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Walter Scheidel

@walterscheidel.bsky.social

2.9K followers 160 following 10 posts

Historian @ Stanford | https://sites.google.com/view/walterscheidel/home

Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history. .. more

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Economics 14%

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Apr 22

Out now: What *is* ‘ancient history’? Why it is much bigger and more important than we might think, how generations of scholars have dismembered it, how we can do it justice – and why ‘Classics’ has run its course: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

What Is Ancient History?

From one of today’s most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters—and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way

press.princeton.edu

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Reposted by Walter Scheidel

Reposted by Timothy Snyder, Thomas Piketty, Richard Baldwin , and 41 more Timothy Snyder, Thomas Piketty, Richard Baldwin, Pedro Domingos, Kaushik Basu, Gordon Guyatt, Mark C.M. van Loosdrecht, Anima Anandkumar, Anders Aslund, John A. List, Harry Anthony Patrinos, Walter Scheidel, Robb Willer, Adam M. Grant, Eudald Carbonell, Ari Laaksonen, Ed Hawkins, Chris Stringer, Steve Fuller, Andreas Löschel, Tim Newburn, Mary K. Mulcahey, Robert B. Talisse, Ive Marx, Konstantin Sonin, Johannes Haushofer, Québec . Ministère de l'éducation, Salvatore Babones, Dean Baker, Robert C. Hockett, Vincent Geloso, Benoît Cœuré, Dominique Rousseau, Christopher Elmendorf, Owen Davies, Dirk Messner, Mario Macis, Jonathan A. Parker, Jenny Kitzinger, Lilian Edwards, Michael Veale, Jonathan Birch, Timothy Graham, Paulo Gala

Reposted by Branko Milanovic

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Jul 29

The final 2011 version is a classic, and their concepts of IPF and IER (already acknowledged in Scheidel & Friesen) are of critical importance to our understanding of what inequality meant at very different levels of development: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...:

Pre‐Industrial Inequality*

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pr...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Apr 16

(1) Yes, (2) probably not.

Reposted by Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Jan 5

Sounds like my buddy Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire not being holy, Roman or an empire. I’d see quite a big difference between post-Roman emperors in search of a functioning empire and what happened in China…

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Jan 5

But what have we argued?

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · Dec 31

“Shaped” (a long time ago — 1900-1969), not “shapes”…