Albert Fishlow and the New Economic History

25 September 2006 at 11:25 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Previous posts have touched on cliometrics or the “new economic history” (not quite so new anymore). For interesting reflections on the cliometric revolution see John Majewski’s recent commentary on Albert Fishlow’s 1965 book American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-bellum Economy (part of a clever “Classic Reviews in Economic History” series; I’d love to see similar series for management, industrial organization, etc.). As Majewski notes, the “book’s forty-year career is a window from which one can glimpse the transition from the ‘Old Economic History’ to the ‘New Economic History.'”

Fishlow’s work, though widely praised, was overshadowed by Robert Fogel’s flashier and more methodologically challenging Railroads and American Economic Growth (Majewski calls Fogel’s analysis “aggressively counterfactual”).

That Fogel’s book received more sustained attention than Fishlow’s attests to its greater appeal to up-and-coming cliometricians. Fogel formally modeled his conception of social savings. Equations fill entire pages of Railroads and American Economic Growth, and even the book’s subtitle, Essays in Econometric History,has a strong cliometric flavor. Fishlow, on the other, eschewed formal models expressed as algebraic equations. Instead of running regressions, Fishlow presented most of his statistical evidence in descriptive tables. As D. McCloskey has argued, Fogel’s provocative rhetorical approach — which combined the confrontational approach of a courtroom lawyer with the technical apparatus of a cutting-edge scientist — appealed to new generation of economic historians.

In short, “Fishlow’s impressive scholarship was not quite econometric enough to hold the attention of economists, yet proved too statistical to appeal to the more traditional economists and historians. One might interpret the fate of American Railroads as a cautionary tale of the troubles that befall interdisciplinary scholarship in an age of specialization.”