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...:

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...

(1) Yes, (2) probably not.

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…

But what have we argued?

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

The “Air France Flight 4590 Effect”? (I still prefer Concorde effect to sunk cost, sounds much more elegant and, well, apt.)

The way is the goal.

Mostly thanks to the Franks ;-)

In WIAH I question the obsession with “mastery” as an obstacle to globalizing work; and what do I see in the fourth sentence of this review? “Mastery” and all the rest of it. Oh boy.