Aaron Freedman

Did Paul Volcker actually say "the standard of living of the average American has to decline"? The Congressional record shows it as "has declined"—not a defense of tight monetary policy, but a description of the impact of lower productivity and higher energy prices.

Now the Congressional hearing text is published after the fact. But even in the next-day New York Times coverage, which uses "has to decline," the intent is clearly about describing existing macroeconomic changes, not demanding new ones.

For Computational History I wrote about my AI workflow for turning photos of archival documents into OCR’ed PDFs and structured metadata in Zotero—a huge time saver in the archive and when I’m taking notes after.

In the Business History Review, I review @dygottlieb.bsky.social's excellent YUPPIES

The decline of TT Assistant Professor jobs in History, thanks to @bschmidt.bsky.social’s database of H-Net job postings observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/h...

Try to play "spot the neoliberalism" here and you see something interesting: 1. with the brief but notable exception of 2000-05, housing's share of wealth was on a secular decline from the Volcker Shock through the Great Recession 2. Retirement funds become more important instead

What's happening in sports betting now is an even stupider version of what happened in banking and investing in the 80s/90s: regulatory arbitrage that in theory offers better consumer prices and choices but ultimately fuels social and economic instability. www.wsj.com/finance/kals...

TIL the turn to cash flow vs profits in accounting and finance really began after the collapse of Penn Central

I think my teaching in the age of AI position is basically "wax on, wax off": forcing students to arbitrarily work without AI (ie blue books) forces them to learn valuable, lifelong skills (ie critical reasoning) that they would/could not otherwise. It's about karate, not waxing.

I don't love this framing but I think it succinctly captures what we in the humanities are out here doing: teaching skills that at best are used for individual human flourishing and civilizational advancement, and at worst for training the next generation of managers

It’s very illuminating that the 2008 financial crisis was driven by the collapse in asset-backed securities, the most “safe” and “real” financial assets, backed by actual cash flows (ie mortgage payments) and even physical assets (homes). The opposite of crypto, or ‘00 dot-com 1/