Comparative Study in the Barnyard

For anyone on the green side of fifty who didn't start historical browsing in the playpen it may be quite hard to see the present appeal of statistical theory and method in perspective. To one lucky enough to have been a student abroad in the 1920's, it is merely one of the consequences of a fundamental shift, which was firming in that decade, in conceptions of the economic historian's job. Essentially the shift consisted in making the economy and the social institutions in which it is embedded analytically distinct. Voices from the Polanyite school still claim that this step was as wrong as Adam's eating of the apple. Milder critics complain only that some of us let economic analysis run away with the ball to the neglect of social analysis and of the interplay between the two. For workers on the recent past this is defensible, because the heavy fall-out of purely economic data clamors to be dealt with in its own terms. The preindustrialist, who has to dig harder for data, and seldom turns up such pure economic ore, is more inclined to think in terms of interplay.