This two-week workshop—a boot camp of sorts—on economic methods is for historians. The format of the workshop is loosely based on an executive MBA program. Faculty and graduate students from across the country participate in two weeks of intense lectures and labs in core technical areas so as to give them confidence in applying quantitative methods and economic theory to historical research.
“This was a tremendously valuable workshop. I have no doubt that capitalism will be more and more effectively historicized if many additional campers have opportunities to share in this experience in the years to come.”
Participants receive instruction from statisticians, economists, and accountants on the basics of their fields, giving them the capacity and vocabulary to further develop their interests in economic techniques. By the end of the two weeks, participants are able to run basic regressions, conduct statistical tests, understand basic micro- and macroeconomic theory, and evaluate financial statements.
“Successfully covering so much material in a two week time period is not only a testament to how well the planning team organized the camp, but also to the teaching ability of faculty who provided the instruction.”
Goals:
- Enable a new generation to learn the skills that have been forgotten and combine with them the other historiographic techniques that have been honed over the last generation
- Train not only graduate students but junior faculty in quantitative methods and economic theory
- Create a substantial shift in the abilities of historians to ask economic questions in history and provide them with the skill sets to answer them successfully.
About the Camp Director:
Louis Hyman, a historian of American political economy, studied at Columbia and Harvard. He has written or edited five books on the history of American capitalism, including Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, Borrow: The American Way of Debt, and Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. His public writings, exploring shifting labor and financial practices, have been published widely in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and Bloomberg.