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College Major, Employment Status and Earnings

 

The relationship between college major and employment status has been getting a lot of attention. The Mellon Foundation claims that “around 95 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed” based on this study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The New York Times suggests that computer science majors have to take jobs at Chipotle based on this study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Numerous people on Bluesky have shared these articles, sometimes combining the claims about employment and unemployment with claims about higher earning potential for humanities majors, like historians than computer science and engineering majors.

 

The actual reports that these claims based on are worth looking at. Here are a few things to note.

1.       These are estimates of unemployment based upon  the American Community Survey (ACS) done by the Census Bureau. ACS is a one percent sample taken every year. Because it is a very large survey (they ask a lot of people a lot of questions) there is some delay in getting the data. The estimates from the NY Fed are are from the data collected in 2023, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences study uses 2021 data.

2.       The estimates based on the ACS define unemployment in the same way as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the widely cited monthly estimates of unemployment based upon the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households. Someone is unemployed if they do not have a job and are actively seeking one. The labor force is composed of all the people who are employed and all the people who are unemployed. The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed.

3.       This definition of the unemployment rate means that you can’t just subtract the unemployment rate from 100 and declare that to be the unemployment rate as was done by the Mellon Foundation. Imagine you are looking at a labor force composed of a particular group of people, say people aged 22- 27 with a degree in history. For simplicity imagine there are 100 people, 95 are employed and 5 are unemployed. The unemployment rate is obviously 5 percent. But I can’t say anything about the employment rate for the entire population of history majors unless I also know how many history majors are not in the labor force, i.e., do not have a job and are not looking for one. If there are five of them then the percentage of the population that is employed would be 95 divided by 105 or 90 percent; if there are 10 of them the employment rate would be 95 divided by 110 or 86 percent. The Mellon Foundation's claim assumes a one hundred percent labor force participation rate.

4.       ACS and CPS use the same definition but collect data differently. BLS does a survey every month, ACS surveys are collected throughout the year. People who report unemployment to the CPS were all unemployed around the same time, people who reported unemployment to ACS were not necessarily unemployed at the same time. ACS estimates are higher than CPS estimates. For 2022, the ACS estimate of the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.3 percent while the CPS estimate was 3.6 percent.

5.       The NY Fed’s report also provides underemployment estimates for each major. Underemployment is defined as employment is a job that does not typically require a college degree. The NY Times article compared computer science and computer engineering that had unemployment rates of around 6 and 7 percent to biology and art history, which had rates of around 3 percent. But computer science and computer engineering had underemployment rates less than 20 percent while biology and art history had underemployment rates over 40 percent. The low underemployment in comp sci is consistent with a story in which some of the unemployment is voluntary in the sense that it results from people not taking the first job that comes along. The low underemployment rate is not consistent with a lot of computer science majors accepted jobs at Chipotle.

6.       Putting together points 3 and 5 suggests that the Mellon claim that “around 95 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed” is doubly misleading: you can’t tell from the unemployment rate how many are employed or how many of the employed are “fully employed.”

7.       The story that the NY Times wants to tell about over supply of computer science grads because of too much hype about it being the lucrative major compounded with AI replacing computer scientists may be true. But the evidence of it is not that clear in the data from 2023. Both the continued high starting salaries, about double those of art history and biology, and the low rates of underemployment are still pretty consistent with strong demand for computer science majors at that time. This would seem to be supported by the BLS estimates of occupational unemployment rates in July 2025 the estimated unemployment rate for computer and mathematical occupations was 2.9 percent.

8.       None of the cited studies support the claim that over the course of their careers history majors out earn computer scientists and engineers. The NY Fed study shows both early and mid-career salaries that are substantially higher for computer science and engineering majors than for history majors: mid-career median was $77,000 for history majors and $122,000 form computer engineering majors.

9.       None of this is to say that you should abandon history and study computer science. You should try to maximize your satisfaction (or utility in economic terms) not your monetary income. Yes, we get satisfaction from the stuff we buy with our income. Many people also get satisfaction from the prestige associated with a higher income. But many of us also get satisfaction from what we do in our job. 

10.   By the way, I didn’t have an undergraduate major. I went to The Evergreen State College, which does not have majors. I have a B.A. in Liberal Arts.

Google AI?

 

Google AI seems to have difficulty using Google. The search was for "Washington Post 25 best musicals of the 21st century." 

