Econometrics has always been something of an intellectual pathology. It is not specific to history. Keynes on Tinbergen was critical at the beginning. The Lucas Critique with all its intellectual self-destruction, derived from the failure of econometrics as a discipline to process the failure of econometric modeling.
I have been reading recently about the Depression of 1873-1879. For ideological reasons, conservative economists since Friedman have wanted to find kind words for the immiserating deflation of those years. Backcasting statistics without data to support their case that the longest depression in American history was “mild” and should be dated differently is practically a cottage industry.
Love this. Absolutely agree on the data. It's not only historical data. In my corner of the world, getting currency invoicing data is very difficult and we have to rely on proxies or painstaking hand-collected datasets.
Econometrics has always been something of an intellectual pathology. It is not specific to history. Keynes on Tinbergen was critical at the beginning. The Lucas Critique with all its intellectual self-destruction, derived from the failure of econometrics as a discipline to process the failure of econometric modeling.
I have been reading recently about the Depression of 1873-1879. For ideological reasons, conservative economists since Friedman have wanted to find kind words for the immiserating deflation of those years. Backcasting statistics without data to support their case that the longest depression in American history was “mild” and should be dated differently is practically a cottage industry.
Love this. Absolutely agree on the data. It's not only historical data. In my corner of the world, getting currency invoicing data is very difficult and we have to rely on proxies or painstaking hand-collected datasets.
For the further reading, what about: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23538 ?
Thank you! I had forgotten about that one!