As an economic historian who has also spent some considerable time living in,
and studying, socialist societies, I would like to offer a few comments
stimulated by the questions circulated by Susan Boettcher. In her numerical
order, they are the following:

1. Econometrics is basically the application of classical or Bayesian
statistics to economic data. Even very simple econometrics has wide uses, well
beyond what we might regard as strictly "economic" questions (see Steven
Levitt's _Freakonomics_ for wonderful illustrations of this point). But
directly to Boettcher's question, it is not so much the econometric methodology
that might have some serious bias, but the data themselves. For instance,
econometrics could be used to test the labor theory of value or the organic
composition of capital, if it had the right data to work with. But most of the
available data reflect the contemporary concerns of the time and the place, as
well as the ruling  orthodoxy (or the orthodoxy of the rulers) and - most
importantly of all - the resources available to collect and record the data.
That is why import data are almost always better than export data, because the
governments that collected import tariffs understandably devoted more resources
to monitoring imports than to monitoring exports. That is also why we often
have price or wage data, but no data on actual  incomes. There are some wage
data, even some good wage data, back to the 13th century, but no data on how
often, or how long, or how many, people worked at those wages. So clever people
find ways to study the standard of living in those times for which income data
are not available by using data that are available, namely the height, weight,
date and place of birth of military recruits, then combining findings from
biology and nutrition with statistical techniques to ferret out  trends in the
standard of living among various populations. The trends found don't themselves
have any ideological bias, but the analyst's explanation for, say, a decline in
standards of living that shows up as a decline in the average height of a given
population, may indeed have an ideological bias. If Boettcher is looking for
ideological bias, it would seem to me that she should first look at the
analyst, and secondly at the data, rather than at the use of econometrics per
se.

2. Quantitative approaches are typically favored by people who want to move
from the particular to the more general. As we learn in courses on logic,
nothing can be proven by the piling up of anecdotes. In order to move beyond
anecdote, some form of quantitification is necessary. For example, no matter
what the society, there are always dissidents and rebels in that society. But
it makes a difference if the dissidents and rebels are a tiny fraction of the
total population, or a large and influential group.  The intensity of their
disaffection also is a crucial factor. To assess the importance or impact of
those groups calls for quantification of these factors. As Boettcher herself
points out regarding the historical evaluation of the Peasants' War, "much of
this debate was conducted via an ever more hairsplitting Marxist class
analysis." In her opinion, therefore, too many intellectual resources were
devoted to a peripheral or perhaps even  irrelevant line of analysis. The
corollary of that is that relatively too few resources were devoted to other
lines of analysis, so maybe there is a case for going back over the old ground,
but looking at it with new perspectives and new tools.

Second no. 2. It would be difficult to find any economic historian, in this day
and age, who would argue against the value of contributions from cultural
history, nor who would advocate "moving away from cultural history." One of the
hallmarks of the maturation of the "new economic history" or "cliometrics" has
been the movement away from the early focus on the debunking of former
folklores toward the inclusion of more classically "historical" approaches into
research in economic history, including the social and cultural. I hope,
therefore, that in this point Boettcher is not advocating moving away from
economic history or refusing to include what is useful from it into other
streams of historical research. One of the signal contributions of
"cliometricians" has been the unearthing of previously unused, sometimes even
unknown, sources of data that can add important dimensions to the study of
history in many countries.  (Cf. the use of heights of military recruits
previously referred to, or the hospital, school, anthropological, and census
records used by so-called anthropometric historians.) I should think that
cultural historians would welcome new knowledge on the standard of living of
the peasantry, for example, in assessing the appeal of certain religious
movements or revolutionary ideas among the peasantry.

3. I think that Boettcher is right on much of this point. I would merely add
that she perhaps is overstating the amount of time and effort needed to acquire
the basic economic literacy that she thinks should be emphasized. While she is
correct in saying that to go on to advanced economic theory "calculus would
have been necessary ... and very quickly differential equations would have been
required," the economically-literate historian would not be expected to become
a _producer_ of economic theories (for that matter, economics-trained economic
historians also are not expected to be producers of economic theory), but
rather an informed _consumer_. For most work in economic history
intermediate-level micro and macro are all that is necessary on the theory
side, and a good statistics course (which many graduate students in history now
take, either as undergraduates or as part of their graduate programme) is
sufficient on the statistics side. If one can understand _Freakonomics_, one
can understand most of the really important works in quantitative economic
history.

4. Again, there is little to argue with in this contribution, except that Prof.
Boettcher has misconstrued the point when she asks "of how much value are
economic theories and quantitative methods gauged to the evaluation and
explanation of capitalism in analyzing pre-capitalist economies?" The analysis
is most often independent of the type of economic system, except that the
system sets the constraints within which the economic actors must operate. So
consumer behavior, whether in a capitalist or a communist society and even
though the outcomes might be radically different, can be evaluated using the
standard tools  of microeconomic theory. Similarly, the hyperinflation in the
Soviet Union in the 1920s can be evaluated using the standard tools of monetary
theory, or the distribution of output in a pre-capitalist subsistence economy
with communal land tenure can be analyzed using the standard tools of welfare
economics.  The investment system of the planned economy, although very
different from that of a capitalist economy, can be analyzed with the standard
tools of investment analysis, just as the foraging of birds for food can be
analyzed using standard risk-and-reward tools. And, when Boettcher tells us
that "the early modernist wrestles even more necessarily with the problem of
incomplete and/or unreliable data series," she is in fact making an implicit
plea for bringing the tools of econometrics to bear on the problem.

In general, I think that Boettcher draws too sharp a line between Marxist
theories and standard mainstream economics. Much from Marx has been
incorporated into modern economics, particularly in the areas of economic
growth and development, but also into comparative economic systems and into
theories of cooperation and conflict. Some of Marx's ideas, particularly the
labor theory of value, have not  been incorporated for, I think, good reason.
That said, however, the theoretical distinctions may be irrelevant in any case:
We don't need a special theory of the pre-capitalist economy, nor special
pre-capitalist econometric tools, to evaluate the behavior of economic and
social actors in such an economy; what we really need is a knowledge of the
constraints (social, cultural, legal, economic) within which their decisions
had to be made. Illuminating those constraints is work for many kinds of
historians.

	Scott Eddie
	International Relations Programme
	University of Toronto

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS