What are historians trying to do?

Andrew Gelman has a fascinating post on debates regarding what, in the context of the study of history, the “science” part of “social science” does or should signify. He makes an important distinction, that I haven’t seen put so clearly before:

I just want to do one thing, which is to separate two ideas that I think are being conflated here:

1. Statistical analysis: generalizing from observed data to a larger population, a step that can arise in various settings including sampling, causal inference, prediction, and modeling of measurements.

2. Causal inference: making counterfactual statements about what would have happened, or could have happened, had some past decision been made differently, or making predictions about potential outcomes under different choices in some future decision.

Statistical analysis and causal inference are related but are not the same thing.

For example, if historians gather data on public records from some earlier period and then make inference about the distributions of people working at that time in different professions, that’s a statistical analysis but that does not involve causal inference.

From the other direction, historians can think about causal inference and use causal reasoning without formal statistical analysis or probabilistic modeling of data.

He also points out that criticisms regarding the purported lack of “rigor” in history — the word “rigor” almost always implies that the writer thinks the goals and methods of the natural sciences should be adopted by other fields to the extent possible — can be generalized to basically all of social science:

[Bret] Devereaux refers to the challenges of statistical inference: “we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. . . .” That’s not just a problem with the field of history! It also arises in political science and economics, where we don’t have a lot of national elections or civil wars or depressions, so generalizations necessarily rely on strong assumptions. Even if you can produce a large dataset with thousands of elections or hundreds of wars or dozens of business cycles, any modeling will implicitly rely on some assumption of stability of a process over time, and assumption that won’t necessarily make sense given changes in political and economic systems.

So it’s not really history versus social sciences. Rather, I think of history as one of the social sciences (as in my book with Jeronimo from a few years back), and they all have this problem.

When it comes to economics in particular, Gelman makes a historical analogy that he first made awhile back, which ought to be pretty sobering to the more uncritical proponents of conventional economic wisdom (note that the phrase “the conventional wisdom” was itself coined by an unconventional economist, John Kenneth Galbraith):

I can’t see how [Noah] Smith could claim with a straight face that theories from academic history are “given more credence” and are “more politically influential” than macroeconomics. The president has a council of economic advisers, there are economists at all levels of the government, or if you want to talk about the news media there are economists such as Krugman, Summers, Stiglitz, etc. . . . sure, they don’t always get what they want when it comes to policy, but they’re quoted endlessly and given lots of credence. This is also the case in narrower areas, for example James Heckman on education policy or Angus Deaton on deaths of despair: these economists get tons of credence in the news media. There are no academic historians with that sort of influence. This has come up before: I’d say that economics now is comparable to Freudian psychology in the 1950s in its influence on our culture:

My best analogy to economics exceptionalism is Freudianism in the 1950s: Back then, Freudian psychiatrists were on the top of the world. Not only were they well paid, well respected, and secure in their theoretical foundations, they were also at the center of many important conversations. Even those people who disagreed with them felt the need to explain why the Freudians were wrong. Freudian ideas were essential, leaders in that field were national authorities, and students of Freudian theory and methods could feel that they were initiates in a grand tradition, a priesthood if you will. Freudians felt that, unlike just about everybody else, they treated human beings scientifically and dispassionately. What’s more, Freudians prided themselves on their boldness, their willingness to go beyond taboos to get to the essential truths of human nature. Sound familiar?

When it comes to influence in policy or culture or media, academic history doesn’t even come close to Freudianism in the 1950s or economics in recent decades.

The whole post is very much worth chewing over, although I don’t recommend doing so before a first cup of coffee (how do Mormons do it I wonder?).

In my own field, legal academia, the history of the American legal academy is pretty much the story of attempts to transform the field into some sort of science, or at least social science, followed by debunking criticisms pointing out that these attempts were failures, deeply misguided, politically pernicious, etc.

In the context of Gelman’s observations about the social status of economics, it’s worth emphasizing that the most recent and by far most successful of such attempts has been the so-called Law and Economics school, which, emanating out of the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, worked with great success to get lots of legal academics to talk like economists, or at least pseudo-economists.