Z **Archived** Economics 210a: Introduction to Economic History: U.C. Berkeley: Spring 2008

February 6: Malthus and the Malthusian Economy

Clark claims that "the real income in Malthusian economies [ all World economies before 1800] was determined from the birth rate and death rate schedules alone." (p. 28) Does this mean that mankind was powerless to improve its material conditions via factors such as technology, social organization, population control, etc.?

Jared Diamond: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School

Discover Magazine, May 1987

Pages 64-66: To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be iimproted from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on eperson per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandonded their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.

At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and logest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

January 30: Diamond

Pre-Class Memo Topic for January 30: Was it in fact the case--as UCLA's Jared Diamond maintains--that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of the human race? What can we say about the causes of the fact that in some human societies technological and organizational progress appears relatively slow and in others relatively fast? And is there a relationship between these two questions?

Brad DeLong's Notes of Jan de Vries's Talk on the Purpose of Economic History

Econ 210a, January 23, 2008. Jan de Vries Speaks:

Here to present apologetics--a response to the question "why are we here, in this class, studying this material?" And this talk is going to give a historian's answer, a narrative, in response to this question...

History and Economics:

The emergence of the social sciences' out of moral philosophy in the 19th century. Positivism--seek truth from facts. resisted positivism; economics embraced it... "Historicism": you can't test, you have to understand... "Historicism": it's an illusion to suppose that we van reduce social science to natural science-like laws like those of mechanical physics... History: Inductive, descriptive, narrative, unique, example... As opposed Economics: Deductive, analytical, model-based, general, experiment...

Robert Solow: embedding of economy in society

All data are historical data... All theory is crystalized history... All history is based on an implicit theory...

Classical Economics:* 

CE is a historically-based inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations--to see through the accidents of history to the natural laws of social organization... For the CEs, "natural" is good

Moses Finley: Aristotle was a really smart guy, but Aristotle the economist is not very impressive. Finley claims this was the fault of ancient society--organized in such a different way so that Arostotle's categories make no sense. Wealth should flow to virtue...

So how eternal are the theoretical insights of Adam Smith? Do they apply to Athens in 350 BC?

The reaction against CE--German and Austrian reaction. Between 1860 and 1890: Jevons, Walras, Marshall and the rise of NE; institutional and historical critique--economics should recognize that different eras and different regions have different economicses. German Historical School vs. Austrians in the streets of Vienna: methodenstreit. Who won this battle? NE. But should we recover something of the losing side? Cunningham's review of Marshall and his Principles of Economics

Schumpeter, Gerschenkrom, Solow: economic history has a civilizing function when applied to economists... Marx: What's going down in Manchester tells us what will go down in Bombay... Gerschenkron: modified stage theory Return of institutionalism via DE...

Cliometrics: the New Economic History: economic history as a branch of applied NE... The New Institutional Economics, the Annales School, and Paul David's call for a historical economics

Doug North: NIE: price theory is not enough. Transaction costs as the only thing worth thinking about. The old institutionalist agenda in new clothes...

Annales: Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie... Longue duree... The different paces of time... The interplay of event and structure... 

Paul David: The demand for a Historical Economics: make up your own mind for how valuable Paul David's project is... Replace mechanical with biological metaphors, complexity instead of linearity. Are episodes of path-dependence trivial? Does qwerty matter? Is qwerty typical? Decreasing/constant/increasing returns? How long and how large a shadow does the past cast? If you have ever seen a typewriter in a museum...

How much does the path of historical development matter?

Big Questions:

Is capitalism "natural" in a Smithian sense, or a unique historical individual process?

Does the market system allows us to partake "of the common heritage of mankind", or is it a particular--and passing--phase?

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Reference: John Maloney (1976), "Marshall, Cunningham, and the Emerging Economics Profession," The Economic History Review New Series, 29:3 (August), pp. 440-451.

January 30: Modes of Production

Economics 210a: Introduction to Economic History: de Vries and DeLong: U.C. Berkeley: Spring 2008:

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Pre-Class Memo Topic for January 30: Was it in fact the case--as UCLA's Jared Diamond maintains--that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of the human race? What can we say about the causes of the fact that in some human societies technological and organizational progress appears relatively slow and in others relatively fast? And is there a relationship between these two questions?

