Tessera
Folgen

Pier Paolo Creanza

@ppcreanza.bsky.social

🇮🇹 Economic Historian in 🇺🇸 | @princetonecon.bsky.social PhD | Assistant Prof @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social | Enthusiast of Mediterranean antiquity | Dog dad | 𐤒𐤓𐤕•𐤇𐤃𐤔

38 Posts1494 Follower1813 Folgt
Joshua Goodman@joshua-goodman.com · 9mo ago

Danielle Graves Williamson (one of my students and a stunningly original scholar in history/labor, studying "segregation academies" in the US Deep South) bsky.app/profile/dani...

Danielle Graves Williamson@daniellecgw.bsky.social · 9mo ago

👋 I'm Danielle, and I'm on the #econjobmarket this year! Let's start with a student describing her segregated school: "The school felt temporary. Built like a warehouse with aluminum siding . . . I had a slipshod education" The twist? The student is white, and her school is private. A JMP 🧵 -->

Pier Paolo Creanza@ppcreanza.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🚀 I'm on the #EconSky Job Market! My JMP asks a classic question: Do large, dominant firms foster or hinder innovation? To study this, I turn to the Great Merger Wave (1895–1904), when >2,600 U.S. firms combined into corporate giants like U.S. Steel and DuPont. A JMP 🧵👇 (1/13)

Bild
Trevon Logan@trevondlogan.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Good history helps us avoid nostalgia. The great article “Economic History and the Historians” (2020) by Anne McCants reminds me why nostalgia can get us in trouble. Two of her examples are very relevant to today: vaccinations and the popular narrative of some economic “good old days.”

Getting vaccinated is unpleasant. Dying of measles is worse. In the decade before the 1963 vaccine for measles emerged, an average of 475 Americans died from measles every year, most of them children. This (absolute) number had dropped to a low of 1 in 1981, despite a steadily increasing population that might have hypothetically contributed additional cases. Sadly, the number of measles cases in the United States has been steadily climbing upward again because we seem not to remember the ravages of the disease so much as the inconvenience of the shot—even without taking into account the absurd rejection of the solid scientific evidence in favor of vaccinations. Many people still have an elderly relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of us has an elderly relative who did not. The blurring of the historical evidence for and against vaccination that arises from strangely incongruous historical narratives allows a seemingly inconsequential but nonetheless deadly nostalgia to run rampant.Another example of dangerous reverence for the past concerns the flurry of popular enthusiasm lately (at least if the pundits of the 2016 American election are to be believed) for the “good old days” of the 1950s when a family could live securely on just one income (in these nostalgic accounts, that one income is usually a man’s). Lest we forget, these are the same good old days of poor air quality and measles. Maybe trivial in comparison but certainly indicative of the scope of the cognitive problem that nostalgia presents, the average size of a new home built in America in 1950 was 983 sq. ft.; by 2010, the average size had risen to 2,392 sq. ft. Given that families were larger on average in the 1950s than they were in 2010, per capita space allocation had risen even faster than total area. Although we might not need that much personal space, many of us have become used to it. Older furniture now looks tiny compared to what is now on offer in showrooms, whereas older television sets were behemoths with miniscule screens showing programs in glorious black and white.
Pier Paolo Creanza@ppcreanza.bsky.social · last yr.

I'm incredibly honored and grateful to have been awarded the EHA Sokoloff Dissertation Fellowship. Many thanks to the committee for supporting my research on Big Business and Innovation between 1880 and 1940. This is particularly meaningful to me because (1/2)

Wake Forest Department of Economics@wfueconomics.bsky.social · 2y ago

Today we had the privilege of hosting Santiago Perez (UC-Davis), who presented his thought-provoking paper, "The G.I. Bill, Standardized Testing, and Socioeconomic Origins of the U.S. Educational Elite Over a Century." 📚 Huge thanks to Santiago for an excellent seminar! 🙌

Bild
Pier Paolo Creanza@ppcreanza.bsky.social · 2y ago

Tbh, when I realize it's time to prepare slides for our work-in-progress presentation to faculty and students... I'm usually pretty panicky. I worry I haven't accomplished enough and take it more as nuisance than an opportunity. Yet, every time I end up benefitting a *lot* from the simple act of...

Pier Paolo Creanza@ppcreanza.bsky.social · 2y ago

The more I work on my research, the more I feel that in economics we brush over data construction too quickly. Cool data sources get attention, but the actual work of building and linking datasets is often the “boring” part, glossed over in papers and presentations—if mentioned at all. #EconSky 📉📈