Who's on First?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_on_First

Abbott and Costello performing "Who's on First?"

"Who's on First?" is a comedy routine made famous by American comedy duo Abbott and Costello. The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello. However, the players' names can simultaneously serve as the basis for questions (e.g., "Who is the first baseman?") and responses (e.g., "The first baseman's name is Who."), leading to reciprocal misunderstanding and growing frustration between the performers. Although it is commonly known as "Who's on First?", Abbott and Costello frequently referred to it simply as "Baseball".

History

"Who's on First?" is descended from minstrel and turn-of-the-century wordplay sketches. One of the most famous was developed by Weber and Fields and called "I Work On Watt Street". Other examples include "The Baker Scene" (the comedian "loafs" at a bakery located on Watt Street) and "Who Dyed" (the business owner is named "Who"). In the 1930 movie Cracked Nuts, comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey examine a map of a mythical kingdom with dialogue like this: "What is next to Which." "What is the name of the town next to Which?" "Yes." In British music halls, comedian Will Hay performed a routine in the early 1930s (and possibly earlier) as a schoolmaster interviewing a schoolboy named Howe, who came from Ware, but now lives in Wye. By the early 1930s, a "Baseball Routine" had become a standard "bit" in burlesque in the United States. Abbott's wife recalled him performing the routine with another comedian before teaming with Costello.

Bud Abbott stated that it was taken from an older routine called "Who's the Boss?", a performance of which can be heard in an episode of the radio comedy program It Pays to Be Ignorant from the 1940s. After they formally teamed up in burlesque in 1936, he and Costello continued to hone the sketch. It was a big hit in the fall of 1937, when they performed the routine in a touring vaudeville revue called Hollywood Bandwagon.

In February 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of The Kate Smith Hour radio program and the sketch was first performed for a national radio audience on March 24 of that year. The routine may have been further polished before this broadcast by burlesque producer John Grant, who became the team's chief collaborator, and Will Glickman, a staff writer on the Smith show. Glickman may have added the nicknames of then-contemporary baseball players like Dizzy and Daffy Dean to set up the routine's premise. This version, with extensive wordplay based on most of the fictional baseball team's players having "strange nicknames" that seemed to be questions, became known as "Who's on First?" Some versions continue with references to Enos Slaughter, which Costello misunderstands as "He knows" Slaughter. By 1944, Abbott and Costello had the routine copyrighted.

Abbott and Costello performed "Who's on First?" hundreds of times in their careers. Although it was rarely performed precisely the same way twice, the routine follows a definite structure. They did the routine for President Franklin Roosevelt several times. An abridged version was featured in the team's 1940 film debut, One Night in the Tropics. The duo reprised the bit in their 1945 film The Naughty Nineties and it is that longer version which is considered their finest recorded rendition. They also performed "Who's on First?" several times on radio and television (notably in The Abbott and Costello Show episode "The Actor's Home").

In 1956, a gold record of "Who's on First?" was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. A video (taken from The Naughty Nineties) now plays continuously on screens at the Hall.

In the 1970s, Selchow and Righter published a "Who's on First?" board game.

In 1999, Time named the routine Best Comedy Sketch of the 20th Century.

An early radio recording from October 6, 1938, was placed in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2002.

In 2005, the line "Who's on First?" was included on the American Film Institute's list of 100 memorable movie quotations.

Sketch

The names given in the routine for the players at each position are:

Position	Player
First base	Who
Second base	What
Third base	I Don't Know
Left field	Why
Center field	Because
Right field	None specified
Pitcher	Tomorrow
Catcher	Today
Shortstop	I Don't Care or I Don't Give a Darn or I Don't Give a Damn

The name of the shortstop is not given until the very end of the routine and the right fielder is never named. In the Selchow and Righter board game, the right fielder's name is "Nobody".

At one point in the routine, Costello thinks that the first baseman is named "Naturally":

Abbott: You throw the ball to first base.
Costello: Then who gets it?
Abbott: Naturally.
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Now you've got it.
Costello: I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don't! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Well, that's it—say it that way.
Costello: That's what I said.
Abbott: You did not.
Costello: I said I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don't! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.

Abbott's explanations leave Costello hopelessly confused and infuriated. At two points in the routine Costello appears to parody Abbott by saying what appears to be gibberish to him, but inadvertently gets it right:

Costello: Now Tomorrow throws the ball and the guy up bunts the ball. Now when he bunts the ball, me being a good catcher, I want to throw the guy out at first base, so I pick up the ball and throw it to who?
Abbott: Now that’s the first thing you’ve said right!
Costello: I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!

