Hillary Vipond
@hillaryvipond.bsky.social
Economic History, LSE || Technological Unemployment in Victorian Britain || Postdoc @CSH Vienna. Senior @atlanticfellows
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.
And today a swan's nest, right on the banks of the river
98 million pairs of shoes produced in Britain in 1907
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
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
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
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
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
📜 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
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"
Day 1 of the workshop on communicating research in economic history. Very glad to see this space developing #econhist
Really delighted to have arrived in Stellenbosch for this workshop on disseminating Economic History. Organized by @johanfourieza.bsky.social with keynote from @delong.social
Tawney Lecture at EHS Guido Alfani: Economic inequality in preindustrial societies
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.
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.
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
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
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"
This conclusion is sickeningly optimistic. I'm a little pleased with it, not going to lie.
"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
