Noel Johnson
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ndjohnson.bsky.social
Noel Johnson
@ndjohnson.bsky.social

Professor of Economics at GMU.
https://noeldjohnson.github.io

Political science 39%
Economics 37%
🚨 New Version 🚨

The new and extended version of our paper on dealing with spatial unit roots in regressions, now
*forthcoming at the Stata Journal* under a new title!

w/ @essobecker.bsky.social @jvoth.bsky.social

Relevant to anyone who uses spatial data !

Link and more information in🧵(1/n)

I love random discoveries. I've been listening to this album a lot recently.

open.spotify.com/album/3pfs0b...
Bernard Hughes: Music for Mixed Voices
open.spotify.com
I've been thinking a lot lately of a quote from Leo Strauss: A theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a practical crisis.

The Constitution has collapsed as a meaningful organizing framework for American politics, but like the Roman Senate meeting in 603AD, some things keep going.
Guy whose concern about the No Kings rally is that there’s a lot of evidence constitutional monarchies do a better job than republics of avoiding personalistic politics.

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

"No way I am going to retire. Even if my students are retiring, not me." ❤️
"Bob Fogel said to me once: For economics to work without economic history is like an evolutionary biologist without paleontology. You just miss 99.5% of all the species that ever walked on this earth." Joel Mokyr www.youtube.com/live/__0sGvj...
LIVE: Nobel Prize in economics winner Joel Mokyr speaks
YouTube video by Reuters
www.youtube.com

Congrats to Joel Mokyr on the Nobel Prize. I'll take this opportunity highlight one of his less mentioned works: "Demand vs Supply in the Industrial Revolution". A great example of how to combine theory with history. tinyurl.com/yv8ed8mj
Dropbox
tinyurl.com
Elated at Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize! You can find numerous accounts -now multiplying by the minute- of his scholarly contributions. Today I want to celebrate the man and the mentor.

The adds are for Colgate, Grinnell, and Bocconi in case you’re wondering.

I just checked JOE and I count 3 adds for economic history positions (I’m not counting the “any fields”). There seems to be a bit of a gulf between what the Nobel committee is recognizing and what Econ departments think they should be doing.
That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

Mokyr's work could not have been done today in most economics departments, but the irony is that his work would not fit in history departments today, either. Methodologically he seems more 'history' than 'economics' to economists, but the content and reasoning are too 'economics' for most historians
That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

Thanks for the heads up "K9 advantix II large dog". For use on dogs only. Got it.
“I’ll declare war on you if you don’t give me the peace prize” is an incredible bit
Was thrilled to write this for @broadstreetblog.bsky.social (which I recommend for anyone interested in historical political economy)

www.broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-...
Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
How new technology reshaped the political equilibrium of the early Iron Age through violence.
www.broadstreet.blog

Science marches on. Also, I’m not eating this.
Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants. Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it. They even partnered with Danish chefs to create three recipes using ant yogurt. arstechnica.com/science/2025...
Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants
Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it.
arstechnica.com

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

questions mount
Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants. Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it. They even partnered with Danish chefs to create three recipes using ant yogurt. arstechnica.com/science/2025...
Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants
Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it.
arstechnica.com

Pierre Bourdieu was on to something… #theinheritors
I was better informed than a lot of grad students about a lot of the hidden curriculum, but this stuff was *totally* invisible to me, and it took me years to see it and understand how important it was.
• Children of PhD-educated parents are 28 times more likely to become professors than those whose parents only completed compulsory school.
• Children of professors are 11 times more likely to join the faculty than everyone else.

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

I was better informed than a lot of grad students about a lot of the hidden curriculum, but this stuff was *totally* invisible to me, and it took me years to see it and understand how important it was.
• Children of PhD-educated parents are 28 times more likely to become professors than those whose parents only completed compulsory school.
• Children of professors are 11 times more likely to join the faculty than everyone else.
The recording of the Tawney Lecture on "Economic Inequality and Social Mobility in Preindustrial Societies", which I had the honour to deliver in Glasgow last spring, is now online! Thanks
@echistsoc.bsky.social for inviting me.
ehs.org.uk/multimedia/t...
Tawney Lecture 2025: Economic inequality and social mobility in preindustrial societies - Economic History Society
ehs.org.uk

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

It’s always great to see that the world supply of soy (or virtually any other commodity) is indeed perfectly elastic. Gotta say that this tariff brought in a heap of revenue. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/b...
China Bought $12.6 Billion in U.S. Soybeans Last Year. Now, It’s $0.
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

This is The Dumb Place.
Megyn Kelly has called on Etsy to burn the witches.

"You're playing with fire messing with this stuff. There are actually are demons in this world. Calling up the spirit world, in particular the devil's spirit world, can actually have real world consequences. It's not something to mess with!"

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

From a new paper by @mjdcurtis.bsky.social, David de la Croix, et al. The Little Divergence in 'academic human capital' (kind of publications index) btw northern & southern Europe started ca 1500. Northern Germany diverged from central & southern German areas after the Thirty Years' War.

Working at the office today and somebody put the following out for free on the break room table. Nice try. I’ve been in this game long enough to know when some phd student in the experimental group is running a behavioral study.

Reposted by Noel D. Johnson

I was going to tweet this last year but somehow I was impeded…

“When [economic] growth does, and does not, reduce poverty”

www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi...

— A great literature review by a team including @paddycarter.bsky.social and @paulsegal.bsky.social

When your little cousin’s new bed looks more attractive than your old one…

Sometimes the Devil tempts you and you just have to force yourself to look away.
Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.
There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease