Regarding the meme circulating from an “economic historian” that private investment in capital isn’t important, Cold Spring Shops author Stephen Karlson quotes Kids Prefer Cheese’s Mike Munger who wrote this about said historian:
He apparently thinks that if you write about stuff you don't understand, that makes you an "economic" historian. Yes, sure, I'm a snob. But the guy has a PhD in History from Northern Illinois U. A two-time loser.*Without any prompting from Cold Spring Shops, he subsequently revises and extends.*A clarification: Northern Illinois has a number of quite good departments, including econ. But the history department is a doctrinaire marxist ideological chop shop.I'm not sure the description of History is completely accurate. Professor Livingston surely got onto the culture-studies ride at the right time, but the history department has also been reduced in size and scope over the past 20 years. We do what we can [with] what we have in economics. And we have Quidditch.
31 October 2011, midafternoon on what passes for a quad.
Karlson is a brave blogger to dis his own school.
That's part dis, part praise. I like the initiative that there's a Quidditch club. Mike Munger was a bit harsh on the history department, which used to be pretty good in Russian (as in pre-Soviet) topics, until the leading lights died or got poached, and headquarters didn't have any money for replacements. Econ has gone from 23 tenure and tenure-track faculty in 1986-87 to 11 or 12 now, with university-wide enrollments stable. There's nothing particularly brave about pointing out these things, particularly on a light-traffic site, which mine is.
Posted by: Stephen Karlson | November 06, 2011 at 11:44 AM