iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

I do love flying in to Boston, it's like a city of sails on the water. Weekend is all prep for NBER SI, reading econ history paper, good times.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

And today a swan's nest, right on the banks of the river

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Vienna. Wildflowers on the walk to the train

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Does Harvard build a couple of spin offs now?

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

98 million pairs of shoes produced in Britain in 1907

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Sometimes I feel like documenting the most quotidian moments of life in Western Europe. This whole terrain will be foreign to peoples of the future, as I am reminded every time I read biographies of workers in 19th c England

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Industrial Revolution probably improved living standards more than any other revolution before or since. It'd be neat to quantify this, and without overlooking the many people who were harmed in the churn

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Have come to terms with the fact that I don't really understand or remember much until I write it out & work through it. So I'm going to blog. Primarily for myself. Would love it to be a little useful for others. Many thanks to @johanfourieza.bsky.social, whose conference on this was inspiring

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Reposted by Hillary Vipond

Kris Inwood @kris-inwood.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

The 12th Australasian Cliometrics Workshop will be held 14 Nov 2025 at Monash Uni, Melbourne. Proposals accepted thru 14 July, full papers due 31st Oct. More info: Quoc-Anh Do (quoc-anh.do@monash.edu) & Laura Panza (lpanza@unimelb.edu.au) ECR & grad students particularly encouraged 📉📈🗃📗 #AcademicSky

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Thousands of books have just arrived at CSH and I can't help myself, I've nabbed a few just for the cover art and title. Any Booth map will do for me I guess #econhistory

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Reposted by Hillary Vipond

Eric Schneider @ericbschneider.com · 13/05/2025

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜 What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox? My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%. 🧵👇 1/6

Picture of the title and abstract of the paper.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Good discussion taking place on whether researchers should be responsible for sharing their findings, or whether it should be someone else. Specialization etc. Someone said "the researcher might not be the one who shares the story, but they should know why it matters"

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Do we have a 4th Industrial Revolution Pope?!

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

@delong.social sharing thoughts on the use and abuse of economic history

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Day 1 of the workshop on communicating research in economic history. Very glad to see this space developing #econhist

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Really delighted to have arrived in Stellenbosch for this workshop on disseminating Economic History. Organized by @johanfourieza.bsky.social with keynote from @delong.social

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

He points out that the great gifts of the super rich are primarily acts of magnificience, acts of rulership. He notes the secular stagnation following the full entrenchment of the Medici. And that, historically, when the super rich rule, they do so for their own benefit

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Look at the decline in entry into the elite over time! After the Black Death, quite a lot of opportunity. Once the Medici had become the super rich, they gained control of central government, and entry disappeared.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

He then accumulated a lot of support and power by redistributing his wealth. In the form of contributions to society.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

But business as usual is keeping wealth and influence in. He tells us the story of the Medici family. They were newcomers after the Black Death. But they got to power by Cosimo. He was initially expelled by Florence. Then Florence needed money. They brought him back...

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

We get the example of the great merchant Datini. Born an orphan. Died immensely rich. Alfani is arguing that the plague had been so bad that the system had collapsed in some places, and so was more open to outsiders...good conditions for a Datini.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

He points out that in pre-industrial Europe there were three main paths into affluence. 1. Be born to money 2. Entrepreneurship (Arkwright. Became the richest commoner in England) 3. Finance Measuring the different prevalence of mobility via each path needs more work

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Ok, where we're going is a hypothesis on waves of social mobility. Potentially around elite control being interrupted...

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Social mobility. The graph shows change in social mobility. Big boost to social mobility after the Black Death. (This has got to be connected to distribution of wealth, but it's not clear to me where we're going)

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

But the *point* he is making here is that similar trends in inequality obscure very different trends in inequality ratios. (Alright, I have to have an opinion here, I think this is very important. Has been on my mind in terms of distribution of the gains of growth)

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

To the extent we can get data on income, we can build an inequality extraction frontier (Milanovic) for the different places over time

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

They are collecting data on what happened in other places in Europe ....

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

One interpretation is the pessimistic one: that the cure is worse than the disease. No one would want a major catastrophe in order to reduce inequality. He is going to talk about another view. We start with this graph on the share of wealth over time

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

He starts by saying that research over the last 10 years on the history of inequality has something to contribute to modern day concerns. This graph is a story - of inequality always growing, except in periods of crisis: black death, world wars.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Tawney Lecture at EHS Guido Alfani: Economic inequality in preindustrial societies

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Man I love a railroad graph In this case it's part of a fascinating and bleak story of indigeneous dispossession. I'll post the paper if it's ok with the authors.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

I'm going to have to write an entire paper showing how bad false positives in Linking actually are. People are surprisingly dubious about this.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

The absolutely stunning sunset in Vienna as I leave to Dublin & the EHS in Glasgow. My team at CSH is superb, and I always regret leaving. Excited to meet people in Dublin & then go on home to economic history. I better have some useful findings one day, I have been given much

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Reposted by Hillary Vipond

Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

it's easy to think that academia is outdated, worthless etc but the fact that we are consistently the first targets for repression by dicators and wannabe dictators suggests we are still doing something useful and good for free societies despite our best efforts to fucking suck super bad

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Thinking with history, not just about it

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Susskind is on fire in parts of his book, Growth. "Indeed, if Jesus himself could not convince everyone to give up their material possessions - in Matthew 19:24 'again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye...' - then it is unlikely degrowthers will be able to do it either"

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

This conclusion is sickeningly optimistic. I'm a little pleased with it, not going to lie.

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

"La machine est le redempteur de l'humanite, le Dieu qui rachetera l'homme des sordides artes et du travail salarie, le Dieu qui lui donnera des loisirs et la liberte" Marx's son in law, with another one of the liberatory takes on labour saving tech

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I just learned that higher, technical education in the UK was originally funded, in 1889, by... the whiskey tax. Delightful. Will be buying a Macallan in honour.

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Reposted by Hillary Vipond

Claire Vernade @claireve.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I’ve put together a short list of opportunities for early career academics willing to come to Europe: www.cvernade.com/miscellaneou... This mostly covers France and Germany for now but I’m willing to extend it. I build on @ellis.eu resources and my own knowledge of these systems.

cvernade.com

Claire Vernade - European career opportunities

European Academic Career Opportunities in 2025

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

This is the astonishingly beautiful building I'm lucky enough to work in. I think there are genuinely some enlightenment values at the Complexity Hub, proud to be part of this. Also, the building itself makes me want to organize an econhist conference, maybe next summer :)

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Hillary Vipond @hillaryvipond.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Absolutely not. We don't start incarcerating people based on identity. God have mercy

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