And finally,

Costello: Now I throw the ball to first base, whoever it is drops the ball, so the guy runs to second. Who picks up the ball and throws it to What. What throws it to I Don't Know. I Don't Know throws it back to Tomorrow—a triple play.
Abbott: Yeah, it could be.
Costello: Another guy gets up and it's a long fly ball to Because. Why? I don't know. He's on third and I don't give a darn!
Abbott: What was that?
Costello: I said, I DON'T GIVE A DARN!
Abbott: Oh, that's our shortstop!

That is the most commonly heard ending. "I Don't Care" and "I Don't Give a Damn" have also turned up on occasion, depending on the perceived sensibilities of the audience. (The performance in the film The Naughty Nineties ends with "I Don't Care".)

The skit was performed only twice on the team's radio series. (It was heard more often when they guested on other shows.) On their April 17, 1947 show, it serves as a climax for a broadcast which begins with Costello receiving a telegram from Joe DiMaggio asking Costello to take over for him due to his injury. Since DiMaggio played center field at the time, Costello ostensibly would be the center fielder, moving Because to right field.

Writing credit

"Who's On First?" evolved from earlier wordplay sketches but it is not known who transposed the basic wordplay to baseball, although numerous people have claimed or been given credit for it. Such claims typically lack reasonable corroboration. For example, a 1993 obituary of comedy sketch writer Michael J. Musto (1919–1993) states that, shortly after Abbott and Costello teamed up, they paid Musto $15 to write the script. Several 1996 obituaries of songwriter Irving Gordon (1915–1996) mention that he had written the sketch. Musto would have been 17 when Abbott and Costello teamed in 1936, but a script entitled "The Baseball Rookie," with the names of Costello and Joe Lyons, his straight man before Abbott, dates even earlier, perhaps to 1934, when Musto would have been 15 and Gordon would have been 19.

Copyright infringement case

In 2015, the heirs of Abbott and Costello filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of New York claiming unauthorized use of over a minute of the comedy routine in the play Hand to God. The suit named producer Kevin McCollum, playwright Robert Askins, and the promoters as defendants. The defense claimed that the underlying "Who's on First?" routine was in the public domain because the original authors, Abbott and Costello, were not the ones who filed a copyright renewal, but the court did not see the need to make a final determination on that. The court ruled against the heirs, saying that the use by the play was transformative.

On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court in 2016 but for the other reason. The one minute of the routine used in the play did not constitute transformative fair use, since it was a significant portion and was taken word for word. But that was moot since the court also found that the heirs had failed to establish that they owned the copyright. (The court did not reach the issue of whether the routine had entered the public domain since the parties had apparently stipulated that they believed its copyright term was coterminous with One Night in the Tropics, where it had first been published for purposes of copyright law at that time). The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on the case in 2017.

Derivatives and references in popular culture

The sketch has been reprised, updated, alluded to and parodied many times over the decades in all forms of media. Some examples include:

