Cliometrics

The book would cause a firestorm of controversy with its claim, based on statistical data, that slavery would not have ended in the absence of the U.S. Civil War, as the practice was economically efficient and highly profitable for slaveowners.

North, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in October 1993 along with Robert William Fogel, himself often described as the father of modern econometric history and Neo-historicals.

"[9] Fogel and North received the prize for turning the theoretical and statistical tools of modern economics on the historical past: on subjects ranging from slavery and railroads to ocean shipping and property rights.

However, some new economic historians did, in fact, begin research around this time, among them were Kemmerer and Larry Neal (a student of Albert Fishlow, a leader of the cliometric revolution) from Illinois, Paul Uselding from Johns Hopkins, Jeremy Atack from Indiana, and Thomas Ulen from Stanford.

Francesco Boldizzoni summarized a common critique by arguing that cliometrics is based on the false assumption that the laws of neo-classical economics always apply to human activity.

He considers that those laws are based on rational choice and maximization as they operate in well-developed markets and do not apply to economies other than those of the capitalist West in the modern era.

[18] He believes that most scholars agree that economic theory combined with new data as well as historical and statistical methods are necessary to formulate problems precisely, to draw conclusions from postulates, and to gain insight into complex processes so as to close the gap between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften: to move from the historical verstehen (understanding) side to the economic erklären (explaining) side or, much better, mixing both approaches for the achievement of a unified approach of the social sciences.

[20] In his Introduction to Murray N. Rothbard's A History of Money and Banking in the United States, Salerno writes that, "in Rothbard’s view, economic laws can be relied upon in interpreting these non-repeatable historical events because the validity of these laws—or, better yet, their truth—can be established with certainty by praxeology, a science based on the universal experience of human action that is logically anterior to the experience of particular historical episodes... [thus] economic theory is an a priori science.

'—from changes in policies and institutions receives very little attention in the cliometric literature, because the evidence that one needs to answer it, bearing as it does on human motives, is essentially subjective and devoid of a measurable or even quantifiable dimension.