Title:
Spleen: the failures of the cliometric school
Author(s): Stefano Fenoaltea
Year: 2018
No: 14
JEL Classification: A10, B40, N01
Pages: 17
Abstract:
This paper argues that we cliometricians have failed as economists, because we did not drag the profession out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth; that we have failed as historians, because we do not take measurement seriously, and misapprehend “the data”; and that we failed signally as economic historians, because we backcast “GDP” as if it measured gross domestic product.
Keywords: cliometrics, economic history, economics