• The comedy troupe The Credibility Gap (1968–1979) did a rock group variation on this routine involving a promoter, played by Harry Shearer and a newspaper advertising salesman, played by David L. Lander, confusing the night's acts as proper nouns. The acts were The Who, The Guess Who and Yes.
• Eugene Levy and Tony Rosato performed a variation on this theme on the TV series SCTV (1976–1984), with the rock groups The Band, The Who and Yes. The final punchline changed to "This is for the birds (The Byrds)!" "Ah, they broke up long ago!"
• Episode six of the fourth season of WKRP in Cincinnati (1981) is entitled "Who's on First?". It revolves around Mr. Carlson being mistaken for Herb Tarlek, and to "prove Andy wrong" Les Nessman is then convinced to act as Mr. Carlson. When a thug named Dave shows up to confront Johnny Fever about an unpaid gambling debt, Johnny claims Andy Travis's identity, while Mr. Carlson refers to Andy as "Johnny" ... with painful consequences for Andy.
• Author and poet Shel Silverstein's poem "The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt", featured in his 1981 poetry collection A Light in the Attic, is stated in the afterword by Silverstein himself to have been inspired by Abbott and Costello's routine.
• The biography of Lou Costello written by his daughter Chris is titled Lou's on First (1982).
• In the mid-1980s, Johnny Carson's spoof of then-president Ronald Reagan preparing for a press briefing included "Hu is on the phone", a reference to fictional Chinese leader Chung Dong Hu (there would eventually be a real Chinese leader Hu Jintao). Reagan also misunderstands references to Secretary of the Interior James Watt (misheard as "what") and PLO leader Yassir Arafat (misheard as "Yes sir").
• In the 1986 Billy Crystal HBO special "Don't Get Me Started," Brother Theodore and Sammy Davis Jr practice an ill-fated version of the routine in their own incongruous performance styles. ^[28]
• In the 1988 film Rain Man, the film's titular character, played by Dustin Hoffman, stims by reciting the skit to himself whenever his brother Charlie, played by Tom Cruise, makes him anxious by meddling with his personal effects.
• In the Animaniacs segment "Woodstock Slappy" (1994), Slappy and Skippy Squirrel attend the 1969 Woodstock Festival, where they pay homage to the routine. Similar to the SCTV version, Slappy confuses The Who, The Band and Yes for proper nouns.
• In the Invasion of the Neptune Men episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1998, during one host segment, Mike and the 'Bots put on a Who's on First-themed skit concerning Japanese Noh Theater.
• Mad Magazine's February 1999 issue featured an article (written by Desmond Devlin and illustrated by Mort Drucker) of Abbott and Costello trying to organize MTV's music video library, with Costello getting confused by the names of songs such as "Give Me One Reason", "You Oughta Know", "Ironic", "What You Want", "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", "Don't Speak", "If It Makes You Happy", "Stop" and "Quit Playing Games". The names of bands U2 and No Doubt also cause confusion.
• In The Simpsons episode "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'", (1999) Superintendent Chalmers and Principal Skinner attempt to perform the routine, but Chalmers gives up after Skinner explains the joke with his first line: "Not the pronoun, but rather a player with the unlikely name of "Who" is on first."
• In The PJ's episode "The HJs", (2000) Thurgood reopens the apartment building's radio station and forms an unexpected comedy team with the community's beloved crack addict, Smokey. They parody the comedy bit with Smokey saying, "Who's on crack, Say What's on smack, and I Don't Know is on freebase."
• In the Family Guy episode "Extra Large Medium", Peter Griffin, in his psychic routine, attempts to solve a case for the police (namely, a person being buried alive with a bomb attached to him) by "summoning the spirit" of Lou Costello. He and the police officer, Joe Swanson, then reenact the routine when it's revealed the person's name is Melvin Hu. Unfortunately, they do the scene so long that the bomb explodes and kills him, at which time Peter dropped the act and admitted he wasn't a psychic. In the episode, "You Can't Do That on Television, Peter," Peter gets his own sketch cable show, and performs Who's on First with a puma, resulting in Peter getting mauled. Later, the puma visits Peter in the hospital, telling him that he finally understands the joke.
• In 2002, playwright Jim Sherman wrote a variation called "Hu's on First" featuring George W. Bush being confused when Condoleezza Rice tells him that the new leader of China is named Hu, pronounced similarly to the word "Who". Bush also misunderstands Rice's references to Yassir Arafat ("yes, sir") and Kofi Annan ("coffee"). He also hears Rice introduce herself, particularly using her last name, while talking on the phone and immediately craves rice, wanting to order some to eat.
