After several years of research and writing, today I finally got to hold the first copy of "The Inclusive Wealth of Nations". Grateful to everyone who helped shape the book along the way. And a special thought for David Greasley and Kirk Hamilton, who I wish were here to see the finished book.

China's economic miracle is one of the defining stories of modern history. But what if the latest international GDP revisions have made its starting point implausibly low? Our latest Substack explores the debate open.substack.com/pub/wattthee...

Comparing GDP and living standards over space and time, part 2: How big was China?

How big was China's economic miracle? A major revision to the Penn World Tables has changed the story, and we're not convinced it got it right.

open.substack.com

Love this! Healy disagreed with Keynes argument that "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist". Given his admiration for Schumpeter, he probably wouldn't have fallen for the Ricardian Vice either!

David Higham@oldtrotter.bsky.social · 2w ago

Posted this earlier from Denis Healey’s autobiography.

It was a genuine pleasure chatting with @voxdev.bsky.social about our recent annual review paper. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World

Climate change politics in the developing world remains understudied, despite the region's acute vulnerability and centrality to climate futures. This article synthesizes emerging research across...

annualreviews.org

Penn Arts & Sciences@sas.upenn.edu · 3w ago

Guy Grossman, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations, discusses how climate change becomes political in the developing world on the VoxDev podcast. @guygrossman.bsky.social @voxdev.bsky.social @upenn.edu

Hear me out, what if Nolan tried to keep the linearity by cutting the timeline down to a day and setting it in Dublin

'Growth in every postcode' is a nice ambition. But why have so many British regions failed to catch up in the first place? I've highlighted Ireland to show an alternative path was possible.

Eoin McLaughlin@eoinaldo.substack.com · 4w ago

Andy Burnham wants “growth in every postcode”. But how has UK growth actually fared under different governments? I played around with 80 years of data and came to a slightly awkward conclusion: which government grew Britain fastest is probably the wrong question. open.substack.com/pub/eoinaldo...

Adam Smith died on this day in 1790. Despite famously writing that he had "no great faith in political arithmetic", one of history's little ironies is that he helped inspire the statistical tradition that eventually gave us modern national accounts.

Andy Burnham wants “growth in every postcode”. But how has UK growth actually fared under different governments? I played around with 80 years of data and came to a slightly awkward conclusion: which government grew Britain fastest is probably the wrong question. open.substack.com/pub/eoinaldo...

Call for Papers: From Suez to Hormuz. Exploring what the Suez Crisis can teach us about geoeconomic competition, maritime chokepoints and global power today. Conference 4 Nov; EOIs by 24 July. Details 👇

Take a look what's under the hood intheweights.com

IN THE WEIGHTS

The weights are the billions of numbers forming an AI's brain. Type a name and see how strongly the leading AI models recognize it. Are you in the weights?

intheweights.com

If AI displaces millions of workers, how should societies respond? 19th century Ireland offers an intriguing historical parallel. As Britain industrialised, Ireland deindustrialised. The responses still have something to teach us about adapting to technological change: www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

The history of loan funds & microfinance in 19th century Ireland

By the 1840s, Ireland had one of the densest networks of microfinance institutions in the world to help people adapt to economic change

rte.ie

How loan funds helped Ireland deal with the effects of the Industrial Revolution. By the 1840s, Ireland had one of the densest networks of microfinance institutions in the world to help people adapt to economic change, writes @eoinaldo.substack.com @researchireland.ie www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

The history of loan funds & microfinance in 19th century Ireland

By the 1840s, Ireland had one of the densest networks of microfinance institutions in the world to help people adapt to economic change

rte.ie

The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations ended up being, in many ways, a celebration of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Why? A few reflections on how Adam Smith scholarship has changed over the past half century. open.substack.com/pub/eoinaldo...

Great piece on the shift in the global balance of power: China’s tribute system and the new world order - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

China’s tribute system and the new world order

Exercising power without resorting to war could be Beijing’s ultimate show of strength

giftarticle.ft.com

Tech bros really are extinctionists: www.msn.com/en-in/money/...