Billy's Books: Property and Slavery

I'm reading Laura Edwards recent paper on "Trunks, Legal Texts, and the Materiality of Law in the Nineteenth Century." The Journal of the Civil War Era 15, no. 2 (2025): 157-183. The paper examines the ways in which trunks enabled people, including married women and enslaved people, to make claims to ownership even when legal texts did not seem to support those claims.

The paper reminded me of an advertisement in the Virginia Herald that I ran across while doing some research on Fredericksburg in the 1820s.

What struck me about the ad was the line that he took with him "a variety of clothing and his books." I was struck by the fact that in fleeing slavery one of the things he chose to carry with him were books and by the fact that the slaveowner referred to them as "his books" when he could have just said "a variety of clothing and books."

I wish I knew more of this story. Of course there is the big question of what happened to Billy, but would also love to know what books he took with him. 

Development of the American Economy

 The NBER  Development of the American Economy Summer Institute is currently taking place. 

There are links to some of the papers here

and you can watch on YouTube

Robert Allen on Arabian Economic History

 Sean Kenny has a new episode of The Economic History Podcast with Robert Allen. 

From the Sand Up: How the Natural Environment shaped the Arabian Economy

Prof. Robert Allen discusses how the desert environment led to a unique economic structure-"from the sand up". Bob takes us through the economic implication of communal lands and describes the differences between the nomadic (Bedouin) and oasis economies. He suggests that religious structures were convenient in eventually consolidating various regions/tribes in the form of states. We also consider the incentives for a unique type of slavery, that arose from the nature of date farming/pearl diving in contrast to the Caribbean sugar plantation experience. 

They also talk about how Allen go into economic history and his advice on doing economic history. 

Overlooked Commodities in American Economic History

 

New NBER working paper today

Firewood in the American Economy: 1700 to 2010.

Nicholas Z. Muller

 

Despite the central role of firewood in the development of the early American economy, prices for this energy fuel are absent from official government statistics and the scholarly literature. This paper presents the most comprehensive dataset of firewood prices in the United States compiled to date, encompassing over 6,000 price quotes from 1700 to 2010. Between 1700 and 2010, real firewood prices increased by between 0.2% and 0.4%, annually, and from 1800 to the Civil War, real prices increased especially rapidly, between 0.7% and 1% per year. Rising firewood prices and falling coal prices led to the transition to coal as the primary energy fuel. Between 1860 and 1890, the income elasticity for firewood switched from 0.5 to -0.5. Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30% of GDP in the 1830s. The value of firewood fell to less than 5% of GDP by the 1880s. Prior estimates of firewood output in the 19th century significantly underestimated its value. Finally, incorporating the new estimates of firewood output into agricultural production leads to higher estimates of agricultural productivity growth prior to 1860 than previously reported in the literature.

 

And if you haven’t already read it take a look at

Ron, Ariel. "When hay was king: Energy history and economic nationalism in the nineteenth-century United States." The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 177-213.

What is normal?

 

This week the Washington Post ran an article declaring High interest rates, rising inflation: The economy still isn’t normal. 

But what is normal?

This is 30 year mortgage rates since the 1970s

Here is the inflation rate since the 1950s

Here is the unemployment rate since the 1950s

At 3.8 percent the unemployment rate is at levels that we had not seen since the late 1960s. The rate of inflation of 3.5% is also low in comparison to much of recent economic history. 

When I first began to study economics in the 1980s the combination would have been regarded as miraculous. Even after people believed the Volcker had beaten the inflationary expectations out of people, no one was predicting a such a low combination of unemployment and inflation. 

Even interest rates, which have increased in recent years in response to Federal Reserve policies, look relatively low compared to the late 20th century.

I have to admit it does appear that current economic conditions are not normal. Perhaps we should be grateful.

 

Updates on UMW Econ Alumni: Christine Exley

 Christine Exley graduated from UMW in 2009. She went on to earn a Ph. D. in economics from Stanford University. She taught for several years at Harvard Business School and is currently associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan.

Christine has published extensively in the top journals in economics.

Examples of recent work include

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected But Not Accounted For

and 

Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad

Updates on UMW Econ Alumni: Sierra Latham

 Sierra Latham graduated from UMW in 2009. Since then she has earned masters degrees as Georgetown University and University of Chicago, worked at the Urban Institute and for the City of Alexandria. She is currently a Senior Research Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Here is some recent work she has done on 

Measuring Poverty 

and

Regional Housing Supply

Updates on UMW Econ Alumni: Alli Baranski

 Alli graduated in 2018 and is currently an assistant manager at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. 