Submit your 450-word, two page memo on this topic and post the text as a comment to this webpage by the start of the relevant class: noon on Wednesday January 30.

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Readings:

• Jared Diamond (1987), "The Invention of Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_spring_2006/2008/01/jared-diamond-t.html
• M. I. Finley (1965), "Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World," Economic History Review, New Series, 18:1, pp. 29-45 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0117%281965%292%3A18%3A1%3C29%3ATIAEPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1
• Peter Temin, "A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire" http://sshi.stanford.edu/Seminars/Papers/classics/temin.pdf
• William Baumol (1990), "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive," Journal of Political Economy 98:5(1) (Oct), pp. 893-921 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-3808%28199010%2998%3A5%3C893%3AEPUAD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

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Pre-Class Notes:

In addition to the four readings for January 30--Diamond, Finley, Temin, and Baumol--let me give you three other short things to read to orient yourselves for the class:

(1) Exchange and its vicissitudes as fundamental to human psychology and society? Adam Smith:

http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-b1-c2.htm: Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.... When an animal wants to obtain something either of a man or of another animal, it has no other means of persuasion but to gain the favour of those whose service it requires. A puppy fawns upon its dam, and a spaniel endeavours by a thousand attractions to engage the attention of its master who is at dinner, when it wants to be fed by him. Man sometimes uses the same arts with his brethren, and when he has no other means of engaging them to act according to his inclinations, endeavours by every servile and fawning attention to obtain their good will. He has not time, however, to do this upon every occasion. In civilised society he stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons....

[M]an has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love....

[I]t is this same trucking disposition which originally gives occasion to the division of labour. In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer. Another excels in making the frames and covers of their little huts or movable houses. He is accustomed to be of use in this way to his neighbours, who reward him in the same manner with cattle and with venison, till at last he finds it his interest to dedicate himself entirely to this employment, and to become a sort of house-carpenter.... [T]he certainty of being able to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he may have occasion for, encourages every man to apply himself to a particular occupation, and to cultivate and bring to perfection whatever talent or genius he may possess for that particular species of business.

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men... is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education... and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents.... By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog....

Among men... the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for...

(2) Different technologies as producers of different societies which give rise to different types of economies? Karl Marx:

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out....

In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society...

(3) Living standards and the pace of economic progress: Brad DeLong:

Handout: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/20080120_longestrungrowth.pdf

Why Should Economists Study Economic History? After-Action 210a Note

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I'm Brad DeLong, and this is my morning coffee.

Jan de Vries ran our first Econ 210a class yesterday--"Introduction to Economnic History" for the first-year Ph.D. students in economics. He spent more time than I had in the past on what he called "apologetics"--outlining why we were requiring first-year Ph.D. students in economics to take an economic history course--and he gave a historian's answer to that question: a narrative, a particular individual story, a talk about the formation of the social sciences and the rise and fall of positivism and the subsequent vicissitudes of economic history as a subdiscipline within economics.

It struck me after the class that I should have taken up a bit of time to give the economist's answer to the question of why we make first-year Ph.D. students take economic history. I think it goes roughly as follows:

Economics is the hyper-positivist of social science disciplines: believing that everything of interest can be reduced to law-like theoretical and empirical propositions modeled after classical mechanics; that what cannot be reliably, repeatedly, quantitatively, and empirically demonstrated does not really exist as knowledge; that the only good social science is a deductive, analytical, model-based, general, experimental science.

But this misses a lot. Because we are people like those whom we study, we have psychological access to our subjects' internal decision-making processes and motivations at a level that we cannot obtain from market price-quantity data. There is lots of interest that happens once and only once. Natural experiments are rare, and so if we restrict ourselves to positivist tools alone much is underidentified. The individuals' preferences--the "tastes" part of "tastes and technologies" are not primitive but are themselves the result of long and complex historical, sociological, psychological, and--yes--economic processes. You need thickly-described case studies and anecdotes looking out from people's insides before you can tell if your statistical results mean what you assert they mean.

Most important, every piece of economic theory is ultimately a piece of crystalized history. And you have a much deeper and more sophisticated knowledge if you know the history that led people to think that elaborating these particular theories was worth doing. If you just do the crystalized stuff--well, there is a sense in which your thought processes are then on crack, unable to properly process and reflect on the systems of analysis you are using.

