Econ

Front 1

Karl Marx

Back 1

(1818-1883) who was concerned with who owned and who controlled capital because they had power in society. He was also thinking about how countries developed over time. He said that “the history…of existing society is the history of class struggle.” He combined history and economics, but he was more of a philosopher.

Front 2

Charles and Mary Beard

Back 2

combined history and economics in there research and studies. They were writing in the early 1900s and published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in 1913. He proposed that the U.S. Constitution was a product of economically determinist, land-holding founding fathers. He saw ideology as a product of economic interests.

Front 3

Simon Kuznets

Back 3

He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971. He established a method for defining and calculating the economic aggregates that comprise the national income and product accounts. He constructed data from past years which provided streams to measure trends. He gave us trend lines to follow.

Front 4

Why was Conrad and Meyer's 1958 publication considered a turning point in the study of economic history? What topic is addressed in their paper? Why was their treatment of this topic controversial, and how did their results differ from previous findings, including those of Phillips (1929)? Explain the asset-pricing model and historical data used by Conrad and Meyer to obtain their results.

Back 4

This publication was a turning point because it was the first time someone used economic models to explain historical events. There paper was “The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South.” They estimate the profitability of slavery during the twenty years before the civil war, and measure it using asset-pricing models to calculate the rate of return using yield, costs and risk. They compare slavery’s ROR to ROR on alternative investments. They took the same approach as if they were looking at a share of stock and seeing if it is comparable to an alternative investment. This was a watershed event in this kind of thought. Original findings stated that slavery was not profitable and would have died out . The price of a slave was going up but the price of cotton was remaining stable. This was controversial because these were economists not historians, and it was challenging a widely accepted idea.

Front 5

3. What are the primary features of cliometrics? What is the focus of most cliometric research?

Back 5

Cliometrics refers to the systematic use of economic theory and econometrics techniques to study economic history. It uses the scientific method/hypothesis testing (ex: Was Owning Slaves Profitable?) and applies facts (data) to explicit theory (model). It uses data not just for description, but also for testing theories. It is the continuous search for new and better data. The focus of most cliometric research is the study and explanation of economic development. There were two parts: one to measure, and two to explain economic development.