• In the Get Fuzzy comic for September 12, 2005, an injured Rob asks Satchel to use speed dial to call "Dr Watt", who is second on the speed dial list after Dr. Hu. Satchel gleefully replies "Third Base!", much to Rob's annoyance.
• In the 2007 film Rush Hour 3, LAPD Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) visits a Kung Fu studio where he meets Master Yu and an instructor named Mi. Carter, Yu and Mi engage in a comedic back and forth in which they confuse the names Yu and Mi with the words "you" and "me".
• In 2007, Canadian Internet comedy group LoadingReadyRun released a parody called It's Very Simple.
• Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, in December 2012, featured a variation of the routine called "Who's on First?: The Sequel". Depicted with vintage touches (black and white images, retro costumes, etc.), the skit finds host Jimmy Fallon in the Bud Abbott role and announcer Steve Higgins as Lou Costello. The twist here is that "Who", "What" and "I Don't Know" actually join in on the quick repartee, with the players respectively played by Billy Crystal, Late Night head writer A. D. Miles and Jerry Seinfeld.
• In Bojack Horseman episode "Downer Ending", (2014) a group of characters encounter a doctor named Allan Hu, which Bojack at first confuses with BBC television show Doctor Who; which Bojack's roommate Todd Sanchez further confuses for Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. In utter confusion,Todd at one point says "I don't know", to which all the characters simultaneously exclaim "Third base!".
• The October 19, 2014, strip of the comic Pearls Before Swine sees Rat ask Goat "Whose drummer was Keith Moon?" Goat responds that he is correct, although Rat does not understand that Goat is telling him Moon was the drummer for The Who. It leads to a routine of more confusions, including Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, Steve Howe of Yes and Pete Townshend – also of The Who. Thinking Goat is asking what band Townshend is the guitarist for, an exasperated Rat screams "I don't know!" Goat replies "Third base!" The final panel sees the still-exasperated Rat threatening to hit the comic's author Stephan Pastis with a baseball bat, asking "When would you like this hit?". Pastis responds "Winwood's the guitarist for Traffic."
• The 2015 puzzle video game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes features a module officially referred to on page 9 of the Bomb Defusal Manual V1 as Who's on First. Its description reads: "This contraption is like something out of a sketch comedy routine, which might be funny if it wasn't connected to a bomb. I'll keep this brief, as words only complicate matters". The module works similarly to the routine, in which the Defuser must recite the word that appears on the module's display to the Expert. The Expert must then follow the steps in the manual to tell the Defuser which button to press. The reference comes in the form of the words that appear on the module's buttons, some of them being homophones of other words that may appear, an example being the words there, they're and their, thus resulting in a similar confusion to that of the sketch.
• In 2017, Studio C made a spin-off of this as a sketch in their seventh season, titled Detective Doctor, At Your Service, where several characters have names such as Detective Doctor, Doctor Hisbrother and Officer Wounded, making the scene of an attempted murder much more confusing to deal with.
• Emcee duo Blanche Debris and Jonny Porkpie did an adaptation of the sketch at the 2017 Burlesque Hall of Fame weekender and reunion, recontextualized as the lineup for a burlesque show.
• In season 11 of All That (2019), the "Good Burger" sketch used the routine, in which Kel Mitchell's character Ed became confused when musical guest H.E.R. walked in to place an order after she told him who she was.
• A variant of unknown origin, called "Abbot and Costello do Hebrew", is popular in the Jewish American community. Its humor draws from the homophonic similarity of a number of words in English – hu, he, me, ma and dag are homophones of the Hebrew words for he, she, who, what and fish respectively.
• The skit is an easter egg on Google Assistant, Siri, Amazon Alexa and Bixby. Asking Google Assistant "OK Google, Who's on first?" will lead to the response "Yes, he is." or "Exactly." Siri responds "Correct. Who is on first." Alexa responds "That's what I keep telling you. Who's on first, What's on second." Bixby responds "I think Who gets the ball and throws it to What."
• There are several American restaurants named "Who's on First", located on 1st Street or 1st Avenue of their respective cities, including New York City, Waconia, MN  and Snohomish, WA
• In the spring split of 2022, League Championship Series casters Azael and Captain Flowers performed a spin-off of the skit using "River" and "Blue", the tags of two players from the esports team Dignitas as well as the river location and blue jungle camp on Summoner's Rift.

Real-life parallels

On several occasions, players with names phonetically similar to the characters in the sketch reached the appropriate bases as runners, or defended them as infielders:

• On October 3, 1920, Allie Watt played one game at second base for the Washington Senators so that, for a brief time, "Watt's on second".
• During a May 31, 1966, game against the Minnesota Twins, relief-pitcher Eddie Watt of the Baltimore Orioles led off the 5th inning with his only career double, again creating a "Watt's on second" situation.
• In September 2007, Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Chin-Lung Hu, a late-season callup from Las Vegas, got his first major league hit against the Arizona Diamondbacks, a single; Dodgers announcer Vin Scully said "Shades of Abbott and Costello, I can finally say, 'Hu is on first base.'"

Parkinson's law

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Parkinson's law can refer to either of two observations, made by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955 in an essay published in The Economist:

• "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"; and
• the number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other.

The first paragraph of the essay mentioned the first meaning above as a "commonplace observation", and the rest of the essay was devoted to the latter observation, terming it "Parkinson's Law".

First meaning

The first-referenced meaning of the law – "Work expands to fill the available time" – has sprouted several corollaries, the best known being the Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson's law:

If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.

the Asimov corollary to Parkinson's law:

In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.

as well as corollaries relating to computers, such as:

Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

Second meaning

This was the main focus of the essay by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, published in The Economist in 1955, and reprinted with other similar essays in the successful 1958 book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. The book was translated into many languages. It was highly popular in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that "Parkinson's law works everywhere."

Parkinson derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service. He gave, as examples, the growth in the size of the British Admiralty and Colonial Office even though the numbers of, respectively, their ships and colonies were declining.

Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting the law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while the British Empire declined (he showed that it had its greatest number of staff when it was folded into the Foreign Office due to a lack of colonies to administer). He explained this growth using two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals", and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He noted that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done".

Formula

Parkinson presented the growth as a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time, with the formula ${\displaystyle x=(2k^m+P)/n}$, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other.

Observing that the promotion of employees necessitated the hiring of subordinates, and that time used answering minutes requires more work; Parkinson states: "In any public administrative department not actually at war the staff increase may be expected to follow this formula" (for a given year)

$${\displaystyle x=\frac{2k^m+P}{n}}$$where:

• x – number of new employees to be hired annually
• k – number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
• m – number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
• P – difference: age at hiring − age at retirement
• n – number of administrative files actually completed.

Related efficiency

In a different essay included in the book, Parkinson proposed a rule about the efficiency of administrative councils. He defined a "coefficient of inefficiency" with the number of members as the main determining variable. This is a semi-humorous attempt to define the size at which a committee or other decision-making body becomes completely inefficient.

In Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London: John Murray, 1958 a chapter is devoted to the basic question of what he called comitology: how committees, government cabinets, and other such bodies are created and eventually grow irrelevant (or are initially designed as such). (The word comitology has recently been independently invented by the European Union for a different, non-humorous meaning.)

Empirical evidence is drawn from historical and contemporary government cabinets. Most often, the minimal size of a state's most powerful and prestigious body is five members. From English history, Parkinson notes a number of bodies that lost power as they grew:

• The first cabinet was the Council of the Crown, now the House of Lords, which grew from an unknown number to 29, to 50 before 1600, by which time it had lost much of its power.
• A new body was appointed in 1257, the "Lords of the King's Council", numbering fewer than 10. The body grew, and ceased to meet when it had 172 members.
• The third incarnation was the Privy Council, initially also numbering fewer than 10 members, rising to 47 in 1679.
• In 1715, the Privy Council lost power to the Cabinet Council with eight members, rising to 20 by 1725.
• Around 1740, the Cabinet Council was superseded by an inner group, called the Cabinet, initially with five members. At the time of Parkinson's study (the 1950s), the Cabinet was still the official governing body. Parkinson observed that, from 1939 on, there was an effort to save the Cabinet as an institution. The membership had been fluctuating from a high of 23 members in 1939, down to 18 in 1954.

A detailed mathematical expression is proposed by Parkinson for the coefficient of inefficiency, featuring many possible influences. In 2008, an attempt was made to empirically verify the proposed model. Parkinson's conjecture that membership exceeding a number "between 19.9 and 22.4" makes a committee manifestly inefficient seems well justified by the evidence proposed. Less certain is the optimal number of members, which must lie between three (a logical minimum) and 20. (Within a group of 20, factions or various individual discussions may occur, some of which may substitute for or displace the working of the whole committee, thus diluting the power of the leader, the chair of the committee proper.) That it may be eight seems arguable but is not supported by observation: no contemporary government (cabinet) in Parkinson's data set had eight members, and only king Charles I of England had a Committee of State of that size.

Economic history

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history

World GDP per capita, 1400–2003

Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The field can encompass a wide variety of topics, including equality, finance, technology, labour, and business. It emphasizes historicizing the economy itself, analyzing it as a dynamic entity and attempting to provide insights into the way it is structured and conceived.

Using both quantitative data and qualitative sources, economic historians emphasize understanding the historical context in which major economic events take place. They often focus on the institutional dynamics of systems of production, labor, and capital, as well as the economy's impact on society, culture, and language. Scholars of the discipline may approach their analysis from the perspective of different schools of economic thought, such as mainstream economics, Austrian economics, Marxian economics, the Chicago school of economics, and Keynesian economics.

Economic history has several sub-disciplines. Historical methods are commonly applied in financial and business history, which overlap with areas of social history such as demographic and labor history. In the sub-discipline of cliometrics, economists use quantitative (econometric) methods. In history of capitalism, historians explain economic historical issues and processes from a historical point of view.

