Hillary Vipond

Our paper now

I do love flying in to Boston, it's like a city of sails on the water. Weekend is all prep for NBER SI, reading econ history paper, good times.

And today a swan's nest, right on the banks of the river

Vienna. Wildflowers on the walk to the train

Does Harvard build a couple of spin offs now?

98 million pairs of shoes produced in Britain in 1907

Sometimes I feel like documenting the most quotidian moments of life in Western Europe. This whole terrain will be foreign to peoples of the future, as I am reminded every time I read biographies of workers in 19th c England

Industrial Revolution probably improved living standards more than any other revolution before or since.

It'd be neat to quantify this, and without overlooking the many people who were harmed in the churn

Have come to terms with the fact that I don't really understand or remember much until I write it out & work through it.

So I'm going to blog. Primarily for myself. Would love it to be a little useful for others. Many thanks to @johanfourieza.bsky.social, whose conference on this was inspiring

The 12th Australasian Cliometrics Workshop will be held 14 Nov 2025 at Monash Uni, Melbourne.
Proposals accepted thru 14 July, full papers due 31st Oct.
More info: Quoc-Anh Do (quoc-anh.do@monash.edu) & Laura Panza (lpanza@unimelb.edu.au)
ECR & grad students particularly encouraged
📉📈🗃📗 #AcademicSky

Vienna at sundown

Thousands of books have just arrived at CSH and I can't help myself, I've nabbed a few just for the cover art and title. Any Booth map will do for me I guess #econhistory

Picture of the title and abstract of the paper.

📜 NEW WORKING PAPER 📜

What was the true case fatality rate (CFR) of smallpox?

My new paper with Romola Davenport (Cambridge) revisits this question using 18th-century data from Sweden and Iceland—and challenges the long-held belief that smallpox CFRs were 20–30%.

🧵👇

1/6

Good discussion taking place on whether researchers should be responsible for sharing their findings, or whether it should be someone else. Specialization etc.

Someone said "the researcher might not be the one who shares the story, but they should know why it matters"

Do we have a 4th Industrial Revolution Pope?!

@delong.social sharing thoughts on the use and abuse of economic history

Day 1 of the workshop on communicating research in economic history. Very glad to see this space developing #econhist

Faulkner

I kinda like eudoroam

Really delighted to have arrived in Stellenbosch for this workshop on disseminating Economic History. Organized by @johanfourieza.bsky.social with keynote from @delong.social

He points out that the great gifts of the super rich are primarily acts of magnificience, acts of rulership.

He notes the secular stagnation following the full entrenchment of the Medici.

And that, historically, when the super rich rule, they do so for their own benefit

Look at the decline in entry into the elite over time!

After the Black Death, quite a lot of opportunity.

Once the Medici had become the super rich, they gained control of central government, and entry disappeared.

He then accumulated a lot of support and power by redistributing his wealth. In the form of contributions to society.

But business as usual is keeping wealth and influence in.

He tells us the story of the Medici family. They were newcomers after the Black Death. But they got to power by Cosimo. He was initially expelled by Florence. Then Florence needed money. They brought him back...

We get the example of the great merchant Datini. Born an orphan. Died immensely rich.

Alfani is arguing that the plague had been so bad that the system had collapsed in some places, and so was more open to outsiders...good conditions for a Datini.

He points out that in pre-industrial Europe there were three main paths into affluence.

1. Be born to money
2. Entrepreneurship (Arkwright. Became the richest commoner in England)
3. Finance

Measuring the different prevalence of mobility via each path needs more work

Ok, where we're going is a hypothesis on waves of social mobility. Potentially around elite control being interrupted...

Social mobility. The graph shows change in social mobility. Big boost to social mobility after the Black Death.

(This has got to be connected to distribution of wealth, but it's not clear to me where we're going)

But the *point* he is making here is that similar trends in inequality obscure very different trends in inequality ratios.

(Alright, I have to have an opinion here, I think this is very important. Has been on my mind in terms of distribution of the gains of growth)