Of course, there is a parallel answer to the question of why historians should be forced to take economic history courses. It has, I think, two parts. First, certainly since 1800 and perhaps since 1500, what is most extraordinary and salient about our global society is primarily economic and scientific, so you cannot do post-1500 history without knowing economics anymore than you can do early Byzantine history without knowing theology.

Second, just as every piece of theory is ultimately crystalized history, so every individual historical narrative or judgment is based on a web of implicit social science theories. And your knowledge of the past is inadequate if you do not understand your implicit social science theories critically enough to be expert users of them.

I'm Brad DeLong, and this is my morning coffee, drunk this morning out of my Revelation of Saint John the Divine mug, it happens.

Weekly Memo Questions for Econ 210a, Spring 2008

The grading policy for memos will be:

14 memos. 2 points each. As follows:

0 - not handed in 1 - handed in, but could have been written without thinking about the reading 2 - reflects upon the reading 3 - teaches us professors something

Weekly pre-class memo questions

January 30: Was it in fact the case--as UCLA's Jared Diamond maintains-that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of the human race? What can we say about the causes of the fact that in some human societies technological and organizational progress appears relatively slow and in others relatively fast? And is there a relationship between these two questions?

February 6: malthus

February 13: industrious revolution

February 20: Judging by the readings, how much of a difference does "good government"--that is, a government that cares about commerce and enforces contracts more-or-less honestly--appear to have made in the centuries before the industrial revolution in Britain?

February 27: early modern globalization

March 5: wars, colonies, et cetera

March 12: Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write that the "historiography of the industrial revolution in England has moved away from viewing the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a unique turning point in economic and social development." Do you agree with their conclusion that the literature has moved too far in this direction? Why or why not?

March 19:

April 2:

April 9: An influential literature cites the scarcity of labor as a key factor in the emergence of the "American System of Production." How much of this argument (if any) survives Peter Temin's 1966 critique?

April 16: Textbooks say that the gold standard had internal mechanisms that worked automatically to maintain both price and balance-of-payments stability. On what grounds do Arthur Bloomfield and Hugh Rockoff challenge this textbook view? Are their points convincing?

April 23: Great Depression

April 30: A growing literature develops explanations for 'Europe's golden age' (the European economy's fast growth in the third quarter of the 20th century). Is this effort misguided? In other words, do we really need fancy explanations for a straightforward phenomenon that is easily explained in terms of convergence and delayed structural change?

May 7: The economic history of the world both in the post-WWII period 1945-1990 and, in broader perspective, over the past two centuries has been one in which the world has shrunken enormously in distance along every conceivable measurement, and yet in which income and productivity differences between societies have grown enormously. What, in your judgment, are the possible big-picture theories for explaining this phenomenon that are worth investigating?

Basics for Economics 210a, Spring 2008

University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720

Economics 210a: Introduction to Economic History: Spring 2008

Jan de Vries: devries@berkeley.edu office hours Th 2-4 Dwinelle 3117
Brad DeLong: jbdelong@berkeley.edu office hours W 2-4 Evans 601
W 12-2 Evans 608-7

Course: Economics 210a is required of Ph.D. students in Economics, and is taken in the first year of the graduate program. Graduate students in other degree programs may enroll subject to the availability of space and with the instructors' approval. The course is designed to introduce a selection of themes from the contemporary economic history literature. While themes are presented chronologically, the purpose of the course is not to present a narrative account of world economic history. Instead, emphasis is placed on the uses of economic theory and quantitative methods in history and on the insights a knowledge of history can give to the practicing economist.

It is naturally required that you do the reading and attend class. Informed participation in the latter is encouraged. Class meetings will consist of a mixture of lecture and discussion. When the course goes well, it is primarily discussion; when the course goes badly, it is primarily lecture. Because discussion will focus on the issues raised, resolved, and left unanswered by the assigned readings, readings should be completed before class.

Readings: Readings are either available on the web or on reserve in a folder at the Haas Library. Access to readings available through JSTOR and other proprietary sources may require you to log on through a university-recognized computer and/or enter your Calnet ID to authenticate your proxy server. In past years, students have found it useful to purchase some of the books from which material is assigned through their favorite online book seller and to assemble the materials for reproduction at a local copy shop.

