We currently organising a launch workshop for An Economist's Guide at Riddel Hall, Queen's University Belfast, on 18 January 2019.

In addition to the editors and some of the book's many contributors, confirmed participants on the 18th include Wendy Carlin (Professor of Economics, University College London) and Nick Crafts (Professor of Economic History, University of Warwick).

Wendy is one of the driving forces behind the CORE project, which aims to revolutionise the way we teach first-year economics by "inverting" the curriculum and starting with topics usually left to the end (like game theory and information economics). The CORE syllabus is very interesting in that it tends to lead with empirical problems before moving to theoretical explanations, and so includes a lot of economic history.

Meanwhile, Nick is probably the most influential economic historian working in the UK today. He was appointed CBE in 2014 for services to economics and has become a regular commentator on the economics of Brexit. He has an excellent new book out which looks at the rise, fall, rise and fall again of the UK economy from the Industrial Revolution to the present day.

Our launch event will be covered by Econ Films, an award-winning production company specialised in making films about economics.

Please get in touch with me if you wish to attend our workshop.

In terms of an update on the book's progress through the presses, we are still on course for a November 2018 publication.

​Chris.

I am writing this short update from Montréal, host city for the 2018 Meetings of the Economic History Association. I had a little wonder around the McGill campus this morning, and am about to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. I am very much looking forward to the conference, which starts tomorrow. 

​From the conference programme, I can see quite a few contributors to An Economist's Guide will be here: Guido Alfani, Vellore Arthi, Jari Eloranta, Price Fishback, Rowena Gray, Noel Johnson, Mark Koyama, Alexander Moradi, Larry Neal, Cormac Ó Gráda, Richard Steckel, and, of course, yours truly! That's 12 out of 51 of the book's authors in one place. Note bad!

On Sunday, I will be presenting a paper I wrote with Matthias and Eoin on the Great Irish Famine. We used our prison dataset to do some anthropometrics, the study of human height - a surprisingly good indicator of health when you haven't got other statistics to hand. We find evidence that those who survived the Famine and reached adulthood are highly selected bunch who did not themselves suffer famine malnutrition and disease. We think this is an important result for a number of reasons, not least because related studies do a bad job of considering selection effects. You can read the full paper here.

Meanwhile, Matthias and I have been putting in the finishing touches to the book proofs. All the missing references are now sorted, and Adi's new visually-appealing graphics uploaded. We will see another version in a couple of weeks to make any last-minute changes, and then it is off to the printers!

Chris.