As row after row of students in Cubberley Auditorium whipped out Palm Pilots to record the dates of midterms and final exams, Professor Gavin Wright fielded questions about Econ 116.
Yes, there would be a term paper. And yes, there would be a test on this, the first day of class, January 9 -- "mostly for my own edification," he said, grinning.
In fact, the historical literacy test was a first for Wright, who has been teaching at Stanford since 1981. He distributed a sheet with 34 questions, including the following: when was Thomas Jefferson president? Which document established the division of powers between the states and the federal government? Identify Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Not surprisingly, 99 percent of the 150 students who showed up for American Economic History got the last question right. But only 57 percent knew that Jefferson had served from 1801 to 1809.
"I was a little fearful as to what I might find," Wright says about the quiz. "It seems that there's a general lack of awareness of American history, and the main purpose of this course is to explain the importance of history to people with the mindset of a typical econ major."
A past president of the Economic History Association, Wright finds himself one of only four in the 36-member economics department he chairs who would describe themselves as economic historians. But while the theorists and econometricians may argue about whether market forces are independent of historical factors, they agree on one point -- that economics is a social science. "It's about understanding the world and understanding policy," Wright says. "It's not about how to go out and make money."
Many students perceive that economics is precisely about making a bundle, however, and those bent on careers in business continually lobby for more courses in finance, insurance and quantitative methods. The department has complied, with the result that economics is consistently the largest undergraduate major -- bigger than hum bio or computer science, where the numbers fluctuate from year to year.
In the past few years, enrollment in Wright's course has exploded, from about 50 students to more than 150, partly because the class now satisfies a general education requirement in American cultures. Looking over the sea of faces in Cubberley, Wright surmised that he was talking to the confirmed. "I know from the expressions on your faces that most of you are econ majors, and most economists take a deductive approach -- they start with a model or a set of assumptions and work out the implications," he said. "But economic history as a school of thought starts with facts and data. So we will study technologies and institutions, and we'll look for patterns and changes in the course of history. And bit by bit, we'll build up a body of thought and try to generalize from there."
Walking them through the expectations of the term paper, Wright said they would have to make original use of data -- from the federal census or reports of the Department of Labor or Bureau of Labor Statistics, perhaps -- to address an unsettled question in American economic history. Try to think imaginatively, he said, about issues like social welfare expenditures, immigration, the national debt, bank failures and international trade.
"We don't like it if someone writes in his term paper, 'I found this data on the Internet,'" Wright said. "You have to have some knowledge of where the numbers came from, what biases were built into them, why those particular numbers survived while others didn't and who the researcher was who put them together. Then you have to question the numbers and deploy them in some coherent way to ask a question."
As a grad student at Yale in the early '60s, Wright had to ask similar questions about a recently uncovered set of data from the 1860 U.S. census -- the Parker-Gallman sample that contained rich details about individual households, farms, crops and slave holdings. He turned his analysis into a thesis on the cotton slave economy of 1860; and in the summer of 1963, he worked with a Quaker-organized voter registration project in a black-majority county in North Carolina. In his research and publications since then, Wright has argued that the civil rights movement was a political and economic success, particularly benefiting metropolitan areas of the South.
"I learned to ask about the roots of the problems of the South," Wright says about his days as a student activist. "And I would love to think that our undergraduates still do that -- talk late into the night about the nature of life and what they want to do with themselves to fit into the historical currents."