Grades: Your grade will be an equally-weighted average of two components: your weekly memos and the Economics 210a research paper.

Weekly memos: Each week your instructors will post an Economics 210a question on their websites. You will then write a memo of two pages (double-spaced, 12-pitch, 450 words) on that question, which is due at the beginning of lecture the following Wednesday. Two page memos cannot be exhaustive, nor can they provide definitive answers on the basis of what may still be unfamiliar material. But they can explain why the question is important, summarize what the articles assigned for the upcoming lecture have to say about it, and provide a provisional assessment of their conclusions.

Research paper: Your research paper is due on the last class meeting. We take the word research seriously: the paper should provide new information or evidence on a topic in economic history. It should not merely summarize an existing literature in the field. The writing and submission process requires that you meet an intermediate benchmark: submit approximately ten pages' worth of a literature review and a statement of your hypotheses by the last day of the fall semester.

Aim for roughly 20 pages for the final paper.

This paper should go beyond summarizing or synthesizing a literature: students should use the tools of economic theory and empirical analysis to pose and answer an historical question. Warning: the paper must have historical substance. This is not a requirement in applied economics or econometrics that can be satisfied by relabeling the variables in theoretical models taught elsewhere or by mechanically applying modern statistical techniques to old data.

This webpage: http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_spring_2006/2008/01/draft-basics-fo.html

Readings for Econ 210a, Spring 2008

Jan 23: What is economic history? [de Vries]

• Paul David, "Historical Economics in the Long Run: Some Implications of Path- Dependence," in G.D. Snooks, ed., Historical Analysis in Economics (London, 1993), pp. 29-40 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/David_Historical.pdf
• Robert M. Solow (1985), "Economic History and Economics," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 75 (May): 328-331 http://www.jstor.org/view/00028282/di950057/95p00934/0
• M. I. Finley (1970), "Aristotle and Economic Analysis," Past and Present, No. 47. (May), pp. 3-25 http://www.jstor.org/view/00312746/ap020049/02a00010/0

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Jan 30: Modes of production [DeLong]

• Jared Diamond (1987), "The Invention of Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf
• M. I. Finley (1965), "Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World," Economic History Review, New Series, 18:1, pp. 29-45 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0117%281965%292%3A18%3A1%3C29%3ATIAEPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1
• Peter Temin, "A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire" http://sshi.stanford.edu/Seminars/Papers/classics/temin.pdf
• William Baumol (1990), "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive," Journal of Political Economy 98:5(1) (Oct), pp. 893-921 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-3808%28199010%2998%3A5%3C893%3AEPUAD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

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Feb 6: Malthus and the demographic transition [de Vries]

• Gregory Clark (2005), "The Logic of the Malthusian Economy," chapter 2 of A Farewell to Alms http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/Clark-2.pdf
• Ronald Lee (2003), "The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change," Journal of Economic Perspectives 17(4), pages 167-190, Fall http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jecper/v17y2003i4p167-190.html
• Peter Passell and Jeremy Atack (1997), "Population Growth and Redistribution," in A New Economic View of American History (2nd ed., W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 212-37 [ONLINE REFERENCE MISSING]
• Optional: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population

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Feb 13: The industrious revolution [de Vries]

• Jan de Vries (1994), "The Industrious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 54:2 (June), pp. 249-70 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199406%2954%3A2%3C249%3ATIRATI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8
• Jan de Vries (1994), "How did Pre-industrial labour markets Function?" in George Grantham and Mary McKinnon, eds, Labour Market Evolution (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 39-63 [REFERENCE]
• Hans-Joachim Voth, "Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London," Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 29-58 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199803%2958%3A1%3C29%3ATAWIEL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
• Gregory Clark Ch. 3 of A Farewell to Alms http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/Clark-3.pdf

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Feb 20: Early modern institutions [de Vries]

• Avner Greif (1989), "Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders," Journal of Economic History 49:4 (December), pp. 857-882 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198912%2949%3A4%3C857%3ARACIMT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
• Douglass North and Barry Weingast (1989), "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England," Journal of Economic History 49:4 (December), pp. 803-832 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198912%2949%3A4%3C803%3ACACTEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

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Feb 27: Early modern globalization [de Vries]

