From EH.Net:

*Paul David: 1935-2023*

Paul Allan David died on January 23, 2023, at his home in Palo Alto, at the
age of 87, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Paul was a major figure in redefining economic history, though his research
interests and influence ultimately ranged far beyond his original
specialties. Influenced by his father Henry David, a distinguished
historian of the American labor movement, Paul studied both parent
disciplines even as an undergraduate at Harvard (1952-1956). Thus he became
an early practitioner of what was then known as the New Economic History,
now more often called Cliometrics: understanding historical economies
through rigorously specified models and quantitative evidence. But Paul
possessed far more historical sensibility than most cliometricians,
cultivated during his postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge
(1956-1958). Returning to Harvard, Paul worked with Alexander Gerschenkron,
pursuing an ambitious thesis project on the economic history of Chicago.
Harvard awarded him a Ph.D. in 1973, not because he had completed the
dissertation, but because by then he had compiled such an extensive
publication record that they felt he had earned the degree!

Paul came to Stanford in 1961, maintaining that affiliation throughout his
career. Even without a Ph.D., he advanced to Associate and then full
Professor of Economics. Degree in hand, he served as department chair from
1979 to 1983. Perhaps Paul’s deepest legacy for Stanford was establishing
the school as a leading center for economic history. The joint
Berkeley-Stanford Colloquium, organized by Paul and Al Fishlow in the
1960s, was a focal point for Bay Area economic history for decades. At
Stanford, the patriarch was Moe Abramovitz, who remained active in both
research and workshops long after his retirement in 1979. But it was Paul
who recruited or helped to recruit Nate Rosenberg, Gavin Wright, Avner
Greif, and Ran Abramitzky – to name only those who became full professors
of economics. We claim that there are more active economic historians from
Stanford than from any other program. A much larger number of graduate
students did not become history specialists but were exposed to Paul’s
perspective through his teaching or that of his colleagues. We like to
think that some of this historical thinking rubbed off and became something
of a hallmark for a Stanford economics Ph.D.

Always an economic historian, Paul soon extended his horizons in diverse
and seemingly disparate directions. He became a strong advocate of the view
that historical research should be fundamental to the economics discipline;
in brief, “history matters.” The essence of the argument was captured by
Paul’s incisive account of the persistence of the QWERTY typewriter
keyboard despite its technical disadvantages, one of the most cited
articles in all of economics (AER 1985). “History Matters” is the title of
a festschrift presented by a group of Paul’s former students in 2004, in
which the editors write: “No scholar has more forcefully and influentially
argued the case for making economics a truly historical social science –
one that, like evolutionary biology, gives past events a central role in
understanding the present.”

A continuing theme throughout Paul’s career was the diffusion of new
technologies. An important early paper considered the adoption of the
mechanical reaper in the American Midwest. Invention occurred in the 1830s,
yet the first wave of adoption occurred only in the 1850s. The twenty-year
delay, according to Paul, was explained by the fact that a minimum scale
was required to cover the fixed costs of purchasing the reaper. Only when
farm size passed this “threshold” did mechanization make economic sense.
Specialists have debated the specifics ever since, but the basic form of
Paul’s diffusion model has been highly influential. In many respects it
formalized accounts of delayed diffusion presented by Nate Rosenberg, and
thus became something of a “Stanford school” of thought in this area.
Scrolling forward to 1990, the era of the “Solow paradox,” Paul offered an
analogy between the delayed productivity effects of computer technology and
a similar lag in the impact of electrification between the 1880s and the
1920s. With the IT-driven productivity surge of the late 1990s, this
article also attained iconic status (AER 1990).

This line of inquiry led Paul into an extensive engagement with policy
issues related to science and technology, such as the role of
interoperability standards in the evolution of network industries. He was
particularly active in Europe. Although Paul maintained his Stanford
affiliation throughout his lifetime, beginning in 1993 he spent about half
his time at All Souls College, moving to the Oxford Internet Institute from
2002 to 2008. From his Oxford base, Paul was a frequent participant in
European networks dealing with the promotion and regulation of information
technologies. His European colleagues presented Paul with a second
festschrift in 2006, entitled: New Frontiers in the Economics of Innovation
and New Technology.

Another of Paul’s enduring interests was demography, specifically the onset
of fertility control in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Often working
with his former graduate student Warren Sanderson, Paul pioneered
techniques to measure the extent of fertility control from a type of data
several countries collected in the early twentieth century. This “Cohort
Parity Analysis” led to new insights into early fertility transitions in
the United States, Ireland, and Great Britain. Paul also deployed his
under-used talent as an economic theorist to better explicate how rational
couples try to reduce completed family size when the only contraceptive
methods available are costly and uncertain. His thinking on this issue
induced an array of historically minded social scientists to rethink the
evidence for early fertility transitions. His work in demography
illustrates Paul’s belief in taking seriously the methods and ideas of
other disciplines, as well as the considerable influence of his wife and
occasional collaborator, Sheila Ryan Johansson.

These specialties would constitute an ample intellectual legacy for a
normal scholar, but for Paul, they are only one component of a much larger
total. He also made significant contributions in macroeconomics and growth
accounting, natural resources, slavery, migration, and climate change,
among other subject areas.

Paul’s academic honors are too numerous to be listed in full, but they
include: Fellow of the Econometric Society, American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and British Academy; Pitt Professor of American History and
Institutions at Cambridge; President of the Economic History Association;
President of the Western Economic Association International.

Paul married Janet M. Williamson in 1958. They later divorced. He married
Sheila Ryan Johansson in 1982. In addition to Sheila, Paul is survived by
children: Rachel, Matthew, Elizabeth and Kenneth; and five grandchildren.



Tim Guinnane, Bill Sundstrom, Gavin Wright

Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305