Here is a recent article she coauthored on small business lending.

What fraction of output was produced by enslaved people?

 

Paul Rhode has an important new paper in the January issue of Explorations in Economic History ("What fraction of antebellum US national product did the enslaved produce?." 2024. Explorations in Economic History 91). Rhode frames the argument against Ed Baptist’s claim that “almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves…”, which has been not just repeated but exaggerated by others. It was easy to show that Baptist’s claim had no foundation in either theory or evidence and was purely a creation of Baptist’s imagination (see here), but the question of how large a fraction of output was produced by enslaved labor remained unanswered.

 

I have for years suggested that the place to begin an answer to this question is the labor supply. Begin with the percentage of the labor supply accounted for by enslaved people and then ask why the percentage of output would be either higher or lower than the percentage of labor (see for instance here in my thoughts on Stelzner and Beckert’s attempt to answer the question). I was too lazy to do the work, but fortunately for us Paul Rhode was not.

He estimates that the percentage of output was probably about the same as the percentage of the population, around 12 percent. He also does a series of robustness checks using alternative assumptions that raise or lower the estimate a little bit. As with all such estimates people will be able to quibble, but I think he makes a pretty strong case that it is difficult to produce an estimate that is much larger than the percentage of the population.

Rhode’s conclusion is not just important because he debunks Baptist. The flaws in Baptist’s work were so obvious that only people so enamored with his conclusions that they were willing to completely disregard all evidence continued to support his work. Rhode’s estimate is important because, like recent work by economists Hornbeck and Logan and the economic historian Joe Francis, it lays waste to a tradition rooted in the work of Fogel and Engerman. In Fogel and Engerman, slavery, although morally repugnant, was not just profitable it was efficient and highly productive. Later economists, including Engerman and Sokolof, would argue that despite its productivity slavery had negative long run consequences (see here for instance). But this recent work says that slavery did not just have negative long -term consequences, it was a massively inefficient misallocation of resources while it was taking place. Rhode’s conclusion that the fraction of output produced by enslaved labor was about the same as the fraction of the population accounted for by enslaved people means that the fraction was much less than the percentage of the labor force accounted for by enslaved people, about 22 percent in 1860.

Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains

 

 I recently listened to Rick Hornbeck on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast in the episode

An Economist Debunks Gone With the Wind

Its kind of  a silly name for the episode, but Hornbeck does a great job of describing important research by himself and and Trevon Logan. The paper calls for a significant reconceptualization of the economics of slavery. Hornbeck and Logan present slavery as a giant externality in which the labor of enslaved people was dramatically misallocated because slave holders did not have to take into consideration the full cost of their decisions. Consequently, although studies of emancipation have traditionally focused on the negative effect on production in the South, Hornbeck and Logan portray it as the biggest increase in productivity in American economic history.

You can access the working paper One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains  through the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics

Word on Fire/ Pants on Fire

 

I got an email notification last week for a new episode of Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire podcast  asking  Is There a Catholic Antidote to the Crisis in Higher Education

“According to Fortune magazine, overall undergraduate enrollment experienced the steepest rate of decline on record from 2019 to 2022, and it has only worsened since then.

There are several explanations, but one cause is entirely self-imposed: most universities and colleges have now replaced education with ideology, subverting the search for truth with political indoctrination.

In this episode of The Word on Fire Show, Bishop Barron and Matthew Petrusek, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute, discuss the ideological takeover of higher education and how the Catholic conception of the university can help provide an antidote.”

I’m afraid that before providing an antidote they should put some more work into their diagnosis. The episode does not provide any evidence that “most universities and colleges have now replaced education with ideology, subverting the truth with political indoctrination.” 

What it does provide are some references to the recent congressional testimony of some Ivy League presidents and some vague allusions to wokeness. Given the argument that students are not attending college because faculty are pressing a certain ideology and the Bishop’s example of the prevalence of this ideolog at Ivy League schools they must be at the forefront of the decline in enrollment. Anyone who knows anything about higher education knows that nothing is further from the truth. Ivy League schools are seeing record numbers of applications, leading to record low acceptance rates. They are doing just fine.

The schools that are seeing declining enrollments are less prestigious schools, especially smaller regional schools. The students who aren’t going don't express concerns about ideology; they are concerned about stress and mental health, the rate of return on their investment (which evidence still indicates is high), and their ability to pay. See, for instance, Exploring the Exodus from Higher Education

People will always be able to find anecdotes about some college course that they don’t like or some statement by an administrator that sounds preposterous, but as someone who has taught in colleges for more than 30 years, I just don’t see the world that Bishop Barron and other purveyors of the wokeness boogeyman want people to believe in. The most popular major in the United States is business, accounting for around 1 in 5 undergrads. Some of the other top majors are engineering, computer science, and nursing.  Are we seriously to believe that these schools are not in fact preparing people to be managers, accountants, engineers, computer programmers, data scientists, nurses, teachers, etc. but are instead just indoctrinating them in a political ideology?

 

If Bishop Barron really wants to play a positive role in higher education he should try to do better than this.

Planet Money on the political economy of rum in the U.S.

 

Planet Money has a nice story about rum production (The billion dollar war behind U.S. rum) in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, particularly the consequences of Virgin Islands deal to lure Captain Morgan away from Puerto Rico.

It should be of interest to anyone paying attention to Youngkin’s attempts to lure the Capitals and Wizards away from D.C.

It is also a nice example of a real world prisoners dilemma type game.

What is Capital? Part 1: Bank Capital

 

This is from The New York Times article Why Big Banks (and Some Odd Allies) Oppose a Plan to Protect Banks:

“Regulators are calling for an increase in the amount of capital — cash-like assets — that banks have to hold to tide them over in an emergency to avoid needing a taxpayer-funded bailout like the one in the 2008 financial crisis.”

 

No! No! No! No! No!

Bank capital is not “cash like assets.” Those are reserves. Reserves are money that banks keep either as cash or as deposits with other banks. They are cash like assets. And there are reserve requirements regarding the percentage of deposits that have to be kept as cash like assets, but those are not capital requirements.

A bank's capital is just the difference between the value of the bank’s assets and its liabilities. In other words, it is the equity the owners (shareholders) have in the bank. Capital requirements regulate the size of the capital. The most basic capital requirement is a leverage ratio, requiring that capital be equal to a certain percentage of assets.

Capital requirements are intended to deal with the threat of insolvency. A bank becomes insolvent when the value of its assets falls below the value of its liabilities, primarily the money it owes to depositors.

Why would the value of assets fall? The investments banks make are risky. The prices of securities that they buy, stocks or bonds, can go up, but they can also go down. If the bank owns stocks and bonds and the prices of those securities fall, the value of the bank’s assets falls. Part of the problem faced by Silicon Valley Bank was that it purchased a lot of long term bonds before interest rates started to increase, and as interest rates rose the price of those bonds fell. The loans banks make can also decrease in value. If the bank loans money to a person or a business and they do not repay the loan, the value of that asset (the loan) falls. In U.S. history, bank runs, (people racing to the bank to withdraw their money) tended to occur during economic downturns when falling security prices and failing businesses meant that the value of bank assets were declining. Under these circumstances people had greater reason to fear that some banks might become insolvent and not be able to repay their deposits. Capital helps protect against insolvency and banking crises.

Capital helps protect against insolvency by providing a cushion when asset prices fall. Assume you have $100,000 in assets, $80,000 in deposits and $20,000 capital, if the value of your assets falls by $15,000, you still have more than enough to cover all of your deposits. On the other hand, if you had $100,000 in assets, $90,000 in deposits and $10,000 capital, a decrease in value of $15,000 would leave the bank insolvent. In addition, it can be argued that banks have less incentive to take excessive risk when they have more of their own money at stake. They have more skin in the game.

Financial institutions, including banks, generally recognize the benefits of capital. I have written a lot about the history of New York City trust companies and one of the things they were most likely to mention in advertisements was the size of their capital. They called it capital and surplus, but it meant what we mean when we talk about a bank’s capital today. They used their capital to signal their strength and stability.

            There is, however, also a cost of higher capital: a lower rate of return. A higher capital requirement means that you have to rely more on bank owner’s money and less on borrowed funds (deposits). The extent to which you rely upon borrowed funds is called leverage. To see how leverage affects return on investment consider this example. You know of an investment that will return 10%. You have $100 you can invest. You do so and end up with $110, earning that 10% rate of return. Now imagine you can borrow another $100 from someone else at 5%. You now use their $100 and your investment of $100 for a total of $200. You get back the $200 plus 10% of 200, $220. You have to give the person you borrowed from $105, leaving you with $115. Your $100 investment now earned $15 for a 15% rate of return. That is the power of leverage. Of course if that investment you made doesn’t pay off we are back to worrying about insolvency. You still owe $105.

