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tom westland

@tomwestland.bsky.social

3.5K followers 1.6K following 1.9K posts

it is a lovely morning in the village, and i am a horrible goose economic history of africa + southeast asia, comparative development, markets and industrialisation (he/him) tomwestland.com

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 22h

CALL FOR PAPERS
A workshop at LSE next April on 'Uses and Abuses of the Murdock Atlas in Social Science Research'. We're looking for cross-disciplinary engagement to think critically about what this widely used source means, what it can & can't tell us. Submit by Nov 14
www.lse.ac.uk/economic-his...

Uses and abuses of the Murdock Atlas in social science research

www.lse.ac.uk

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The French Republican Calendar @sansculottid.es · 8h

Today is Octidi the 18th of Vendémiaire in the year 234.
Vendémiaire is the month of vintage.
Today we celebrate buckwheat.#JacobinDay

More information on buckwheat

An old time-y illustration of a Buckwheat.

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Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social · 19h

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 8h

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 9h

Simultaneously loving the message that third places are important and hating the fact that they showed it with Starbucks

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 10h

imo it is both extremely funny but also extremely good to meet your partner through posting. there's nothing you can't achieve, through posting.

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Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 13h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

River or sankey diagram showing the allocation of profits from global oil and gas companies to quantiles of the US wealth size distribution via financial system intermediaries, such as asset managers, and categories of ultimate beneficiaries, such as business owners, pension funds and shareholders in listed companies. The scale is hundreds of billions of US dollars, and ultimately 50.4% of profits reaching the US personal wealth distribution go to the richest 1% of households.

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Richard 塚正ー緑 @rhtebooks.bsky.social · 19h

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 19h

hell yeah!!! 3 world historical economic crises in two decades this can only mean good things

tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 20h

the Fed's nowcast of CPI is currently running at 3.67% for Q4.

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 21h

Yes I had an affair with Margaret Thatcher, no I will not be answering further questions on my affair with Margaret Thatcher at this time

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 21h

I'm glad Lord Heseltine is in the news again because it gives me the chance to remind you all of the

Westland Affair, above a photo of Margaret Thatcher

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 21h

Ethically, I would say definitely.

tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 21h

This is the kind of thing that just completely undermines the public's faith in universities. Absolutely unforgivable, WSU and Newcastle need to pay substantial compensation and apologise.

Fahad Ali @fahad-s-ali.bsky.social · 1d

Outrageous. WSU and Newcastle advertised accredited degrees that weren't accredited. I wonder if our universities might be better run if they spent more time administering their courses and less time trying to persecute support for Palestine.

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

Careers in limbo after graduates discover university courses were never accredited

Students have been left with HECS debts and careers that are "non-existent" after completing degrees that were not accredited. Class actions have been launched against two Australian universities.

www.abc.net.au

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 22h

Longer description:

The Ethnographic Atlas, drawn up by George Murdock in the 1950s and 1960s, is a widely used resource in economics, political science and even in evolutionary psychology. The Atlas tabulates a broad range of attributes for over 1200 pre-industrial societies across the entire globe, with notable granularity for Africa and North America in particular. For Africa, Murdock also drew up a map with ethnic homelands. Later scholars have matched the Atlas and the Map to create a spatial dataset which has sparked a large and influential recent literature.
In this literature, researchers have leveraged various aspects of the Atlas, each with their own empirical and conceptual challenges. One of the most influential uses of the Atlas involves the spatial matching of past 'ethnic characteristics' with outcomes today, for example to measure the lasting impact of pre-colonial states or gender norms. Others have specifically looked at the location of ethnic borders in Africa, for example to evaluate how they coincide with colonial borders.
As use of the Atlas has expanded, so has criticism of the data it contains. How reliable is the Atlas? Is the research that underpins it not well past its due date? And to what extent can potential weaknesses be overcome? Research outputs using the Atlas may cite these critiques, but rarely have the space to engage with questions of data quality in any significant depth. Our aim is to bring together scholars who have engaged with the Atlas in their research and are interested in an open, cross-disciplinary, and forward-looking conversation on the merits, limitations and pitfalls of using Murdock's Atlas in social science research.

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 22h

Uses and abuses of the Murdock Atlas in social science research

www.lse.ac.uk

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Seema Jayachandran @seema.bsky.social · 1d

We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving."

Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.

Event study coefficients that show that men's earnings rise more than women's among couples following a cross-commuting zone move (left panels). The pattern is muted or reverses among single men and single women (right panels).

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 1d

@nathanlane.bsky.social ur new look?

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Mark Hailwood @markhailwood.bsky.social · 1d

As you dig out your chunky knitwear from the back of the draw, I know you are wondering: 'How did people prepare for winter 400 years ago?'

Read today's post to find out (and whet your appetite for our new book The Experience of Work in Early Modern England)

manyheadedmonster.com/2025/10/07/t...

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England I: Winter is Coming

This post is part of a series that marks the publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by monster head Mark Hailwood, along with Jane Whittle, Hannah Ro…

manyheadedmonster.com

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Jana H-S (they/she) @jana-aych-ess.bsky.social · Apr 24

the quantity of wolves inside of you cannot accurately be described with an integer value. hope that helps

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 2d

people are claiming that Bari Weiss wrote her letter to CBS employees with ChatGPT but I think it is more likely that ChatGPT's charmless prose style is the product of being trained on 10,000 Bari Weiss columns

Reposted by tom westland

Patrick Fitzsimmons @patrubenfitz.bsky.social · 2d

Was thrilled to write this for @broadstreetblog.bsky.social (which I recommend for anyone interested in historical political economy)

www.broadstreet.blog/p/blood-and-...

Blood and Iron: Political Fragmentation in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

How new technology reshaped the political equilibrium of the early Iron Age through violence.

www.broadstreet.blog

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Hampton Gaddy @hggaddy.bsky.social · 2d

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market | PNAS

There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

www.pnas.org

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 2d

stand up for womens sex based rights to be trafficked

Reposted by tom westland

~daniel_barker~ @daniel-barker.bsky.social · 3d

Imagine you're at a writers' retreat with the lads and you're all showing off a draft after dinner and then your mate's girlfriend goes here is the novel Frankenstein which I just wrote

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tom westland @tomwestland.bsky.social · 3d

academic philosophy: not even once