Cliometrics

History

Cliometrics, originated in 1958 with the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer with the publication of "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South," in the Journal of Political Economy (4). The cliometric revolution actually began in the mid-1960s and was particularly ugly because most economic historians were either historians or economists who had very little connection to mathematical techniques or statistics. The first projects published during the revolution are well known among economists. Much of the research was conducted by people who were or would become Nobel Laureates. One key area of interest was transportation history. Another was slavery. Still others focused on agriculture and farming. Cliometrics began to gain a following and become better known when Douglass North and William Parker became the editors of the Journal of Economic History in 1960. Today, cliometrics can be followed in Explorations in Entrepreneurial History. The Cliometrics Meetings began to be held around this time at Purdue University and are still held there annually.

While the cliometric revolution was successful, it was almost too much so with its use of modeling and econometrics. Because it largely did away with the old economic history, economic historians seemed more like other economists. They nearly disappeared altogether. However, some new economic historians did, in fact, begin research around this time, among them were Kemmerer and Larry Neal (a student of Albert Fishlow, a leader of the cliometric revolution) from Illinois, Paul Uselding from Johns Hopkins, Jeremy Atack from Indiana, and Thomas Ulen from Stanford. In spite of this, the separation of economic history and economics continued until the 1970s.

Thus became the problem of cliometrics. The dilemma was voiced by Donald McCloskey in 1976. He disagreed with the current position which was created by the new method of formalizing economic theory and testing that economic theorists no longer needed to be learned in economic history. In his article, “Does the Past Have Useful Economics?�, he wrote:

‘Smith, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Heckscher, Schumpeter and Viner, to name a few were nourished by historical study and nourished it in turn. Gazing down from Valhalla it would seem bizarre that their heirs would study economics with the history left out, stopping their desultory search for facts in time series at the 1st 25 years and in cross sections at the latest tape from the Bureau of the Census, passing by the experiments of history with little regard for their place in a nonexperimental science, distrusting old facts as error-ridden intrusions from another structure, abandoning historical perspectives on their political economy'.

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