Little late picking up my postings, so if this is now off the thread, I apologize in advance: I agree totally with James Ahiakpor's point about fundamentals and econometrics. It has gotten to the point in economic history where available, obvious, convincing, thick evidence is often brushed aside impatiently with the statement "That COULDN'T have happened". Couldn't? Oh really? Why? "Because the model SAYS it couldn't." But the model is only as good as the theory upon which it is based. And -- in economic history at least -- few are the researchers who are as good at debating the merits of the theoretical background of the study as they are at pronouncing an interpretation "proved". I can off the top of my head cite three examples where economic historians with VERY good jobs in economic departments at to;p universities saw nothing wrong with an a priori assumption that the observed wage equalled the MPL, and therefore could serve as a proxy for productivity of individual laborers -- and were completely oblivious to the existing literature on the number of situtations in real life where that simply will not be the case. (A much- heralded book, for example, argued in one chapter that a traditional economy was becoming a "market" economy because wages were converging -- then used the SAME wage data to argue in the next that wages were a perfect proxy for MPL -- well, didn't argue it. Just simply asserted it, one sentence, the famous "economic theory proves that" sentence I am hearing more and more often. Statistical analysis can be an extremely useful method for making sense out of a jumble of stats. I do not think that either econometrics or statistics BY ITSELF is the problem. THat is like ranting at the computer for getting your billing statement wrong -- the computer did not do that. A human being behind the computer did. And it is the same with econometric or other statistical models. They are being misused. They are being used to be lazy about theory. This ties in with what I keep seeing as a serious cultural flaw within economics as a proefssion -- the unwillingness to be publicly open about disagreement (except in the most bombastic sense - as when an economic historian from a local econ dept. informed a historians' seminar I was in that "Robert Reich is not an economist." Oh right. He might DISAGREE with Reich, but by any definition of the word Reich is certainly an economist! Okay -- this is long, but there really is a history of economic thought idea in here: I would argue that econometrics first developed within a framework of SEVERELY limiting the scope of what economics "was". It went along with a national culture that similarly limited our perception of what was "scientific" and what was not; what was "professional" and what was not. And overconfidence in the ability of American know-how (in this case, economic know-how) to fix just about any problem. What I see as the fundamental scholarly problem here is that in the past thirty years economics has expanded to encompass much, much more, deliberately. So basdically a methodology designed to work within a very constricted and highly-defined framework is being applied to a much looser set of constructions that simply will not fit. The practitioners won't admit this, however. And if you try to call them on it, they get huffy and say -- oh, you just don't understand. (Like heck.) That is -- economists have NO CONCEPTION that it has been almost FIFTY YEARS since Paul Samuelson's dissertation. Fifty years. Half a century. They approach all postwar theory as either innately "right" or innately "wrong" and do not seem able to conceptualize the framework within which different theories and methodologies developed -- what questions they were asking and answering, and how that shifts over time as the conversation moves on. What is desperately needed is a focus on the history of American/British economic thought since World War II. (The monetarist/Keynesian dispute of the early 70s neejds to be viewed historically as well.) -- Mary Schweitzer