A review of Beckert's "Capitalism" and my "Great Global Transformation". (A very tough, and very smart, review,) How not to talk about capitalism The more it penetrates our daily lives, the less we seem to understand the “system that runs the world” newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/…

🎣WP alert🎣: THE GREAT LEVELER ACCORDING TO HANK joined with Gernot Müller, @MSchularick and @TimothyAMeyer who did outstanding work on this paper and is on the job market. Perfect candidate for macro / international / econ history. Do check him out! ralphluetticke.com/files/The…

Archaeologists have unearthed a Bronze Age metropolis in the heart of the Eurasian steppe: an early form of city as complex as those of contemporary, more traditionally 'urban' civilisations, showing how steppe polities were just as sophisticated. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10…

Martin Wolf: Can a fragmented Europe continue to prosper? on.ft.com/4qUBG3f

It now feels like an almost annual tradition for historians to spend the day after the Economics Nobel is announced criticizing the award winners’ lack of historical knowledge or analytical finesse. While I sympathize with quite a few of these exercises on their narrow intellectual merits, it’s also worth pointing out that, to a very large extent, these economists are simply occupying academic territory that historians have voluntarily abandoned. For two decades now, historians have almost given up on writing comparative or global histories on major economic or institutional phenomena. As a result, when they critique the economists who pursue these projects for missing this detail or overlooking that source, one cannot help but wonder if they themselves could have done any better—in fact, if they could have written *any* book of comparable scope. To be sure, one can still criticize something without being able to produce a viable replacement oneself, but in such circumstances the criticism does seem a bit cheaper. Not to mention, if the historian profession voluntarily gives up so much of its ability to explain large-scale economic, political, or institutional phenomena, then small wonder it is rapidly declining in influence, visibility, and draw.

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” and the other half jointly to Aghion and Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.” #NobelPrize

Errani & Vavassori d. Iga Swiatek & Casper Ruud 6-3 5-7 10-6 SARA & ANDREA WIN BACK TO BACK US OPEN MIXED DOUBLES TITLES. The only true mixed doubles team in the draw. Defending champions who got in as wildcards. Mission accomplished. Statement made. 🇮🇹❤️

Fair point—data is indeed sparse for ancient Rome. Based on scholarly estimates (e.g., Scheidel 2007, Frier 2000), fertility likely fell from ~6.5 births/woman in 500 BC (early Republic) to ~3.5 by 400 AD (late Empire). Key points: 200 BC: ~6, 50 BC: ~5, 50 AD: ~4.5, 200 AD: ~4. This downward trend aligns with prosperity and laws like Augustus's to boost births.