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  • History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demography
  • Paul M. Hohenberg
History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demography. Edited by Timothy W. Guinnane, William A. Sundstrom, and Warren C. Whatley (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004) 510 pp. $65.00

The volume under discussion is a sort of Festschrift for Paul David, of Stanford and Oxford. It rates at least an "above average" for a volume that originated as a set of conference papers. The short introduction by the editors does little more than summarize the papers. Also, although the title sounds like a broad manifesto, its message is aimed squarely at economists. Historians of other stripes will find it both obvious in general (of course, history matters!) and not infrequently impenetrable in its details. Demographers, however, will note several meaty chapters.

The essays are divided into four groups, the first two dealing with the issue of path dependence. The editors sum up the other two parts as "context matters" and "facts matter." The third is a bit of a catch-all, with no obvious links among the four papers. The last should really be labeled "What is a fact?" Its papers grapple mainly with issues of measurement, including both the ambiguities that arise in aggregating data and the art of making statistical bricks with few actual data straws.

As to path dependence, the papers range widely, from technical exercises aimed at fitting the concept into standard theory to applications. On the methodological level, Melvin Reder's paper starkly confronts the historical economics toward which David and others have been working with the neoclassical model that largely rules the profession.1 This clear and vigorous essay will no doubt confirm some prejudices [End Page 99] against economists, since Reder comes perilously close to arguing for the "strong economics" model on the grounds that it makes the academic game of what to publish and who matters much more tractable than would an emerging and still amorphous historical economics.

Douglas Puffert's contribution, though ostensibly a work in progress, goes farther than most in fleshing out the connections between path dependence, network effects and form, and technological change, which are at the heart of the putative new paradigm. And it does so with a laudable minimum of formalism. One promising notion is that of sub-networks with different standards or technologies joined by means of "gateways." While limiting inefficiencies resulting from heterogeneity, such a compromise may improve the long-term performance of an entire network by preserving useful diversity during the—often drawn-out—process of competitive technological maturation. As Puffert says, "not only history matters in allocation, . . . time matters (88, italics in original).

Paul M. Hohenberg
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Footnotes

1. David, "Path Dependence, Its Critics, and the Quest for 'Historical Economics,'" in Pierre Garrouste and Stavros Ioannides (eds.), Evolution and Path Dependence in Economic Ideas: Past and Present (Cheltenham, 2001).

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