Looking Back at This Semester of American Economic History...
Thirteen ways from cotton to code of looking at america’s economic story, & none a Grand Narrative: priming our historical past to serve as an analogy generating machine…
Thirteen ways from cotton to code of looking at America’s economic story, & none a Grand Narrative: priming our historical past to serve as an analogy generating machine…
It was not much like the course I wanted to teach, but it is the course that it turn out I have taught.
It wound up not really telling a Grand Narrative about but rather examined a number of episodes and facets of American economic history. There is no possible Grand Narrative, after all. There are just a lot of stories about a place and the people whose history was something very mess. Embracing the mess is the more honest way to proceed, and thus I wound up teaching episodes from and facets of the economic history of an exceptional nation that is—and always has been—more than just a little bit nuts. Exceptional in, relative to other lands, its sheer weirdness.
But from frontier conquest to the Neoliberal Order’s post-2008 legitimacy crash, the resistance to neat single storytelling of the economic history of America might be just what the students need. They then leave with an archive of arresting potential analogies to human situations they might see sometime between 2025 and2075.
I wound up with thirteen facets and episodes:
the conquest-settlement resource-frontier economy;
slavery and Jim Crow;
the transformation to an exceptional economy pushing ahead not on a resource frontier but on education, industrial, and technological frontiers;
the rise of American dominance over the key Second Industrial Revolution technologies;
the role of immigration;
the transformation of women’s opportunities via the rise of feminism;
the coming of the mass-production economy;
the social-democratic New Deal political-economic order that managed the functioning of and distributed the fruits of the mass-production economy;
the rise of Silicon Valley;
the rise and fall and rise of a more unequal America with fewer channels for upward mobility;
the shift from the mass-production to the globalized value-chain economy and the concomitant shift from the New Deal to the Neoliberal Order in political economy;
the 2008 to 2010-triggered loss of legitimacy on the part of that Neoliberal Order; and
the coming of what we might someday label the Attention Info-Bio Tech economy.
To the extent that there wasn an overarching frame for the course, it has been that America has been a truly exceptional nation. Alternatively, perhaps, that compared to all other nations it his been weird. This has been for both good and for ill: America has both been an example to emulate—a Shining City on a Hill, a New Jerusalem—and a dystopian Valley of Hinnom, where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not.
Exceptional America, in all of its episodes and facets, was formed by the interaction of situation, markets, institutional arrangements, and government policies. Two and a half millennia ago the Athenian general Thucydides wrote that his history would be a “treasure for all time” for:
Thoukydides of the Athenai: Wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians <>: ‘such as shall desire to gain a true picture both of the past and of what is likely to happen in the future, in accordance with the course of human nature, to prove either just the same or very like it…”.
So how do I sum up potential lessons to learn from—or to at least think about and reflect on these thirteen episodes and facets? We get frustrated, those of us who do sincerely think that history provides us with a treasure for all time—that, in the word of Dan Davies:
Dan Davies: the valve amplifier of history <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-valve-amplifier-of-history>: ‘“Recognising that an analogy is no good” is a relatively quick cognitive operation…. Any kind of problem solving is based on making mental models of the problem…. Usually, disanalogies are quick to spot; if there’s a good reason why the mental model won’t translate, it tends to be glaring. Creating a mental model from scratch is a very expensive cognitive operation, though. So, if you have a supply of previously existing mental models, it might be a very good strategy to just start going through them one by one, effectively running your thumb through the book going “nope, nope, nope, maybe … nope, nope, nope … nah, doesn’t work … maybe … nope, nope … hang on this might work”. Rather than taking on the expensive task of making a model that you’re certain will work because you’ve constructed that way, you’re making multiple cheap attempts. But where might you get a large supply of ready made mental models to go through in this way? Yes, obviously, you’re way ahead, nice one readers. Just filling your head up with stories about how things could happen means that you’ve got a catalogue to rifle through, while the constraint that they’re stories about things that actually did happen once should exercise some kind of rudimentary quality control on the library of candidate solutions…
Why do we get frustrated? Because people then don’t do the abstraction—don’t go riffling through their filing cabinet of potential historical analogies during off-peak hours when they have lots of mental processing power going unused, and construct an index. Niccolò Machiavelli is one of us. And his frustration was a reason he decided to write a book:
Niccolò Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of TItus Livy <>: ‘I see antiquity held in such reverence…. [But] I find those noble labours which history shows to have been wrought on behalf of the monarchies and republics of old times, by… [those who] toiled for the good of their country…admired [rather] than followed… [because of] the want of a right intelligence of History, which renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning…. Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought…. The task be arduous…. With the help of those at whose instance I assumed the burthen, I hope to carry it forward so far, that another shall have no long way to go to bring it to its destination…
So there is my question: What kind of exam should I write and how should I advise my students to study for it so that that process of studying and then taking the exam will induce them to riffle through their filing cabinet of his historical examples to serve as an analogies and construct the right kind of index? Suggestions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The next useful model always adds and removes parameters, but if each of these facets and phases represent a swerve from some imagined trajectory, one might ask what changed and what stayed the same, and what decisions might have been made differently, to get a sense of the twist and the duration of a settlement. I'd also look at some Annales school geographic constants, such as the oceans Bismarck noted protecting the US from Europe. Finally, I'd try some international cultural comparisons -- antitrust and "friendship" deals, vs cartels and chaebols for example. Too much for a survey course, but asking questions at the end isn't just for passing a test, it's also to stoke up interest in going further, and also to add some humility to the incompleteness.
Sorry, you are on your own!
And your students should be honored to have such a wonderful professor.