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Are the tools and concepts developed by economists usable for historians?

- - - - good for showing the dangers: Nico Voigtlaender and Wilhelm both published a paper on Nazi Germany which argued that cultural norms persist. There was a high correlation between the places where there had been progroms and those where there was anti - Jewis sentiment - ver bad measures they took. Hardly plausible that these persist over 6ß0 years and not only where the Hanse was active.
      - Slavery
        
        Engerman: Time on the cross: have argued that slavery was really profitable
  - - - models the American railroads or the world if they had not existed and comes to the conclusion that they did not add much to the growth -> debate
    - - odl view: Mary and charles Beard and louis Hacker all claimed that the victory of the north basically caused a second revolution. However, with the rise of cliometrics there came a new generation of scholars whose methods showed that that the growth was modest.
    - - Fritz Redlich: 'Model? I deal with the truth.'
      - models can never be part of history
      - Lance Davis: everybody makes mental models
  - - - Historiography
        
        Cipolla Between two worlds (1991)
        
        'Economic History answers fundamentally different questions'
        
        'The past is too complex and complicated to be squeezed into a model'
        
        Rawski: Economics and the Historian (1996)
        
        Stephen Cullenberg and Susan Carter -> the tools can give insights into connections that were not visible before.
        
        Fritz Redlich
        
        'Model? I deal with the truth'
        
        Lance Davis
        
        everybody makes mental models
      - late development
        
        Japan as a counterexample
      - dependency theory
        
        Japan as well complete and immediate integration into the world market
      - mental models
        
        confirmation bias
        
        we are trying to frame stuff into that model (major problem in historiographical writing)
        
        Look at the historiography of the American revolution. In both ways problematic in the 1970s and 1980s were was a tendency to write the American Revolution from the perspective of the slaves, and Africans etc. and there was a confirmation bias against the founding father. For instance one of the most famous works at the time was Howard Zinns a peoples history of the United States. From the very beginning Zinn tries to depict himself as someone who analyses the history of the not of the false heroes and criticises the founding fathers. Also saying ' in a world of victims and executioners...' which is already a dangerous statement. For him the Europeans that came where genocidal predators and the indians were alluring and hospitable and he depicts a very different picture. Problematic are the sources he uses. On the other side int he 90s a school developed the founders chick which was especially generous with federalists like Madison whiteout seeing that it is always black and white the history.
        
        history of capitalism accounts of slavery also a good example here. Take for example the depiction of Baptsist of slavery and his dealings with violence. Nearly exclusively uses sources from abolitionists to analyse the amount of violence.
        
        Hence: other models are helping us to challenge our view about the models we have from within.
        
        the idea that the way we see the world is a model
        
        The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system (Forrester, 1971)
        
        before Fogel and his study on railroads, historians had a mental model according to which the effect of railroads must have been huge.
  - - - very interesting example is the history of capitalism and basically how Baptist did some weird calculations which he ends up with that cotton made up 40% of GDp in antebellum America but that calculation is just so flawed because he used inter country transfers as well but not for the rest of the calculation so that he ends up with a much higher number than it actually is.
    - - another example of the history of capitalism is that the all stress violence but over stress it, it is some sort of counteraction against those of Engermann etc who stressed more the importance of other things and neglected to stress violence.
- - - - behavioural economics (doubted within economics itself)
        
        Richard Thaler
        
        nudge theory
        
        Kahnemann
        
        prospect theory
        
        historians can use these biases of behavioural economics to gat smarter about themselves
        
        hindsight bias
        
        BSP: Maugeris explanation of the oil shortage after the first world war
        
        Illusory correlation (Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events
        
        Example: Hitler and opera -> thought it was necessary for the survival of the state, as whenever opera suffered, the war would be going worse.
        
        Loss aversion (Kahneman)
        
        second oil shock -> reaction of the world even though it was hardly less oil produced.
        
        Social bias
        
        authority bias
        
        milgramm experiment
        
        historical example: Hubberts peak vs Mckkelves
        
        historical predictions about world population -> Knibbs, Paul Ehrlich,
        
        other resources: Jevons, etc.
        
        hostile attribution bias
        
        gorbachev, reagan etc.
      - harsh critique from Boldizzoni (2011)
        
        18th century working hard was frowned upon and retiring in your mansion as early as possible was the norm -> this is not irrational. this could be completely rational behaviour.
        
        critique for Boldizzoni: if you draw indifference curves, then basically it would be rational for someone to do so, what would not be rational would be if someone wrote swapped something for something else even though he does not end on the same indifference curve.
        
        also argues that it cannot be projected into the past but actually the homo economics never described human behaviour well.
    - - why are institutions the way they are? Acemoglu and robinson settler mortality.
  - - - this is simply not how humans deal with these problems.
  - - - these concepts were used so thats why a historian needs to at least understand them. Both Thatcher and Reagan were proponents of monetarism so basically of the opinion that it is the money supply that should be used to drive the economy.