• [Memo Question(http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_spring_2006/2008/02/memo-question-2.html)
• Jeffrey Williamson and Kevin O'Rourke, "After Columbus: Explaining Europe's Overseas Trade Boom, 1500-1800,"  Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 417-456 http://www.nber.org/papers/w8186
• Karl Marx, "The So-called Primitive Capital Accumulation," Capital, I, Part VIII, Chs 26-32 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm

* Jan de Vries, "The Limits to Globalization in the Early Modern World," Economic History Review (forthcoming) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/devries_limits_of_globalization.pdf

Mar 5: Wars, colonies, canals, finance, and northwest European divergence [de Vries]

• Ralph Austen and Woodruf D. Smith (1992), "Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization," in Joseph E. Imkori and Stanely L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade (Durham, Duke Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 183-203 [ONLINE REFERENCE MISSING]
• Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (2005), "The Rise of Europe," American Economic Review 95 (2005) http://www.nber.org/papers/w9378
• Larry Neal, Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Cambidge, Univ Press, 1990), pp. 1-43, 118-40  [ONLINE REFERENCE MISSING]
• Jan de Vries, "Dutch Economic Growth in Comparative-Historical Perspective, 1500-2000,"  De Economist 148 (2000): 443-467 http://www.springerlink.com/content/l4qp2l551l7t7361/

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Mar 12: Technology, investment, and the industrial revolution [DeLong]

• Nicholas Crafts (2002), "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," (London: CEPR Discussion Paper no.3142) http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP3142.asp
• Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution," Economic History Review new ser. 45, pp.23-50 http://www.jstor.org/view/00130117/di011838/01p0208u/0
• Peter Temin, "Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 57, pp.63-82 http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberhi/0081.html
• Jeffrey Williamson, "Why Was British Economic Growth So Slow During the Industrial Revolution?" Journal of Economic History 44, pp.687-712 http://www.jstor.org/view/00220507/di975668/97p1230f/0

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Mar 19: Marx and urbanization and industrialization and marketization [DeLong]

• Alfred D. Chandler (1992), "Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise," Journal of Economic Perspectives 6 (Summer) http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28199222%296%3A3%3C79%3AOCATEH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X
• Susan Wolcott and Gregory Clark (1999). "Why Nation's Fail: Managerial Decisions and Performance in Indian Cotton Textiles, 1890-1938." Journal of Economic History, June http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199906%2959%3A2%3C397%3AWNFMDA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), "Manifesto of the Communist Party" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

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Apr 2: Imperialism and colonialism [de Vries]

• W. Arthur Lewis, Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 2-25, 38-57 [ONLINE REFERENCE MISSING]
• Barry R. Chiswick and Timothy J. Hatton, "International Migration and the Integration of Labor Markets," in Michael Bord, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization in Historical Perspective (NBER 2003), pp. 65-120 http://books.google.com/books?id=vDL0u3Rz7C8C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=chiswick+and+hatton+international+migration+and+the+integration+of+labor+markets&source=web&ots=TyVyvyVUrD&sig=uMpziuGPhgx3CC_cY2X5oEzuN6I
• Jeffry G. Williamson, "Globalization, Convergence, and History" Journal of Economic History 56 (1996):227-306 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28199606%2956%3A2%3C277%3AGCAH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
• Michael D. Bordo and Hugh Rockoff, "The Gold Standard as a 'Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval'" Journal of Economic History 56 (1996): 389-428 https://www.nber.org/papers/w5340

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Apr 9: Why did the European settler colonies industrialize? [DeLong]

• Evsey Domar (1970), "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic History, pp. 18-32 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001447.html
• Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (1994), "Factor Endowments, Institutions and Differential Paths of Development Among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States" (Cambridge: NBER Working Paper no. h0066) http://papers.nber.org/papers/h0066.pdf
• Peter Temin (1966), "Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850s," Journal of Economic History 26, pp. 277-298 http://www.jstor.org/view/00220507/di975596/97p0463m/0
• Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff (1984), "The Relative Productivity Hypothesis of Industrialization: The American Case, 1820-1850," Quarterly Journal of Economics 99 (August), pp. 461-87 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-5533%28198408%2999%3A3%3C461%3ATRPHOI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

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Apr 16: Gold standard and pre-WWI globalization [DeLong]

