Historiography and Retrospective Econometrics

Abstract

My assigned topic is Historiography and Retrospective Econometrics. I want to address myself to only a limited aspect of the literature suggested by that title, and I shall confine my remarks to the work of Americans who have been writing on the history of their economy. The and application of mathematical methods to the study of American economic history is now some ten years old. I stress the words systematic and self-conscious because it is very easy to find earlier examples of one or another writer, on one or another topic, at one or another time, who deliberately applied mathematics to historical problems. And as I shall argue shortly, unconscious or subliminal applications are as old as the discipline. I am interested therefore in the systematic, use of these methods. A decade is not a very long time. During this short span econometric history has changed from a novelty into the predominant form of research in American economic history. I say this with full knowledge that the methodology of the new economic history is still highly controversial. However, I believe that these methodological debates are essentially rear guard actions. The predominance of the new type of research is evidenced by a number of things. It is, for example, evidenced by the number of articles published by American journals which are econometric in their basic character. On another occasion, I pointed out that one-third of the then current issue of the Journal of Economic History (1966) employed quantitative methods. In a later issue of the Journal (1968) half of the articles apply these methods. If I extrapolated naively, I would come to the conclusion that 100 per cent of the articles would be econometric in six years and seven days. The predominance of the new approach is also demonstrated by the fact that the main postgraduate centers of economic history in the United States, those departments which produce most of the Ph.D.'s in economic history, now routinely teach econometric history. I include in this class such institu-