Economics Without Time: A Science Blind to the Forces of Historical Change.

• Author: Higgs, Robert

Professor Graeme Donald Snooks does not like the way most members of the economics profession undertake their work nowadays. Too many are "gameplayers," too few are "realists." The former dedicate themselves to the refinement of models and techniques, publishing esoteric articles in journals comprehensible to only a few specialists. "Ironically, the increasing precision and abstract nature of economics has [sic] been accompanied by the profession's growing status and influence. The less it is understood by the layman the more it is respected" [p. 19]. So what's the problem? Well, within the profession, economic historians get no respect, especially economic historians like Snooks who study the very long run. He worries, too, that because otherworldly economists cannot provide useful policy advice, radical environmentalists may displace economists as advisers to governments, with disastrous consequences for everybody.

To argue for a rapprochement of economic theorists and economic historians in which the latter would be treated as equal partners in training apprentices and conducting research, Snooks has written two books and placed them within one set of covers. In Part I, which occupies 146 pages, he laments the present condition of economics and surveys its history over the past couple centuries to illustrate how it arrived at its current condition. In Part II, which takes up more than 100 pages, he presents a monograph focused on estimating the average rate of economic growth of England from 1086 to 1688. While Part II is evidently intended to illustrate the value of studying the very long run, the lack of which Snooks bemoans in Part I, readers may become bogged down in the details and conclude that, if this is economic history, they want no part of it.

Snooks's observations on the ills of contemporary economics echo the complaints of many others over the past half century. He opines that "theory, history, and statistical method must become equally important foundations for the teaching and practice (particularly regarding policy) of economics" [pp. 16-17]. He champions the practice of "analytical economic history," a style of study best exemplified by - mirabile dictu - his own research and that of his Australian predecessors and mentors, Coghlan, Shann, and the Butlin brothers, whose work he describes with filial affection while snidely depreciating the cliometrics movement as a pale shadow of the real thing. More than 40 years ago...