• Michael Bordo, "The Gold Standard" http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GoldStandard.html
• Albert Fishlow (1985), "Lessons from the Past: Capital Markets During the 19th Century and the Interwar Period," International Organization 39, pp. 383-439, http://www.jstor.org/view/00208183/dm980251/98p00792/0
• Douglas Irwin (1998), "Did Late Nineteen Century U.S. Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry," NBER Working paper no. 6835 (December), http://www.nber.org/papers/w6835
• Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939, pp. xi-31, 34-39 http://books.google.com/books?id=Qk1flhynCD8C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=gold+standard+rules+of+the+game+ragnar+nurkse&source=web&ots=ONUR57nl4M&sig=yPLXPtqeUlDBtlmU3zgpECPVAbU#PPA39,M1
• John Dutton (1983), "The Bank of England and the Rules of the Game under the International Gold Standard," in Michael Bordo and Anna Schwartz (eds), A Retrospective on the Classical Gold Standard, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 173-195 http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GT_S0mm3opEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=Hugh+Rockoff,+Some+Evidence+on+the+Real+Price+of+Gold,+Its+Costs+of+Production,+and+Commodity+Prices,&ots=B1Ld-1e9HO&sig=v27mKZ0vpCy38AsN2E44lW2CKnQ#PPA173,M1

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Apr 23: WWI and the Great Depression [DeLong]

• John Maynard Keynes (1920), The Economic Consequnces of the Peace, chapters 1, 2, and 6 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-h/15776-h.htm
• Christina Romer (1990), "The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression," Quarterly Journal of Economics 104, pp.719-736, http://www.jstor.org/view/00335533/di971078/97p00037/0
• Ben Bernanke (1983), "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression" American Economic Review 73, pp. 257-276, http://www.jstor.org/view/00028282/di950033/95p00602/0
• Paul Krugman, "Introduction" to John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/GeneralTheoryKeynesIntro.html
• John Maynard Keynes (1932), "The World's Economic Outlook," Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/budget/keynesf.htm
• Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, "State Structures and Social Keynesianism: Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden and the United States," International Journal of Comparative Sociology pp. 4-29 http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GLQ3AAAAIAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA7-IA3&dq=Margaret+Weir+and+Theda+Skocpol,+%22State+Structures+and+Social+Keynesianism&ots=P2iXGFkFfu&sig=APmY6D1P2QkJ0l28RRWX5YxjBmg#PPA29,M1

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Apr 30: WWII and the thirty glorious years [DeLong]

• Peter Temin (2002), "The Golden Age of European Growth Reconsidered," European Review of Economic History 6, pp. 33-22. http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/Temin.pdf
• Mancur Olson (1996), "The Varieties of Eurosclerosis: The Rise and Decline of Nations Since 1982," in Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo (eds), Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.73-94 http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wiTtnUn5qGsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA73&dq=%22OLSON%22+%223+The+varieties+of+Eurosclerosis:+the+rise+and+decline+...%22+&ots=s86KlJoXe7&sig=wabLIsaAIsicZhoppgt-vDhRxcE#PPA69,M1
• Barry Eichengreen, "Institutions and Economic Growth in Postwar Europe: Evidence and Conjectures" (with Pablo Vazquez), http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/research/vanark.pdf
• Richard Ericson, "The Classical Soviet-Type Economy: Nature of the System and Implications for Reform," Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (Fall 1991), pp. 11-28, http://uclibs.org/PID/1011

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May 7: The twentieth-century experience: half empty or half full?

• Richard Easterlin (1981), "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?" Journal of Economic History 41:1 (March), pp. 1-19 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198103%2941%3A1%3C1%3AWITWWD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
• Angus Maddison (1983), "A Comparison of Levels of GDP Per Capita in Developed and Developing Countries, 1700-1980," Journal of Economic History 43:1 (March), pp. 27-41 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0507%28198303%2943%3A1%3C27%3AACOLOG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
• Lant Pritchett, "Divergence, Big Time," Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 1997), pp. 3-17, http://uclibs.org/PID/1011
• Dani Rodrik, "Getting Interventions Right: How South Korea and Taiwan Grew Rich," Economic Policy 20, (1995) pp. 55-107, http://papers.nber.org/papers/w4964.pdf

Paper Assignment for Econ 210a, Spring 2008

Your research paper is due on the first Friday after the end of spring classes: May 16.