            So what is the story in the New York Times actually about. Its really about how complicated capital requirements can get. Toward the end of the article they point out that some suggested regulations could decrease certain kinds of lending. This is because capital requirements are no longer set based upon a simple leverage ratio that applies to everyone. Modern capital requirements recognize that not all investments are equal. Some are riskier than others. So regulations assign different risk assessments to different assets and then provide a risk weighted capital requirement. More risky assets, more capital. The argument of opponents of increased capital requirements is that these risk assessments could discourage banks from making some kinds of loans that we actually want to promote. In other words, it could get harder to get a mortgage to buy a home or take out a loan to start a business.

            I’m not going to try to answer which side is right. This isn’t about whether banks should have capital requirements, its about how much capital is enough. That is a hard question. My objective here has been to clarify what people are talking about when they are discussing banks and refer to capital. The post is titled part 1 because this is not the only meaning of capital. In other contexts, the meaning of capital is very different, and I plan to discuss that in the future. Who knows, eventually I might even take on the meaning of capitalism.

Richard Thaler and Behavioral Economics

 

I was listening to a recent episode of Hidden Brain the other day about anomalies, specifically things that are supposedly anomalies in economic theory. The guest was Richard Thaler, who is famous as a behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winner. The discussion reminded me of some of the problems that I have with some work that is described as behavioral economics. One of the stories he told was about Richard Rosett, a professor of his when he was in graduate school at the University of Rochester. Rosett collected wine. He wouldn’t spend more than $20 or $30 on a bottle, but sometimes a bottle he had purchased would increase in price to as much as $200. There was a wine shop in Rochester that would have purchased these valuable bottles from him, yet he would serve them rather than sell them, despite the fact that he would not spend $200 on a bottle. Thaler regards this as an anomaly that contradicts economic theory. The claim is that economic theory says that cost is the value of the foregone opportunity. It doesn’t matter whether you paid $200 for the bottle you are serving or gave up the opportunity to sell the bottle for $200. Either way the cost is $200. That’s all well and good, but it is ignoring the value of the story, which is odd because Thaler claims stories are his thing.

I assume Thaler knows this story because Rosett told it to him. Serving a $200 bottle that you paid $20 for is a very different story than the story you tell when you serve a $200 bottle that you just bought. The first is about your skill in purchasing good wines, the second is bragging about your wealth. Everyone can enjoy the first story. You shouldn’t tell the second story. The other possibility is to sell the $200 bottle and buy more $20 bottles to serve. Again, this isn’t such a great story: “I had a $200 bottle of wine, but I sold it and bought some less expensive wine to serve you.” Following Thaler’s notion of economics would have cost Rosett the pleasure he gained from telling the story to people like Thaler.  Economists assume that people try to maximize their utility not their wealth. I am inclined to believe that Rosett was in fact behaving exactly as economic theory would predict he was maximizing his utility.

I think part of the problem with the wine story comes from not appreciating the many ways in which people can get satisfaction (utility). This showed up later in their discussion of tipping. From the standpoint of economic theory there is nothing anomalous about leaving a tip. If you believe that leaving a server $20 will give you more satisfaction than alternative uses of that $20, that is what you should do. One of the silliest notions that some people try to attribute to economics is that economists think people only care about their own material gain. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Don’t take my word for it. Here is University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize Winner Gary Becker:

“One basic query is: What is meant by rational behavior? Consider first what is not meant. Certainly not that people are necessarily selfish, “economic men” solely concerned with their own well being. This would rule out charity and love for children, spouses, relatives or anyone else, and a model of rational behavior could not be so grossly inconsistent with actual behavior and still be useful.”

Economic theory doesn’t say what people should and should not get satisfaction from. It just says that whatever people get satisfaction from their choices will tend to respond to changes in the constraints they face.

I’m not saying there is no value in behavioral economics, but far too much attention is given to these little stories that supposedly contradict economic theory when in fact they do no such thing.

