Robert H. Nelson died suddenly last December, while he was in Helsinki, Finland, to give a talk. Nelson was a respected—and unconventional—economist. In preparing a memorial essay about him, I read through many of his writings and saw how an economist can use history to gain insight. In this short space I’d like to concentrate on just one topic—federal land management in the United States.
In the early 1980s Nelson worked for the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis (otherwise known as the “Office of Smart Guys,” according to my husband, who directed the office at the time). Part of his research involved reviewing the history of federal land ownership.
He made two important discoveries.
First, he discovered the utter failure of federal “scientific management” of land.[1] The federal government owns large swaths of land in the West because the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century halted its dispersal to the private sector. Suspicious of big companies (the trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt was a hero), Progressives thought that big projects like managing land should be in the hands of the federal government, which would hire experts and leave them free to manage “scientifically” without political interference.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.
It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.”[2]
Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder, especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.
Until a few months ago, I had never heard of William McNeill, a historian who died in 2016 at the age of 98. In my class in world history, I came across his book The Rise of the West, an 828-page volume published in 1963.[1] Not only did it receive the prestigious National Book Award in 1964, but it was extremely successful—even a popular Christmas gift. For historians, its significance is that it expanded thinking about world history away from a narrow view based on Europe and the United States.
That accomplishment is ironic because the book itself, a wonderful treasure trove of information about the entire world, looks somewhat old-fashioned and out of date now. But it’s still fascinating.
The title would never fly today. The Rise of the West sounds like just what McNeill was combating: Eurocentrism. His narrative starts with the origins of humans in the African savannahs and ends in the year 1917 with the Russian Revolution). It unabashedly celebrates the “era of Western dominance,” which began around 1500 and hadn’t ended by the book’s conclusion (or, for that matter, by the end of McNeill’s life).
In academia these days, you can get into trouble for what you say. Megan Neely, a Duke assistant professor in biostatistics, lost an administrative position for pleading with Chinese students to speak more English—for the sake of their careers. Calling them out (in an email) was considered insensitive. Jeffrey McCutcheon, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, had to apologize for suggesting that students who claimed excessive test anxiety (and thus sought special accommodation) might simply be unprepared rather than suffering from a disability.[1] That too was considered insensitive.
Until now, I have been fairly comfortable writing about history. True, I’ve found some words you shouldn’t use, such as “barbarians,” but that’s okay with me. We don’t have to echo the Romans or their prejudices. But here’s one I’m beginning to wonder about: “universal.”
A couple of months ago in class, I said (all too confidently) that some human tendencies can explain similarities between the history of one region and that of another. The explanation doesn’t have to be that the regions were connected through trade or other contact. I gave a few examples: governments tend to grow; people tend to rebel; knowledge accumulates; cultural similarities tend to support territorial consolidation, etc.
I was criticized (by another student) for “universalizing.”
Historians and economists think differently. Historians tend to be self-effacing and tentative; economists are bold.
Let me illustrate this by a statement from a historian introducing a more scientific way of looking at the Black Death:”The new microbiology . . .opens up entirely new questions, ones we did not previously know we needed to ask.”[1]
Notice: . . . opens up entirely new questions . . . not answers.
The following statement is from two path-breaking economists. “This book explains that unique historical achievement, the rise of the Western World.”[2]
