Felix Salmon asked me and the FT’s Alan Beattie, because we’ve both just written “heavyweight new books of economic history” (Beattie’s is False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World. I just now read the first four pages, and they’re great), a few questions:
Can studying history prevent us from repeating past mistakes, or does it just end up forcing us into committing new ones? And how much of a good thing is it that an economic historian is chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve?
Anyway, you can read the whole back and forth at Felix’s place, but here’s my answer in its entirety (including a little bit that Felix clipped out):
Those who do not read history are condemned to retweet it. Or maybe reheat it.
My book is basically the story of a bunch of guys who decided to ignore financial market history (the dodgy parts, at least) in order to create more elegant models of financial markets’ future. That didn’t work out so well, so yeah, knowing economic history would seem to be useful. But Alan’s right that there are lots of different lessons that can be drawn from the past, and sometimes people draw the wrong ones. I too am related to a liquidationist, by the way—George Washington Norris, the hard-line president of the Philly Fed in the early 1930s, was my great great uncle.
On Bernanke, I’d certainly rather have somebody with his background in that job than an ahistorical rational expectations type who believes bubbles and panics don’t happen. He’s not really a historian, though. He’s a macroeconomist who’s done some research on the financial system breakdown of the early 1930s. He’s worked really hard to avert such a breakdown over the past two years, and on balance that’s a good thing. But he hasn’t really been a student of what causes financial crises in the first place. Still, he’s an open-minded guy who reads a lot, so maybe he’ll figure it out.