UK ONS data collection issues: www.reuters.com/business/uk-...

UK statistics office reports error in May and June job data collection

Britain's statistics office said on Friday that an operational error in May and early ​June has led to reduced response rates for its main survey ‌of unemployment and the labour market.

reuters.com

Operation Health! at the British Academy Festival of Ideas. Participants explored NHS resource allocation in 1974, discovering that similar outcomes could emerge from very different levels of provision, but with different trade-offs. @britishacademy.bsky.social heal-researchhub.github.io/nhs-74/

Everyone is talking about a possible "super" El Niño in 2026. But what does history tell us? The last comparable event (1877–78) triggered a global climate crisis. A short essay on Ireland, climate shocks, and the long shadow of El Niño: open.substack.com/pub/wattthee...

What History Teaches Us About a Super El Niño

Some lessons from Ireland in the nineteenth century

open.substack.com

Thread about our new @wid.world working paper with @jakobmolinder.bsky.social and Svante Prado on income inequality and structural transformation in Sweden, 1870–1970! Link to paper: wid.world/document/inc... Thread 1/

This week a group of economists and degrowth advocates argued in the Guardian that economic growth is a "doomed strategy". The piece is a good example of what I call advocacy bias: selecting evidence that supports a preferred policy while overlooking contrary evidence. (1/7)

I used to wonder if the AI enthusiasts were getting paid to promote AI products. I saw a post from a very high profile AI advocate saying they were given early access to Mythos and heaping praise on it, that's the one that was supposedly 'too powerful for [the] public' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

China Inc deploys 'quiet' layoffs as Beijing promotes AI adoption reut.rs/4egfGdy

China Inc deploys 'quiet' layoffs as Beijing promotes AI adoption

Liu, a Hangzhou-based contractor at a large Chinese internet firm, says her employer began quietly firing contractors in March after it ordered staff to use AI tools including AI agent OpenClaw, which saw lightning-fast adoption in ​China this year.

reut.rs

Are smartphones causing global fertility declines? www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/u...

Why Are Birthrates Down? Two New Studies Point to Phones.

nytimes.com

Great article in the FT on what lessons we can draw from studying the industrial revolution: Why are we still arguing about the industrial revolution? - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

Why are we still arguing about the industrial revolution?

Historical data does not offer much insight about how our predecessors navigated profound change

giftarticle.ft.com

"This is also what Lanier points to in saying that “many, many” young AI researchers think it might be good to “wipe out” humanity. " open.substack.com/pub/xriskolo...

One Half a Pro-Human Manifesto

A comprehensive analysis of Silicon Valley pro-extinctionism.

open.substack.com

I've apparently been erased by AI slop. A paper cites: "Agarwala & Coyle (2024), Challenges of wealth-based sustainability metrics: A critical appraisal" The actual paper is by McLaughlin, Ducoing & Hanley. Same title, journal, and year, but the AI hallucinated the entire authorship.

Tail wagging the dog ‘Staggering’ Irish slump pushes Eurozone economy into reverse - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

‘Staggering’ Irish slump pushes Eurozone economy into reverse

Economists say Ireland’s GDP ‘impossible’ to predict because of cross-border flows from multinationals

giftarticle.ft.com

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...

pnas.org

There are two growth debates. One argues for more growth. The other argues for less. They rarely speak to one another, despite using the same word. A short piece on growth, degrowth and relative decline: open.substack.com/pub/wattthee...

Growth, Degrowth, and Relative Decline

How competing definitions of growth are shaping contemporary economic debate

open.substack.com

🇪🇺 Meet EuroOffice, Europe’s bold alternative to Microsoft 365, promising sovereignty and control It is based on OnlyOffice and offers a near-like-for-like experience as Microsoft for free. Something for everyone to check out, not only Europeans.

EuroOffice emerges as Europe’s sovereignty‑focused alternative to Microsoft 365

Europe’s biggest tech players debut EuroOffice, a sovereign suite designed to challenge Microsoft 365’s dominance.

windowscentral.com