[Economics VS Economic History]

On 1/27/2018 at 1:46 PM, ExponentialDecay said:

I am not familiar with Emily Oster's paper on witchcraft, but to take an example that probably all of us have hear of, idk, the rise of China, an economist looking at that question would probably subsume or assume away a lot of individual factors into a model and end up running a productivity analysis, whereas an historian would take a more holistic view, examine things like culture in more detail (rather than filing it all under "institutions" with some indicator variable), in ways that we can't model, and the two would come up with complimentary but texturally different conclusions that don't mix the way oil and water don't mix. I'm grateful for @emperor norton's list of historical monographs, because I really don't have broad familiarity with historical methods, but from the works that I've read that I'd class as economic history not written by economists, that's the impression I get.

I completely agree with your assessment of the contrast between the holistic historical approach and the more schematized model-oriented economics approach to economic history. I'm more bullish on the ability to combine them productively (but not necessarily at the level of using some indicator for "institutions" as a whole), which was why I thought it productive to distinguish between economics that uses historical data and economic history. I'm not sure that I was as clear as I could have been, however, that this is a distinction within the larger discipline of economics--for better or for worse (FWIW, I lean towards the latter), most pure historians interested in economic questions now tend to go by different labels like history of capitalism, political economy, etc. So, the examples of economic historians I listed (with the exception of Lamoreaux) are all trained as economists and usually rely on quantitative economics. What separates them from the others is that they also do their historical homework and tend to frame their questions/models in a way that comes much closer to isolating the variables of interest.

This is why I think they (in theory at least) might be able to carry on a productive dialogue with their colleagues in history departments. To take one of the examples I mentioned above, Hilt's articles on whaling rely on archival research not only to populate his data set, but to inform his theoretical analysis by putting flesh onto the institutional framework that existed in that corner of 19th c. American shipping and what contemporary actors thought about it. That leads him to analyze the effect of risk sharing via selling shares in whaling voyages on captains' choice of whale fishery to exploit, leveraging access to family capital to deal with the endogeneity problem. I think it would be a lot easier for historians to buy into an analysis like Hilt's focus here on how a specific institution--the trade in shares of whaling vessel--shaped specific agents' decisions than to buy into Acemogluesque conclusions about highly abstracted "institutions," as well as easier to integrate into a historical-style wholistic narrative.

And, to the extent that I wish to wade into this thread's current morass on the epistemic validity of historical/developmental economics--which isn't very far--I'd like to join Mellow Yellow in noting that new economic works have been working to address some of the issues raised about the validity of statistical methods and that there are still some areas for serious improvement. In addition to the ideal of randomized control trials, we've seen economists increasingly utilizing instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-difference research designs to limit the number of variables left to the error term--especially related to the endogeneity problem. (Indeed, I'm convinced that Acemoglu and his coauthor's influential articles gained attention as much for their clear, concise articulation of their IV methodology as their North and Weingast-ian institutional analysis.) That said, a less dogmatic/polemical version of at least one of Tigla's (earlier) points is in order: 

On 1/25/2018 at 3:39 AM, Tigla said:

In short, I am beyond skeptical of using statistical methods to "weigh" history. There is a lot of work being down at the University of Missouri-Kansas City which is steadily eroding the science from statistics. For example, the tests of rigor commonly used within economic history (p-value) is heavily biased by the statistical program, data set, and the way the information is inputted into the program. This allows for the statistician to "manipulate" the data set and create series of high rigor tests that reinforce the thesis. Due to this research, I think economic history needs to be seriously questioned and ripped apart because it is unclear whether statistics are a reliable method for making "scientific conclusions."

There are serious dangers with the regnant measures of statistical significance tied to data mining (https://xkcd.com/882/) and more generally with a scientistic attitude. But the response shouldn't be to throw out quantitative methods, but to maintain a humble attitude, continuing to refine them and our research designs, and in the policy arena remembering that long-tails matter. There are a couple episodes of EconTalk that have really helped me think through these sorts of issues while commuting or cooking dinner:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/campbell_harvey.html

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/01/john_ioannidis.html

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/06/hansen_on_risk.html

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/06/hansen_on_risk.html

[Crucial Theory for Historians]

5 hours ago, khigh said:

Frederick Jackson Turner is another that I'm surprised people haven't mentioned. I thought his frontier thesis was crucial for study of the American West, but I could be mistaken. 

