HeyJaredThe Poor Rich World
This is a blog on the origins of global inequality. It asks: How did we become so wealthy with so much poverty?
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Oct 1, 2026
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- Jul 21, 2026
Latest issues
What Remains of the “China Shock” Narrative? (opens the original)
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My article “Whimsy and Fragility in the ‘China Shock’ Narrative” is the second in what I hope will be a trilogy of articles in Econ Journal Watch, inspired by the work of Edward E. Leamer. The first was “Specification Searching in the Race between Education and Technology,” in which I described how the “human capital” agenda beloved by American economists has depended on problematic econometrics. Now I
American Slavery and the Angel of History (opens the original)
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Suresh Naidu sent a comment on my post “Argentina without Railroads, the United States without Slavery“ and kindly said that I could reproduce it here. He wrote:On our paper: Broadly, you are correct about the structure of the argument. The new version of the paper that we are re-writing (slides here), for what it is worth, incorporates many of the things that were missing in the previou
On Being Wrong (opens the original)
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A friend of this blog recently suggested that, to be more respectable, I really ought to contact the people whose work I am reviewing as part of my attempt to provoke a Reformation in economic history.My initial reaction was horror. I have previously found it pointless to engage in debate with academics about potential issues in their published work. When I have done so, aggressive defenses and unpleasant personal attacks tend to follow. It seems that some would sooner swear that 2+2=5 than admi
Beware the Fuzzy Matcher (opens the original)
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Bolton-le-Sands is a small town on the edge of the salt marshes of Morecambe Bay, a few miles north of Lancaster, in the Northwest of England. Its 4,000 or so residents benefit from a post office, pharmacy, butcher, bakery, two pubs (the Royal Hotel and The Blue Anchor), and a cricket club. I imagine it to be a green and pleasant place to live, even if it is a little sleepy.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NwAz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_prog
Women, the Plough, and a Failure of Peer Review (opens the original)
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In “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough” (2013), Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn provide an explanation of women’s position across the world today. They extrapolate from an idea first proposed by Ester Boserup: that the arrival of the plough could sideline women in agriculture because its operation favored men’s upper body strength. This observation of twentieth-century developing countries then becomes a catch-all theory of gender history in Alesina et al.’s ar
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