If the audio is weird: go to settings for the video (the wheel top-right), and set audio to the original Korean; it’ll switch to English.

I gave an interview for Korean tv on the topic of this article, my view on Korea’s economic miracle, and some personal stories:

Why care? See the paper 🌍:

When do states form? Literature has not converged on this point. There are costs and benefits, but like 'where' these are more abundant while historical state formation is rare. Question is wide open!

Why do states form? I describe the `fundamental dichotomy' in the literature: Is the state - at its core - kleptocratic and needs to be curtailed, or is it cooperative, and needs to be controlled?

Where do states form? We have considerable evidence on the costs and benefits of certain locations for state formation, but why is state formation so rare if so many locations could work?

Historically, state formation is rare! We know Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc; but these are few, and states spread slowly. Any theory has to contend with these facts. (Partial table of theories 👇- see paper for full table!)

🧵 New survey on theories of government and the state in the annual reviews: https://t.co/XgN0FR45VO (includes overviews of theories - for teaching) 👇When, where, and why do states form?

I have a predoc opening! This position will involve working with historical U.S. local newspaper data to understand Americans' varied perspectives on key issues across a century. Applicants can upload materials here (the listing describes a different project - sorry, I was

James Robinson (@HarrisPolicy) and I are hiring one or more predocs starting Summer '25. Come work with us on political economy, economic history, and AI. Link: https://t.co/NCTLsRzbD2 @predoc_org

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

How A River Changing Course Led People To Form The First Governments. Research in @AEAjournals from Robert Allen, Mattia C. Bertazzini & @LeanderHeldring via @forbes @NYUAbuDhabi @UniofNottingham @KelloggSchool

We've released a new dataset, Newswire https://t.co/Ok6dQM2q4I 2.7M unique newswires reproduced 32M+ times over a century (1878-1977). Articles have location and topic tags and person ids (from Wikipedia). Fun fact: see the prohibition related crime spike in the 1920s

🚨Job alert🚨@edoardoteso and I are looking for a predoc, for 1 or 2 years, to start immediately. Work with us on political economy, economic history, and machine learning. Apply here: https://t.co/Um6LHTVxi5 @predoc_org

What led to Iraq’s 9thC collapse? Superb paper by Bob Allen & @LeanderHeldring Rulers struggled for succession, & needed to pay troops, then exploited peasants, who refused to pay taxes. Canals were not maintained Salivation rose, wheat yields fell https://t.co/h8qIJOKFJx

Very nice animation of our recent paper, thank you @econimate! Paper: https://t.co/hzDN83vJn6 Economist article: https://t.co/XG5iz2RYPu Interview:

Once you're happy with your settings, we provide a routine to process a directory full of scans. Caveat: For your use case you will probably engineer our code a bit, but we hope it's a useful starting point

Here is an example from a table in a historical data source. After cropping, our routine returns the tabular data in dataframe format, ready for processing.

Here's an example of a page from the historical New York Times that has text in various different boxes. We return the different text boxes. For a model that links different textboxes correctly, see my co-authored project: https://t.co/xceNJQ22IV

An example of preprocessing is cropping to remove logos and other extraneous objects in an image. We also provide routines for: 1. Splitting of pages (e.g. multiple columns) 2. Grayscale/contrast/brightness (for OCR contrast) These help a lot with the quality of the final OCR