P.S. I should mention that I also knew Rosett, though I’m sure Thaler spent far more time with him than I did. Rosett was a Dean and Professor of Economics at Wash U when I started the Ph.D. program there. I only knew him because he was friends with Doug North and came to the Economic History Lunch every Friday. The man I met did seem to enjoy a good story.

History's Replication Crisis

 

Anton Howes recently asked Does History Have a Replication Crisis?  The question is one that Howes has been concerned with for some time, but the immediate impetus for the essay was the publication of Jenny Bulstrode’s Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution published in the journal History & Technology. Bulstrode claims that,

“Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world. Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit.”

Howes describes the innovation as a process “to more easily convert scrap iron into new bar or wrought iron — a higher-quality iron that had had various impurities beaten out of it with hammers — by bundling the scrap together, heating it, and then passing it through grooved rollers, rather than the more usual flat ones, stretching and smoothing the sides and edges of the heated metal so that the resulting bars became “perfectly welded at the edges and throughout” and “completely welded at the sides, without a crack, into one mass, perfectly sound to the centre”.” Not surprisingly, the discovery that a famous inventor of an important process had in fact stolen his invention from enslaved people spread quickly.

On NPR you can listen to How Henry Cort stole his iron innovation from Black metallurgists in Jamaica

In the Guardian you can read about how Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’

At The World you can hear how Historian uncovers the Jamaican metal workers behind Industrial Revolution

At New Scientist you can read about how English industrialist stole iron technique from Black metallurgists

     Howes, however, was skeptical of the claim ( The Cort Case) suggesting that the evidence presented in the paper did not warrant the conclusion that the innovation in question had been developed by enslaved workers and then stolen by Cort. Oliver Jelf (The origin of Henry Cort’s iron-rolling process: assessing the evidence) looked at the sources cited by Bulstrode and concluded that there was a more fundamental problem. The sources simply did not say what Bulstrode claimed they did. For instance,

 

Jelf did not simply claim that the sources do not support Bulstrode’s argument, he transcribed and presented the sources in the paper, leading Howes to state that “What I simply cannot fathom, now that I’ve read her sources thanks to Jelf’s transcriptions, is how Bulstrode arrived at her narrative at all (Does History Have a Replication Crisis?).”

Ian Leslie (Stories are bad for your intelligence: How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid) has theory for how Bulstrode came to the narrative. He traces it to problems with stories and  story telling. Leslie says that,

I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. My guess is that she came across a few suggestive fragments in her reading (the ‘cousin’ of Cort travelling from Jamaica to England) and wanted so badly to make them into a story which fitted her ideologically determined prior - that the British stole ideas from those they enslaved - that she got carried away, fabricating causes and effects where none existed.”

He thinks more of the blame should fall on the peer reviewers. Leslie suggests that,

It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them. The paper had two anonymous peer-reviewers (Bulstrode thanks other historians in an endnote, though they may not have read the paper). Even to an ignorant reader like me, the paper just smells funny - it has the aroma of the fantastical. How on earth did these experts read it without becoming suspicious? Why didn’t they double-check its remarkable claims?

I can’t agree with Leslie’s argument. I don’t think that stories or peer-reviewers are the fundamental problem here. 

We need to tell stories. Often the answer to “Why did this happen?” is a sequence of events, a story about how it came to happen. Nor can the blame for misleadingly citing sources be pushed on to the referees. Although I am an economist, I have probably written more referee reports for books and papers written by historians than economists. I will note it in my report if I think an author incorrectly uses a source that I am familiar with.  But I can’t check every citation. I can’t even check the citations to crucial claims if it requires a trip to the archive. Experts in the field should be familiar with important secondary sources, but you can’t know every primary source. You certainly can’t run off to check on every novel primary sources that someone has discovered. You have to be able to trust the author to honestly report what is in the sources that that they cite.

Leslie’s concern about the siren song of stories makes him overly generous with Bulstrode. A professional historian should not get carried away with enthusiasm to the point that they try to support claims with references to sources that do not actually provide any support for those claims. Actually, amateur historians and undergraduate students shouldn't do that either. Historians must tell stories, but they must tell stories that are constrained by the sources. If you do not want your story telling to be constrained by the historical evidence you should be forthcoming and admit that your genre is historical fiction, not history.

