Thanks Prof Delong for setting this up. I'm hoping it takes off, so I'll put something down to start, even tho. I don't have anything intelligent things to say. Just a few questions.(posted 8758 days ago)In class we talked about why we should do economic history, But will we in time learn how economic historians do it? And how to appraise their work? (this matters now, and will probably matter even more when we start writing the research paper :P ).
For instance, in the QWERTY-Dvorak comparison, we didn't eventually find out who was more accurate about the history of the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. Thats really troubling, cos we can't really be confident in conclusions formed from flawed data, right? Or are we supposed to forget the facts and concentrate on the lessons of the story, that path dependence matters? (gee, that sounds alot like how neoclassical economics handled lighthouses and bees)
Well, anyone who's interested can find lots of supporters of both QWERTY and Dvorak on the Internet (just type QWERTY or Dvorak on your search engine).
Ok I gotta go back to 201A problem set 1.....