Beth Popp Berman
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epopppp.bsky.social
Beth Popp Berman
@epopppp.bsky.social
28K followers 2K following 4K posts
Professor @ a large Midwestern U

Author of Thinking like an Economist, Creating the Market University

Trying to understand how ideas about economic value have shaped capitalism + its regulation, from the first Gilded Age to the second

Have more hair now
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epopppp.bsky.social
Can't believe this was an actual sentence I read this morning.
Screenshot of Financial Times: "But money, if you believe the hype, is a neutral medium measuring contributions"
December 19, 2025 at 4:38 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Love this energy

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...
A small middle-aged woman in a fuschia winter coat yells up at a large, camo-uniformed Border Patrol officer, who is leaning back slightly in what looks alarm
December 18, 2025 at 11:37 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
The hate I can at least understand.

The desire to shoot ourselves in the foot, repeatedly, will never cease to mystify me.
Screenshot of tweet from Russ Vought, explaining that the National Center for Atmospheric Research is being broken up for being "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country."
December 17, 2025 at 11:58 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
Light one candle.
Picture of a hanukkiah with two candles lit for the first night of Hanukkah.
December 14, 2025 at 11:08 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
trying to figure out what "blue-collar pay" means here; search of BLS website does not suggest this is a standard category?
Screenshot of WaPo: Start with the relationship that matters: wages versus prices. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data on blue-collar pay and the consumer price index for “Food at Home,” we can compare wage growth with grocery inflation over multiple time horizons. Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent.
December 14, 2025 at 9:15 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
NYT, Pew.
NYT text: Young men have different concerns. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less. Screenshot of Pew table showing the top 10 places where young women outearn young men; most are small metros but NY and DC are #8 and #9, with young women earning a horrifying 102% to young men's 100%
December 14, 2025 at 1:26 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Also, best name ever?
Wikipedia text: In the 1990s in the latter part of his career, Odum and David M. Scienceman developed the idea of emergy as a specific use of the term embodied energy. Some consider the concept of "emergy", sometimes briefly defined as "energy memory", as one of
November 26, 2025 at 2:17 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I keep running into Howard Odum the ecologist, and yes, he *is* the son of Howard Odum the sociologist.
Screenshot of wikipedia text: Biography Odum was the third child of Howard W. Odum, an American sociologist, and his wife, Anna Louise (née Kranz) Odum (1888–1965). He was the younger brother of Eugene Odum. Their father "encouraged his sons to go into science and to develop new techniques to contribute to social progress". Howard learned his early scientific lessons about (a) birds from his brother, (b) fish and the philosophy of biology while working after school for marine zoologist Robert Coker, and (c) electrical circuits from The Boy Electrician (1929) by Alfred Powell Morgan.[1]
November 26, 2025 at 2:14 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
There hasn't been a lot of empirical evidence yet -- here's a start from Kim + Hamilton.

Faculty hiring of URMs decreases after state introduction (not passage) of anti-DEI legislation. Impact greater for teaching-focused schools, and increases with state revenue dependence. osf.io/preprints/so...
Graph showing relationship between share of faculty hiring going to white men vs. underrepresented minorities at different levels of state revenue dependence with and without introduction of DEI bills.
October 29, 2025 at 11:18 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Organizational Studies at UMich is hiring a full-time lecturer. We're a small but growing program with amazing students at a wonderful university. If this ad sounds like you, please apply. apply.interfolio.com/174964
Description Job Summary: The Interdisciplinary Program in Organizational Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan seeks applicants for a full time Lecturer III position to begin August 25, 2026. Organizational Studies is a small but growing selective undergraduate major in the arts and sciences. This is a non-tenure track position with a university year appointment. The initial appointment period will be four (4) years, and the appointment may be renewed (based on programmatic need, funding, and performance). The appointment is subject to final approval by the college. Responsibilities: Duties and responsibilities for this Lecturer III position are expected to include four (4) undergraduate courses per year, including both lectures and seminars, as well as departmental service, including undergraduate advising and mentoring equivalent to a third class per semester, and service on appropriate committees. Candidates may also contribute to our core class rotation (micro-organizational behavior, macro-organizational theory, and research methods), depending on program needs and candidate background. A typical full-time (100% effort) load for a Lecturer III in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is three courses per semester, or the equivalent in administrative and/or service duties. Qualifications Qualifications: Qualified candidates will have a Ph.D. in a relevant social/behavioral science or professional discipline prior to the start date of the position and a range of instructional expertise. Candidates must be able to teach lower- and upper-level classes relevant to the study of organizations that are grounded in social/behavioral science and appeal to students looking to develop practical, transferable skills. Candidates must also be capable of teaching at least one and preferably two of our core classes (micro-organizational behavior, macro-organizational theory, and research methods). We espec…
October 10, 2025 at 5:33 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Where we are
Two adjacent posts: I assume we're at war with Venezuela now. Has the U.S. attacked Norway yet?
October 10, 2025 at 10:11 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
Well, this seems normal for October in Michigan.
Image of forecast of sunny weather with highs in the mid/upper 80s
October 1, 2025 at 10:28 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
What I find inspiring is being forced to fly to another continent in the middle of my workweek to listen to my boss give an unnecessary speech.
Headline: Summoned Military Officers Are Expected to Hear a 'Rally the Troops' Message
September 26, 2025 at 10:18 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Good review. I particularly like the opening paragraphs.
The​ sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin America, in particular Argentina. The sociology of work developed as a study of car manufacturing. And our thinking about professions relies on the examples of doctors and lawyers. Krause doesn’t seek to challenge this partiality (the natural sciences also use ‘privileged material research objects’, such as fruit flies) but to understand what it tells us about the practices and knowledge claims of the social sciences.
September 17, 2025 at 12:54 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Federally funded R&D (not all of which is spent at universities) as a fraction of GDP is as low as it's been since we started tracking.

