in the Goldilocks zone for right wing politics: cutting the administrative state as much as possible without spooking Wall Street (which depends on predictable expectations) and triggering economic chaos and a mass streets opposition

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