I need your connect. I still don't have the Mason and Jayadev I need!

Thank you, Rae Gancie Hammers

Happy @briancallaci.bsky.social day let's all start our strike notices with "Dear Joint Employer"

An artist named Rae Ganci Hammers designed it. I don't know them, but I am very fortunate they were assigned to my book.

Today's the day!

🚨🚨Revised paper 🚨🚨

The Balance of Power in Franchising

w/@ulrichatz.org, Blake Eliason, @mikelipsitz.bsky.social, @pnorlander.bsky.social, & @stpinto.bsky.social. We built the 1st comprehensive panel dataset of franchise contract terms: 46,000 documents, 4,500 chains, 20+ provisions, 2009-2024.
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at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born

New Slingshot Episode in which @briancallaci.bsky.social discusses his new book, Chain of Command (Chicago Press), on the latest episode of The Slingshot with @halsinger.bsky.social and Darren Bush.

Vertical Vertigo - The American Prospect Brian Callaci’s book describes the deregulatory strategies franchisors use to protect their profits.

Franchise owners have become less like independent businessmen and more like a badly treated employee stripped of all their rights. Jarod Facundo reviews a new book on how franchisors put this legal regime in place.
prospect.org/2026/04/10/a...

It's alive!

Very grateful to Rae Ganci Hammers for the design.

NEW WORKING PAPER

Minimum Wages and Vertical Restraints in Franchising

joint with Swayam Sarangi, @stpinto.bsky.social, and Blake Eliason.
marshallsteinbaum.org/wp-content/u...
#EconSky
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Larry Fink waxing lyrical about the magic 1950s, when American capitalism was oh so dynamic, but leaves out the bit about the heavy repression of finance within and across borders that underpinned it.

Also, imagine being a TSA agent who hasn't been paid in over a month watching these thugs who ARE being paid coming into your workplace. ICE are basically scabbing in order to brutalize Americans.

Don't outsource your reading to LLms

Imagine a Buffalo Wild Wings but sadder

Very unfortunate the Clinton admin dragged its feet and left the ergonomic standard to be overturned by the CRA

Agreed. That’s something I’ve consistently written as part of the explanation. It’s also a way more modest claim than in Yglesias’s post, which was that there is a certain and substantial benefit to going moderate on all issues. You should join us on Team It’s Uncertain

To me it matters that even under the most favorable conditions

presidential candidates, not House (where party brand matters)

holding turnout fixed

voters have knowledge of all policy positions, no media

The paper finds that going moderate is half as effective as Yglesias wrote in Boston Review

I don't think they'll ever be able to automate participant observation. Accordingly, I accept my fate as an economist, and welcome our new overlords as queen of the social sciences. Anthropology.

Delta swore to its employees and unions that it was not transporting deportees this way.

I interrupt this moment with some nerd shit. This is from the Spirit Level comparing the degree of inequality in a state (ratio of income of the top 20% to the income the bottom 20%) and confidence that you would do better than average in a fist fight. Not with a bear but still notable.

New quadratic coordinates:

Is tough, acts tough: WV, NM, LA
Not tough, acts tough: UT, MT, ID (the "Yellowstone" quadrant)
Is tough, acts not tough: SD
Not tough, acts not tough: IA, MN, ME

What I think:

@lpeproject.bsky.social needs to have a conference with @urpe1968.bsky.social.

Because I think they could inform each other on theories and data.

This is Nathan Cavanaugh, another DOGE staffer explaining how he flagged grants at NEH for "DEI" which would be reviewed for termination. 404 Media has reviewed hours of this footage and we'll have more soon.

Part of a lawsuit by @acls1919.bsky.social, @modernlanguage.bsky.social + @historians.org

Today, firms are often able to calculate their own-price elasticities from rich customer data, in some cases even that of specific customers. These firms *do* have the ability to maximize profits in the neoclassical sense, and they say they do so. How does PK econ respond?

Something my students have picked up on: Post-Keynesian price theory makes much of its empirical fidelity, rooted in observations of actual pricing behavior rather than optimization assumptions. But workhorse PK markup models are based on obs from manufacturing firms decades ago

Waging a Good War #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use o...

Source: us.macmillan.com/books/978037...

The US military as a "ferrari without a steering wheel"--all tactics, no strategy--is about as perfect as a metaphor can be.

Funny we posted nearly simultaneously bsky.app/profile/bria...