Early history of the discipline

Economic history department, London School of Economics (1971)

Arnold Toynbee made the case for combining economics and history in his study of the Industrial Revolution, saying, "I believe economics today is much too dissociated from history. Smith and Malthus had historical minds. However, Ricardo – who set the pattern of modern textbooks – had a mind that was entirely unhistorical." There were several advantages in combining economics and history according to Toynbee. To begin with, it improved economic understanding. "We see abstract propositions in a new light when studying them in relation to historical facts. Propositions become more vivid and truthful." Meanwhile, studying history with economics makes history easier to understand. Economics teaches us to look out for the right facts in reading history and makes matters such as introducing enclosures, machinery, or new currencies more intelligible. Economics also teaches careful deductive reasoning. "The habits of mind it instils are even more valuable than the knowledge of principles it gives. Without these habits, the mass of their materials can overwhelm students of historical facts."

In late-nineteenth-century Germany, scholars at a number of universities, led by Gustav von Schmoller, developed the historical school of economic history. It argued that there were no universal truths in history, emphasizing the importance of historical context without quantitative analysis. This historical approach dominated German and French scholarship for most of the 20th century. The historical school of economics included other economists such as Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter who reasoned that careful analysis of human actions, cultural norms, historical context, and mathematical support was key to historical analysis. The approach was spread to Great Britain by William Ashley (University of Oxford) and dominated British economic history for much of the 20th century. Britain's first professor in the subject was George Unwin at the University of Manchester. Meanwhile, in France, economic history was heavily influenced by the Annales School from the early 20th century to the present. It exerts a worldwide influence through its journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales.

Treating economic history as a discrete academic discipline has been a contentious issue for many years. Academics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Cambridge had numerous disputes over the separation of economics and economic history in the interwar era. Cambridge economists believed that pure economics involved a component of economic history and that the two were inseparably entangled. Those at the LSE believed that economic history warranted its own courses, research agenda and academic chair separated from mainstream economics. In the initial period of the subject's development, the LSE position of separating economic history from economics won out. Many universities in the UK developed independent programmes in economic history rooted in the LSE model. Indeed, the Economic History Society had its inauguration at LSE in 1926 and the University of Cambridge eventually established its own economic history programme.

In the United States, the field of economic history was largely subsumed into other fields of economics following the cliometric revolution of the 1960s. To many it became seen as a form of applied economics rather than a stand-alone discipline. Cliometrics, also known as the New Economic History, refers to the systematic use of economic theory and econometric techniques to the study of economic history. The term was originally coined by Jonathan R. T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter and refers to Clio, who was the muse of history and heroic poetry in Greek mythology. One of the most famous cliometric economic historians is Douglass North, who argued that it is the task of economic history to elucidate the historical dimensions of economies through time. Cliometricians argue their approach is necessary because the application of theory is crucial in writing solid economic history, while historians generally oppose this view warning against the risk of generating anachronisms.

Early cliometrics was a type of counterfactual history. However, counterfactualism was not its distinctive feature; it combined neoclassical economics with quantitative methods in order to explain human choices based on constraints. Some have argued that cliometrics had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and that it is now neglected by economists and historians. In response to North and Robert Fogel's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993, Harvard University economist (and future Nobel winner) Claudia Goldin argued:

Economic history is not a handmaiden of economics but a distinct field of scholarship. Economic history was a scholarly discipline long before it became cliometrics. Its practitioners were economists and historians studying the histories of economies... The new economic history, or cliometrics, formalized economic history in a manner similar to the injection of mathematical models and statistics into the rest of economics.

The relationship between economic history, economics and history has long been the subject of intense discussion, and the debates of recent years echo those of early contributors. There has long been a school of thought among economic historians that splits economic history—the study of how economic phenomena evolved in the past—from historical economics—testing the generality of economic theory using historical episodes. US economic historian Charles P. Kindleberger explained this position in his 1990 book Historical Economics: Art or Science?. Economic historian Robert Skidelsky (University of Cambridge) argued that economic theory often employs ahistorical models and methodologies that do not take into account historical context. Yale University economist Irving Fisher already wrote in 1933 on the relationship between economics and economic history in his "Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions":

The study of dis-equilibrium may proceed in either of two ways. We may take as our unit for study an actual historical case of great dis-equilibrium, such as, say, the panic of 1873; or we may take as our unit for study any constituent tendency, such as, say, deflation, and discover its general laws, relations to, and combinations with, other tendencies. The former study revolves around events, or facts; the latter, around tendencies. The former is primarily economic history; the latter is primarily economic science. Both sorts of studies are proper and important. Each helps the other. The panic of 1873 can only be understood in light of the various tendencies involved—deflation and other; and deflation can only be understood in the light of various historical manifestations—1873 and other.

