Not already published, and no, I don't--what do you recommend reading?
Posts by Aaron Freedman
I’m working on an interactive version as well
Thank you!!
My new masterpiece: vibe-coded chart showing the collapse of the New Deal financial order and rise of Wall Street, by flow of deposits from small to big banks.
From 1990 to 2024 NYC banks more than double their deposit share. Small banks and thrifts go from more than half of deposits to <20%.
Here’s US history
The decline of TT Assistant Professor jobs in History, thanks to @bschmidt.bsky.social’s database of H-Net job postings observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/h...
I built a NotebookLM-like RAG (a semantic search engine) for my Zotero library, optimized for the documents I have as a historian (books, articles, scanned primary sources, Congressional docs). Try for yourself: github.com/freshaf/zote...
Stephen Miller "rejects the vision that shaped the post-1945 world, the conclusions reached by ordinary soldiers and national leaders, by preachers and poets, by the survivors of genocide and the remorseful publics that vowed never again."
timothyburke.substack.com/p/a-wrong-th...
The closest is Capitalism Journal, where IIRC the latest issue is always open-access muse.jhu.edu/issue/55045
gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZu...
Try to play "spot the neoliberalism" here and you see something interesting:
1. with the brief but notable exception of 2000-05, housing's share of wealth was on a secular decline from the Volcker Shock through the Great Recession
2. Retirement funds become more important instead
Where’s my Zotero wrapped
Another way to think about it is the evolution of asset classes and derivatives to be ever more remote from real investment. CDOs and interest rate swaps have underlying bets that affect home prices and government borrowing, but sports betting just amplifies domestic violence.
What's happening in sports betting now is an even stupider version of what happened in banking and investing in the 80s/90s: regulatory arbitrage that in theory offers better consumer prices and choices but ultimately fuels social and economic instability. www.wsj.com/finance/kals...
Harry Braverman really did anticipate the dynamics that drive AI, the separation between conception and execution becoming so complete that no human is needed for the latter
New #awarded #research in #bizhis
Take a look at 🧵
@hagleycenter.bsky.social @gnvbusinesshistory.bsky.social @repec-nep-his.bsky.social @businesshistory.bsky.social @womenknowhistory.bsky.social @historians.org @financialtimes.com @financewatch.bsky.social
Thank you! It’s still in progress!
An example of what's missing in our accounts of financialization and deregulation: an explanation of why Wall Street's #1 political priority in the 1980s is _defending_ Glass-Steagall.
But another, led by Reagan Treasury Secretary Don Regan, celebrated the utopian possibilities that the “securities state” promised: a line of credit to every consumer, capital for every business, and no need to worry about steering the economy away from inflation or deflation again—the market would
But this process wasn’t the inevitable result of deregulation or technological change, but was contested by policymakers. One group, led by Paul Volcker, worried about how the breakdown of the institutional structure of economic security could destabilize American capitalism and society
Using new and neglected archives of financiers, banks, trade associations, and policymakers, I show how Wall Street expanded through and then took over the midcentury economic security state of regulated banks, thrifts, and pension funds
My dissertation project, “The Securities State: Washington, Wall Street and the Financialization of America, 1979-1992” asks how and why Wall Street become the central force in intermediating credit, savings, investment, and liquidity throughout the entire US economy
Thrilled to announce that I've been awarded the 2025 John E. Rovensky Fellowship in US Business and Economic History from the University of Illinois Foundation and @businesshistoryc.bsky.social!
This is insulting, he should settle for nothing less than Ambassador to Turkey
If you're interested in a preview of my dissertation project: "Wall Street’s role isn’t just about markets...It’s about legitimacy, about how the government tries to deliver economic security without doing it directly.” global.columbia.edu/news/how-wal...
J Levy's "Accounting for Profits" is really brilliant but a big blind spot is it doesn't talk at all about cash flow. A cash-flow focused accounting history of the 20th c US would center Penn Central as much as GM!
TIL the turn to cash flow vs profits in accounting and finance really began after the collapse of Penn Central
The better version of "wax on, wax off" is shifting US higher ed to an Oxford tutorial model that emphasizes 1-1 or very small group oral discussion. But at scale that would require many more instructors, and realistically that's not happening any time soon.
I don't love this framing but I think it succinctly captures what we in the humanities are out here doing: teaching skills that at best are used for individual human flourishing and civilizational advancement, and at worst for training the next generation of managers
I think my teaching in the age of AI position is basically "wax on, wax off": forcing students to arbitrarily work without AI (ie blue books) forces them to learn valuable, lifelong skills (ie critical reasoning) that they would/could not otherwise. It's about karate, not waxing.