Thursday, November 3, 2016

Economic History Update

Eric Hilt has a new paper on “Economic History, Historical Analysis and the "New History of Capitalism."  He is presenting the paper at the Penn Economic History Forum. The paper reviews eleven books that have figured prominently in the New History of Capitalism. It summarizes many of the complaints that economic historians have made about these works but still makes a plea for increased dialogue between economic historians and historians of capitalism.

The Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association will have a session on Cliometrics in Historical Perspective: In Remembrance of  Robert Fogel and Douglas North (follow the link for abstracts of the papers):

A Cliometric Counterfactual: What If There Had Been Neither Fogel nor North?
Claude Diebolt
France National Centre for Scientific Research and University of Strasbourg
Michael Haupert
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
What Fogel and North Got (Spectacularly) Right, and What They Got (Modestly) Wrong
Deirdre McCloskey
University of Illinois-Chicago
Douglass North, Cliometrics, and the New Institutional Economics: Continuity or Divergence?
Lee Alston
Indiana University and NBER
Cliometrics and Econometrics
Robert Margo
Boston University and NBER

Here are a couple of links related to Joel Mokyr’s most recent book A Culture of Growth: the Origins of the Modern Economy:

Here is review by Brad De Long

Here is an interview with Mokyr