Very bad reasons for doing things

Watching Good Will Hunting.

There's a scene in the first quarter of the movie where Will tears apart a Harvard student who is attempting to intimidate his friend Chuckie by ruthlessly criticising the student's views on economic development in the pre-revolutionary southern American colonies. The student, Will surmises, has not an original idea in his head: his views are being shaped by the stage he's got to on the Harvard reading list.

It reminds me how little I know about economic history. Mark Overton is the Professor of Economic History here at Exeter (http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/staff/overton/), and in between being Pro-Vice Chancellor  he came to give us a lecture last Autumn term on the subject. It was interesting. He covered the development of modern Economic History and how it is largely intertwined with the history of Cliometrics (numerical and statistical analysis of historical economic trends), along with reminding us all what a revolutionary effect that computing developments have had on research.

Yet here I am, almost a year later, and the amount I know about economic history is about as small as it was then. The idea that Cliometrics is the great hope for objective historiography has been disproved. Firstly, like most of the great 'Historiographical Hopes' of the post-WWI age, its advocates seriously overstated its effectiveness and reliability. Secondly, the modelling that William Fogel et al ended up with was substantially divorced from reality.

(I'm not entirely sure about this, but some of the contributing factors that may have occurred is that economics - to my understanding - treats human beings as 'rational actors'. I'm not convinced that humans should always be assumed to be acting rationally)

At the same time though the 'rejection' of Cliometrics doesn't mean that you can understand your time period without knowledge of the economics involved. I'm doing my doctoral research on British politics and the Haldane Reforms (of the British Army) between 1906-1914. If I want to know what non-military factors shaped those Reforms, I have to look at the Protectionism-Free Trade dispute of 1902-1910, and the impact of that old age pensions being introduced had upon the 1908 budget. If you want to understand the 'People's Budget' of 1909, you have to realise that the Government was not only looking to challenge the authority of the House of Lords, it was looking to balance the Budget in the face of massive defence estimates and a two-year (1907-1909) recession. Which leads you to ask about why it saw the need to balance that Budget, which in turns leads you back to 19th century liberal economic analysis, and the predominance of Gladstonian economists among the senior levels of the early 20th century British Treasury.

My point, if I have one, is that it's impossible to be a purely political, religious, sociological or cultural historian. In my humble opinion it's more sensible to divide areas of study by time period rather than subject. The subjective viewpoint has to acknowledge inter-connectedness. My research is on politics and defence, but I have to include in that everything from economics to the influence of the Daily Mail.

So why don't I know more about economic history than I did a year ago? Well, and here the title comes into play, economic history is quite dull really. Cliometrics involves a substantial amount of computing and maths: Overton for instance learnt to program whilst being involved into early studies as to what computers could do for history. I'm sure that there are some historians out there who enjoy working with numbers - they're called quantitative historians and they used to be everywhere apparently. I don't though. So I tend to leave numbers out of my work.

My conclusion? I should do more economic analysis. I probably won't though, not because it doesn't need to get done but because I'm human and I like working on things that interest me. My suspicion is that quite a few of my fellows do too.