Scope and focus of economic history today

The past three decades have witnessed the widespread closure of separate economic history departments and programmes in the UK and the integration of the discipline into either history or economics departments. Only the London School of Economics (LSE) retains a separate economic history department and stand-alone undergraduate and graduate programme in economic history. Cambridge, Glasgow, LSE, Oxford, Queen's, and Warwick together train the vast majority of economic historians coming through the British higher education system today, but do so as part of economics or history degrees. Meanwhile, there have never been specialist economic history graduate programs at universities anywhere in the US. However, economic history remains a special field component of leading economics PhD programs, including University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago and Yale University.

Despite the pessimistic view on the state of the discipline espoused by many of its practitioners, economic history remains an active field of social scientific inquiry. Indeed, it has seen something of a resurgence in interest since 2000, perhaps driven by research conducted at universities in continental Europe rather than the UK and the US. The overall number of economic historians in the world is estimated at 10,400, with Japan and China as well as the U.K and the U.S. ranking highest in numbers. Some less developed countries, however, are not sufficiently integrated in the world economic history community, among others, Senegal, Brazil and Vietnam.

Part of the growth in economic history is driven by the continued interest in big policy-relevant questions on the history of economic growth and development. MIT economist Peter Temin noted that development economics is intricately connected with economic history, as it explores the growth of economies with different technologies, innovations, and institutions. Studying economic growth has been popular for years among economists and historians who have sought to understand why some economies have grown faster than others. Some of the early texts in the field include Walt Whitman Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1971) which described how advanced economies grow after overcoming certain hurdles and advancing to the next stage in development. Another economic historian, Alexander Gerschenkron, complicated this theory with works on how economies develop in non-Western countries, as discussed in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (1962). A more recent work is Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson's Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012) which pioneered a new field of persistence studies, emphasizing the path-dependent stages of growth. Other notable books on the topic include Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) and David S. Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998).

Since the 2008 financial crisis, scholars have become more interested in a field which may be called new 'new economic history'. Scholars have tended to move away from narrowly quantitative studies toward institutional, social, and cultural history affecting the evolution of economies. The focus of these studies is frequently on "persistence", as past events are linked to present outcomes. Columbia University economist Charles Calomiris argued that this new field showed 'how historical (path-dependent) processes governed changes in institutions and markets.' However, this trend has been criticized, most forcefully by Francesco Boldizzoni, as a form of economic imperialism "extending the neoclassical explanatory model to the realm of social relations."

Conversely, economists in other specializations have started to write a new kind of economic history which makes use of historical data to understand the present day. A major development in this genre was the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). The book described the rise in wealth and income inequality since the 18th century, arguing that large concentrations of wealth lead to social and economic instability. Piketty also advocated a system of global progressive wealth taxes to correct rising inequality. The book was selected as a New York Times best seller and received numerous awards. The book was well received by some of the world's major economists, including Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, and Ben Bernanke. Books in response to Piketty's book include After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum (eds.) (2017), Pocket Piketty by Jesper Roine (2017), and Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Century, by Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicolas Lecaussin, Emmanuel Martin (2017). One economist argued that Piketty's book was "Nobel-Prize worthy" and noted that it had changed the global discussion on how economic historians study inequality. It has also sparked new conversations in the disciplines of public policy.

In addition to the mainstream in economic history, there is a parallel development in the field influenced by Karl Marx and Marxian economics. Marx used historical analysis to interpret the role of class and class as a central issue in history. He debated with the "classical" economists (a term he coined), including Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In turn, Marx's legacy in economic history has been to critique the findings of neoclassical economists. Marxist analysis also confronts economic determinism, the theory that economic relationships are the foundation of political and societal institutions. Marx abstracted the idea of a "capitalist mode of production" as a way of identifying the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This has influenced some scholars, such as Maurice Dobb, to argue that feudalism declined because of peasants' struggles for freedom and the growing inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production. In turn, in what was later coined the Brenner debate, Paul Sweezy, a Marxian economist, challenged Dobb's definition of feudalism and its focus only on western Europe.

