Documents de travail « The Role of Cliometrics in History and Economics» Auteurs Claude Diebolt, Michael Haupert Document de Travail n° 2021 – 26 Juin 2021 Bureau d’Économie Théorique et Appliquée BETA www.beta-umr7522.fr @beta_economics Contact :
[email protected] The Role of Cliometrics in History and Economics Claude Diebolt, CNRS, University of Strasbourg and Michael Haupert, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Prepared for Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method Draft: June 10, 2021 Summary How did cliometrics in particular, and economic history in general, arrive at this crossroads, where it is at once considered to be a dying discipline and one that is spreading through the economics discipline as a whole? To understand the current status and future prospects of economic history, it is necessary to understand its past. Keywords Cliometrics, economic history, Robert Fogel, Douglass North, economic growth, econometrics, interdisciplinary economic history, new economic history, multidisciplinary, methodology, quantitative. JEL codes A12, N00, N01 Introduction In 2019 Diebolt and Haupert (2019a), in a response to the question of whether economic history had been assimilated by the economics discipline, argued that rather than assimilation, economic history resembled a ninja, and had infiltrated the discipline. That view of the current status of economic history is not universally shared. Abramitzky (2015 p 1242) bemoaned the fact that the typical economist only cares about the past “to the extent that it sheds light on the present.” More recently, Stefano Fenoaltea (2018) mourned what he saw as the loss of respect for the field of cliometrics. Abramitzky and Fenoaltea represent contemporary scholars who identified dark shadows encroaching upon economic historians.