Which is a different way of looking at it than "line go up." 4/x ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf2332...
Line graph of the ratio of US R&D spending from various sources to GDP, 1953-2021. The federal percent ranges from about 0.6% of GDP to 1.8%, with the peak in the 1960s, and the low point at the very beginning and over the last 20 years.
April 19, 2025 at 3:52 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
In the 1960s over 70% of higher ed R&D came from the federal government! It's just a bigger enterprise now.

(from same data source) 2/x
Line graph of the percent of higher ed R&D coming from federal government, 1953 to 2023. The range is from about 53% to 74%, with the peak in the 1960s.
April 19, 2025 at 3:34 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
What woke agenda, exactly, do they think Chest Journal has?
Wiki: Chest is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The editor-in-chief is Peter Mazzone (Cleveland Clinic Respiratory Institute).
April 17, 2025 at 9:21 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Is it just me, or is military.com significantly more clear-eyed about this than most news sources? www.military.com/daily-news/2...
The change reflects the expanding Trump administration censorship across the Department of Defense aimed at erasing acknowledgment of those groups. It also follows a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump and internal policy shifts championed by Hegseth, who has made the erasure of those groups a core goal of his tenure so far. The administration has labeled materials related to women, minorities and gay people as "diversity, equity and inclusion," or DEI, a term that once described efforts toward racial equality but has been repurposed under Trump as a catchall term used to conduct a government-wide purge.
April 16, 2025 at 11:21 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Just spent an hour of my one wild and precious life replacing tiny fairy light batteries secured by even tinier screws out of a misguided sense that things should not be disposable even if they cost $2 apiece
tiny finicky dissassembled fairy light mechanism
April 12, 2025 at 3:11 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Is this bad? This seems bad.
www.ft.com/content/0005...
Text: One hedge fund manager said: “Those huge hedge funds with trillions of dollars of Treasuries relative value trades will blow up today if the Fed doesn’t bail them out.”
April 9, 2025 at 10:15 AM
epopppp.bsky.social
Yes! Although this bit stuck out as maybe not an obvious end goal right now; even the stuff about "workforce development" appears to be motivated by the needs of capital and opposition to a liberal education, not an ROI-driven vision of the university.
Text: "The Trumpist university would also have its function, but as an even more extreme neoliberal engine of return on investment and tied to the cultural promotion of ‘Western civilization’." The part about being a neoliberal engine of ROI is highlighted.
April 7, 2025 at 12:06 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
The whole assignment description is long, but this is the key part
Text: Paying for the Party shows how colleges, intentionally or unintentionally, create “pathways” that channel students into particular majors or make some academic paths easier/harder to follow than others, in ways that intersect with social class, gender, and other identities. In this essay, I would like you to use a close reading of Paying for the Party and your own experience to analyze the ways that U-M creates similar pathways and how they appear to work.
April 6, 2025 at 7:04 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
Things are escalating quickly, I see.
Post screenshotting Reddit preppers: People don't realize how difficult subsistence farming is. Many people will starve.
April 4, 2025 at 3:59 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I just keep thinking about this one
Screenshot of Tweet: Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam! Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
April 3, 2025 at 5:55 PM
epopppp.bsky.social
I think you're all jumping to conclusions, we've got another 2.5 hours left.
Schedule of Tariff Day for Trump, climaxing at 8pm: Global markets respond as the impact of America's renewed strength takes hold.
April 2, 2025 at 9:31 PM