Granted that economic history is important to the professional economist or economic policymaker, but is there any practical reason for studying it if a student has other longterm goals? The answer is yes. See Black, Sanders, and Taylor (2003), who show that undergrad economics majors do better financially than do business, math, or physics majors. The skills developed in studying economic history—critically analyzing the economic record, drawing conclusions from it based on economic theory, and writing up the results in clear English—are valuable skills in many lines of everyday work. The attorney who reviews banking statutes to determine the intent of the law, the investment banker who studies past stock market crashes to find clues on how to foretell a possible crash, and the owner-operator of a small business who thinks about what happened to other small businesses that were sold to larger firms are all taking on the role of economic historian. It will help them if they can do it well.3
Besides the importance of historical study for its vital role in deliberating private and public policy recommendations, knowledge of history has other merits. For one thing, history can be fun—especially as we grow older and try to recapture parts of our lives in nostalgic reminiscence. For another, history entertains as well as enriches our selfconsciousness, and, often, because of television, the historical account is provided almost instantly (e. g., news coverage of the 2003 war in Iraq). A sense of history is really a sense of participation in high drama—a sense of having a part in the great flow of events that links us with people of earlier times and with those yet to be born.
We conclude this section with the reminder that two of the principal tasks of economic historians are to examine a society’s overall economic growth (or stagnation or decline) and to find out what happens to the welfare of groups within the society as economic change occurs. Our primary purpose in the following pages is to explain how the American economy grew and changed to fit into an evolving world economy. We study the past to better understand the causes of economic change today and to learn how standards of living can be affected by policies and other forces stemming from technological, demographical, and institutional change.4
World History