Thomas Piketty, economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

History of capitalism

Main article: History of capitalism

A new field, called "history of capitalism" by researchers engaged in it, has emerged in US history departments since about the year 2000. It includes many topics traditionally associated with the field of economic history, such as insurance, banking and regulation, the political dimension of business, and the impact of capitalism on the middle classes, the poor and women and minorities. The field has particularly focused on the contribution of slavery to the rise of the US economy in the nineteenth century. The field utilizes the existing research of business history, but has sought to make it more relevant to the concerns of history departments in the United States, including by having limited or no discussion of individual business enterprises. Historians of capitalism have countered these critiques, citing the issues with economic history. As University of Chicago professor of history Jonathan Levy states, "modern economic history began with industrialization and urbanization, and, even then, environmental considerations were subsidiary, if not nonexistent."

Scholars have critiqued the history of capitalism because it does not focus on systems of production, circulation, and distribution. Some have criticized its lack of social scientific methods and its ideological biases. As a result, a new academic journal, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, was founded at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Marc Flandreau (University of Pennsylvania), Julia Ott (The New School, New York) and Francesca Trivellato (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) to widen the scope of the field. The journal's goal is to bring together "historians and social scientists interested in the material and intellectual aspects of modern economic life."

Academic journals and societies

The first journal specializing in the field of economic history was The Economic History Review, founded in 1927, as the main publication of the Economic History Society. The first journal featured a publication by Professor Sir William Ashley, the first Professor of Economic History in the English-speaking world, who described the emerging field of economic history. The discipline existed alongside long-standing fields such as political history, religious history, and military history as one that focused on humans' interactions with 'visible happenings'. He continued, '[economic history] primarily and unless expressly extended, the history of actual human practice with respect to the material basis of life. The visible happenings with regard-to use the old formula-to "the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth" form our wide enough field'.

Later, the Economic History Association established another academic journal, The Journal of Economic History, in 1941 as a way of expanding the discipline in the United States. The first president of the Economic History Association, Edwin F. Gay, described the aim of economic history as to provide new perspectives in the economics and history disciplines: 'An adequate equipment with two skills, that of the historian and the economist, is not easily acquired, but experience shows that it is both necessary and possible'. Other related academic journals have broadened the lens with which economic history is studied. These interdisciplinary journals include the Business History Review, European Review of Economic History, Enterprise and Society, and Financial History Review.

The International Economic History Association, an association of close to 50 member organizations, recognizes some of the major academic organizations dedicated to study of economic history: the Business History Conference, Economic History Association, Economic History Society, European Association of Business Historians, and the International Social History Association.

Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economic historians

Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that's the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come.

– Paul Samuelson (2009)

Several economists have won Nobel prizes for contributions to economic history or contributions to economics that are commonly applied in economic history.

• Simon Kuznets won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ("the Nobel Memorial Prize") in 1971 "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development".
• John Hicks, whose early writing was on the field of economic history, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1972 due to his contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
• Arthur Lewis won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1979 for his contributions in the field of economic development through historical context.
• Milton Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1976 for "his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy".
• Robert Fogel and Douglass North won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1993 for "having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change".
• Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for 'having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes', began her career researching the history of the US southern economy and was President of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000.

Notable works of economic history

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)

Foundational works

• Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (1963)
• Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)
• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: Origins of Our Time (1944)
• David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)
• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

General

• Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (2011)
• Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007)
• Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (2007)
• Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953)
• Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (1923)

Ancient economies

• Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (1973)
• Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017)
• Peter Temin, The Roman Market Economy (2012)

Economic growth and development

• Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012)
• Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (1962)
• Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016)
• David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998)
• Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016)
• Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990)
• Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000)
• Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1971)
• Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (2005)
• Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999)
• William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good] (2006)

History of money

• Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014)
• William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (2016)
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011)

Business history

• David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (2006)
• Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)
• Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990)
• Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998)
• William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
• Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (1985)
• David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (2006)
• Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (1999)

Financial history

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013)

• Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009)
• Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013)
• Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (2014)
• Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (2010)
• Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (1996)
• Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008)
• Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996)
• Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2009)
• Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (2013)
• Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006)
• László Vértesy, Financial Perspectives of Economic History (2024) Volume I, Volume II

Globalization and inequality

• Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014)
• William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today (2008).
• Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (2001).
• Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974).
• Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990).
• Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (2009).
• Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-century Atlantic Economy (1999)
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013).
• Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality (2015).
• Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (2020).
• Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (2019).
• Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (2015).