Econometrics

Abstract

Whether this category is to be described as ‘econometrics’, ‘cliometrics’ or, in one peculiar formulation, ‘counterfactual history’, the reliance on numbers, any numbers, is necessarily high. ‘A mass of factual research’, Gerschenkron reminded us, ‘must be carried out before counterfactual questions can be asked’; he did not deny the value of counterfactual history — the assessment of events and results by what might have been — but his qualification was that it should be ‘suitably applied’.¹ And the claims of the cliometric ‘school’ are reasonable enough for the more quantifiable elements like railways, trade, prices, commerce and labour — in fact for any activity where numbers are recorded and preserved. It is no small matter, Donald McCloskey argued, to be able to say that economic change in the nineteenth century was not utterly dominated by railways, or that the tariff was not the ‘magic key to economic change in German-speaking Europe’.² And there can be nothing but gain from the application of ‘serious’ economic and statistical analysis, the resistance to which, as Gerschenkron says, might simply be ‘inadequate comprehension of the nature of the tools used’.³