Timur Natkhov

Just delivered at home. More importantly, in a world with powerful LLMs, the relative importance of understanding economics (as opposed to being able to complete a proof) just went up considerably. An LLM can solve a fixed-point problem faster than most of us. What it cannot do is look at a policy proposal and see the second-order effect, the incidence shift, or the margin that adjusts. That is price theory. No amount of computation will give it to you. Becker knew this fifty years ago: the power of economics was never in the math. The math was always the servant. The power was in thinking clearly about trade-offs, incentives, relative prices, and equilibrium. LLMs just made the servant very cheap. That makes the master more valuable, not less. P.D. One still needs to know the math. I am only claiming its relative price changed!

How did people in 1913 see the world? How did they think about the future? We trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts—no Wikipedia, no 20/20. The model literally doesn't know WWI happened. Announcing the Ranke-4B family of models. Coming soon: github.com/DGoettlich/his…

David Wooton on Joel Mokyr! engelsbergideas.com/essays/joel-mo…

What it's all about. 💜🥹 Prof. Joel Mokyr, winner of the @NobelPrize in Economic Sciences, shares a lovely message from a former student.

An interesting discussion on what happens when historians ignore economics. 🪙 Add your two cents, #econhist! (With inputs by @tylercowen, @patrickc, and @jasoncrawford on #progress) ourlongwalk.com/p/when-histori…

Timur Natkhov now presenting at @ArthurLewisLab the paper "All Along the Watchtower: Military Landholders and Serfdom Consolidation in Early Modern Russia" (w/ Andrea Matranga) 👇

My paper with @DanTGilbert is out today in Nature: people believe that people are less kind than they used to be, they're probably wrong about that, and we have an idea where this illusion comes from. nature.com/articles/s4158…

@AmandaGregg711 I bet it was Steve Hoch who said that.

Overheard at the conference: "Alexander Gerschenkron wouldn't know a cow if it bit him in the ass."

@pablhern @andreamatranga @albertobisin Sure. Here it is. Thanks for the interest. sites.google.com/view/natkhov/r…

@andreamatranga @albertobisin @Natkhov Fascinating! Is there a version I could read (couldn't find it in google), thanks!

We just submitted our paper on the rise of Serfdom in Russia (joint work with @Natkhov), and we're very proud of the result. I am going to start here a long thread explaining the paper (I will add little by little as I have time)

This book is a testament that disruptive work is still there in comparative development. @GalorOded produced a new Guns, Germs and Steel, a beautiful description of the history of humans, except that it is now grounded in (rather new) theoretical and empirical research. I love it

Latest from #thelongrun: 'With mother’s milk: ethnic-specific infant care practices and infant mortality in the Russian Empire' by @natkhov @HSE_eng @cinst_hse @nvasilenok @stanford ehs.org.uk/with-mothers-m…

@felipev84 @nvasilenok @EconHistAssoc Many thanks to everyone involved in this decision! Completely unexpected and honored. Thanks to my wonderful coauthor, it would’ve been impossible without her. And congrads to Chicheng as well. I knew his paper was the best in JEH in 2021 as evidenced in my November twit.

Congrats to Chicheng Ma, you and @nvasilenok for publishing the best papers in econ history last year, wow! @EconHistAssoc

@AmandaGregg711 Yes! That made my day too. Here are more old pictures. #photo" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hist.msu.ru/departments/88…

@Natkhov OMG that picture of Borodkin in 1983!

Looking for sources, anecdotes, and random wisdom on the history of cliometrics in Russia for a little thing I'm writing. Thanks!

A beautiful paper on super interesting topic cambridge.org/core/journals/…

@dshestakov yeah, wonderful lecture! Saw it about a year ago. One of the most compelling stories about the the rise of the West. So far...

#CRHDUD closing session

Thanks to Moscow State University for hosting the conference, and all those that worked behind the scenes to make this possible #CRHDUD

@sleepy_romantic спасибо!