Turner might be the perfect example of a theorist who is so-oft cited that you can generally afford not to read him. Unless you work explicitly on the frontier/borderlands or intellectual/cultural history touching closely upon him, you will be familiar enough with his work to summarize it while teaching and there are few scholars embracing his thesis today. Given how limited time is as a resource, it's not necessarily worth diving in. Given how diffuse different subfields' canons are, this applies for a large portion of the above-mentioned texts as well. Unless I'm working on hegemony, I can get by with Gramsci filtered through Genovese, etc.

[Economics VS Economic History]

American historian who did an field in quantitative economic history, here.

On 1/24/2018 at 8:10 PM, Imenol said:

Within economics, I feel that history is gaining more traction as well.

4 hours ago, ExponentialDecay said:

The closest thing to economic history produced by economists that I know of tends to be essentially an exercise in long-run statistical inference. It's an interesting exercise and has applications in other economic work, but it is understandably far from the concerns of historians.

When thinking about the relationship between history and economic history it is also useful to make a distinction within economics departments between historical economics and economic history, proper. I'd lump Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's highly cited recent works in the former--only engaging with history as a dataset to test some theory. This type of work has no trouble getting published and looks good on the econ job market. It is telling, however, that none of these authors would label himself an economic historian--It's not particularly clear how this sort of presentist theory-focused work, largely reliant on cross-national panels (and precious little attention to primary sources) is compatible with our work as historians.

But there is also a different strand of economic history (on display in the JEH and EHR, but unfortunately little in the JQE or AER), which I would label economic history, proper, which might be more open to useful cross disciplinary engagement. Unfortunately, interest in it within economics departments has been been in a long decline stretching at least back to cliometricians break with historians. Like the European approach mentioned above, it engages more deeply with historical sources. It's also always have a much more permeable boundary with business history and an interest historical economic development for its own sake--though the cannier young scholars will do their best to frame their questions in present theoretical terms for the job market. Its practitioners will still use quantitative methods and theory but they also develop some expertise in their geographic area of study--displaying much less tendency to jump around wildly between projects or rely on cross-national panels abstracting away from historical specificity. As DCGrayson mentioned above, Naomi Lamoreaux is a great (if unfair example since she trained in a history department) of how one can fruitfully mix economic methods and theory to answer questions about historical economic development. Some other economic historians that might be worth a read for Americanists include: 

-Eric Hilt - His above-linked review article is definately worth a read and he has done some interesting work on corporate forms/the economics of whaling

-Gavin Wright - A senior scholar who regularly engages with historians and is a *must* read for anyone studying slavery in the US

-Paul Rhode and Alan Olmstead - who have done a lot of good work on agricultural history and may have already come to historians' attention for challenging Ed Baptist's economic arguments (which like most of the new history of capitalism literature has belatedly taken Fogel and Engerman seriously but not any of the follow-up work by economic historians)

-Mary O'Sullivan has some great work on financial history and the corporate form that mixes economic theory, archival work, and quantitative evidence (usually no more complicated than needed to make her point) where each element helps inform the others.

-Price Fishback (and coauthors), Joshua Hausmann, Jason E. Taylor, Peter Temin, and a slew of others could be of interest to historians of policy, particularly involving the New Deal

-Rick Hornbeck - he cuts a bit closer to the historical economists side of my divide but tends to be very good about doing his historical homework

-Claudia Goldin - She's more of a pure economist doing some work on historical data but definitely worth reading for any historian interested in women's place in the economy

[Fall 2016 Applicants]

tmt503, you might also want to look at MIT's HASTS program. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of science with a number of well regarded historians located there.

[Fall 2014 Applicants]

I have a quick question for Duke applicants. Once you were accepted/rejected, did your status on the online website change ? Or still say "submitted?"

 

It still just says "Submitted." My guess is you're waitlisted or rejected if you haven't been contacted because the admitted students weekend emails cc-ed all 22 admits.