I have frequently said that I think honesty is the most important trait for a historian. In economics and other quantitative social sciences I can say “Send me your data.” Many journals require making the data available. But a historian might cite documents that I would have to travel to multiple cities, states, or even countries to access. To be of any use to me I need to be able to trust that you have honestly represented the sources that you cite. Once you have lost my trust you are worthless to me as a historian. Even if I can point to things that you got right, I can’t be sure about anything that I don’t already know. I can’t learn anything from you.

Anton Howes suggests making history more like quantitative social sciences. Try to make copies of relevant sources available. Now that so many people have digital images of the primary sources they use this is at least imaginable. Still, it is not a panacea, as demonstrated by recent revelations on honesty research (see datacolada.org.) Nevertheless, to the extent that it can be done, it would be great, both for the credibility of current research as well as a resource for future research.

But there should also be repercussions. Sadly, I doubt that there will be. Anton Howes notes other historical myths that seem immune to revision in response to evidence. I and others have written a great deal about one historian who in an influential book did not honestly represent what was in primary or secondary sources, going well beyond honest mistakes driven by youthful enthusiasm. As best I can tell there were absolutely no repercussions for him. Other historians still cite the book and praise the author. 

I hope that I am wrong; I hope that many historians read Howes' Does History Have a Replication Crisis? and take the question seriously.

Economic and Business History Seminars

Some have not yet been updated for the current academic year. Let me know of any that should be added.

Yale Economic History Workshop

Harvard Seminar in Economic History

Hagley Research Seminars

Northwestern Seminar in Economic History

Newberry History of Capitalism Seminars

Harvard Business School Business History Seminar

Princeton Economic History Workshop

Washington Area Economic History Seminar

NYU Stern Economic History Seminar

Queen’s University Centre for Economic History

LSE Economic History Seminars

Economic and Social History at Cambridge

Some thoughts on a liberal arts education

 

I recently listened to an episode of the Podcast Word on Fire in which Bishop Robert Barron and Brandon Vogt discussed Why Liberal Arts Matter. Although I agreed with their conclusions regarding the need to support the humanities, I disagreed with their overall interpretation of a liberal arts education.

Bishop Barron defines liberal arts by going back to the root of the word liberal in the Latin word liber, which means free. He argues that in the context of  liberal arts, free refers to disciplines that are free from utility. He provides as examples of liberal arts English and Philosophy, which he claims do not have practical utility, but are higher sciences because they are simply good in themselves. Vogt notes that the liberal arts are “sometimes called the humanities.” I think the notion that the liberal arts and the humanities are synonymous is actually fairly common. Leaving aside the claim that the humanities do not have utility, I don’t think that making liberal arts and humanities synonymous is supported by the traditional use of the term liberal arts, and I do not think it is a useful definition for the present.

The traditional understanding of the liberal arts was that it referred to the education appropriate to a free person, a person who was fully eligible to participate in society.  One traditional view held that there were seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music.  These clearly do not coincide with what we now regard as the humanities. They suggest, instead, that a free person needed a broad set of skills and knowledge, including critical thinking, clarity of expression, and an understanding of the world they lived in.

Barron’s view suggests that there are disciplines that are liberal arts and disciplines that are not. You could, for instance, obtain a liberal arts education by studying only English, or only Philosophy, or somewhat more broadly, only the Humanities. If on the other hand, if you think of a liberal arts education as an education that prepares someone to fully participate in society, studying only the Humanities would not qualify as a liberal arts education. A liberal arts education in terms of the original definition, the education appropriate to a free person, refers to the totality of the education rather than specific disciplines. It requires an education that promotes critical thinking, clarity of expression and breadth of knowledge associated with the original conception of a liberal arts education. An education only in the humanities will not achieve this goal.

Things have changed since the Classical World in which the idea of a liberal education was developed. In general, we no longer think of free people as a subcategory of the population. But it is still reasonable to ask what sort of education will prepare people to fully participate in society. Students do need to study the humanities, but they also need to study the social and natural sciences, and mathematics. The sort of disciplines that Barron would contrast with the liberal arts, such as engineering, computer science, and business are subjects that people increasingly need some knowledge of to be informed citizens. One could even argue that education that leads directly to an income is now an essential part of a liberal arts education. Unlike the past a free person is less likely to able to depend upon their inherited wealth and status for their livelihood.

In other words, I don’t think it is particularly productive to divide disciplines into those that are liberal arts and those that are not. Instead, we should think of a liberal arts education as one that includes numerous disciplines, giving students a wide array of skills and the breadth of knowledge to live successful and fulfilling lives and make valuable contributions to society.