Aim for roughly 20 pages for the final paper.

We take the word "research" seriously: the paper should provide new information or evidence on a topic in economic history. It should not merely summarize an existing literature in the field. The writing and submission process requires that you meet an intermediate benchmark: submit approximately ten pages' worth of a literature review and a statement of your hypotheses by the last day before spring vacation.

The paper should go beyond summarizing or synthesizing an already-existing literature: students should use the tools of economic theory and empirical analysis to pose and answer an historical question. Warning: the paper must have historical substance. This is not a requirement in applied economics or econometrics that can be satisfied by relabeling the variables in theoretical models taught elsewhere or by mechanically applying modern statistical techniques to old data.

Topic: The paper may cover almost any topic in economic history. You are certainly not limited to the material covered in 210a. You may, for example, work on time periods or countries of particular interest to you. The only requirement is that the topic must genuinely involve the past. Comparisons of past and current events are certainly fine, but studies of developments solely after 1973 are not.

Evidence: As the readings on the syllabus make clear, historical evidence comes in a wide range of form and styles. It is often empirical, but not always. Sometimes the key evidence is just a list of goods traded or what policymakers said they were trying to accomplish. With empirical evidence, tables and graphs of important variables are often enough to make a compelling argument.

Length: Good papers do come in a wide variety of sizes. However, for this assignment aim at a length of ten pages or so for the literature review, and more for the final paper. A final paper less than 15 pages tends to make your instructors suspicious, while a final paper more than 25 pages (unless it is very good indeed) tends to make your instructors cranky.

Successful Paper Topics from Previous Years: Coming up with a promising paper topic is arguably the most useful part of this exercise. Your entire graduate career (indeed, for most of you, your entire career) will center around identifying interesting questions to be answered. For this reason we will not give you a list of topics (though we often toss them out in the course of class discussion). Instead, we will describe the type of topics that have been successful in the past and suggest ways of finding similarly successful topics.

• A comment on an interesting paper: Perhaps the easiest type of paper to write is a comment on an existing paper. Such comments often turn out to be more important than the original work. Think about flaws in some paper that you read. Is there selection bias? Has the author left out a potentially crucial variable? One year a student noticed a footnote in a paper by on the reading list that said one observation had been left out of the figure because it was so large relative to the others. This same extreme observation was included in the empirical analysis. The student got the data and showed that his results depended crucially on this one observation.
• A comparison of past events with present events: Few economic events have no historical antecedents. If there is a modern development you are interested in, you could look for its historical roots or counterparts. For example, so much has been written about the rise of the Internet and the revolution in communication in the 1990s. How do these developments compare to the rise of the telegraph and the telephone? The rise of TV and radio? Did investment and financial markets response in similar ways?

• Analysis of an interesting source: While it is not a good idea to let data availability drive your topic, it is perfectly reasonable to let serendipity play a role. Have you come across an unusual source in the library or during your undergraduate years? Is there an interesting question that this source could be used to answer?

  • One year a student came across the catalogs for the 1851 World's Fair. She had the idea that these descriptions of what each country exhibited could be used as a measure of innovation. She wrote a paper looking at the industrial composition of innovation across countries.
  • Another student was looking through newspapers from San Francisco in the 1870s. He found many classified ads that read something like: "Wanted - man to work in store and loan store $1000." This student wondered why companies would tie employment and loans. He wrote a paper investigating whether ads such as these were a sign of credit market imperfections or a way of ensuring worker loyalty and honesty. (Both of these papers have since been published in high-profile outlets.)

• A new test of an old debate: Take some interesting debate in economic history and come up with a clever, alternative way of testing it. Usually, such a test involves using a new type of data. For example, if everyone has been using quantities, think about a way to use prices. An example of this type of paper involves the debate over how business cycles have changed over time. One researcher suggested that instead of fighting over very imperfect estimates of real GDP, one could look at stock prices as an indicator of the volatility of the macroeconomy.

• A natural experiment: Just as one should be on the lookout for interesting sources, one should also be thinking about interesting events. History is full of natural experiments--some weird tax is passed, a war is fought, a new regulation is imposed. Often such experiments can be used to answer crucial questions in economics--for example, what the changing speed with which liberty ships were built during World War II tells us about the size of learning-by-doing effects.