Can economic history manage without economic theory? And can economic theory get along without economic history? These are the two questions that will be addressed here. If we look at what the situation is actually like in both the Norwegian and international research communities today, the basic outline of an answer becomes quite evident: Economic history is strongly and quite significantly influenced by economic theory, and there is little reason to believe that the discipline will be able to manage gracefully without economic theory in the future. But this dependence is not mutual. Economic theory has, at least over the last two research generations, received rather limited input from economic history. Most academic economists have little exposure to economic history, and I do not think this is seen as a pressing problem among practitioners of the economics profession. Nevertheless, I believe that many economists would benefit from studying more economic history. I will come back to this in my conclusion, after taking a closer look at the relationship between economic theory and economic history as it has developed over time.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: