Tim Leunig is a reader in Economic History at the LSE, and specialises in 18th and 19th century economic history. Tim talks us through how he chose his school subjects, and why it’s best for students to listen to the wisdom of their tutors. He also recommends an accessible introduction to economics.
At age 14 I was required to choose the subjects that I wanted to study for O-level. English language and literature, maths and French were compulsory. In addition I chose the three sciences and geography, probably the most popular set of choices for people at my school.
That summer, after making my choices but before starting the courses, I read two books that would change my life. The first was a AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War. It convinced me that I should take history instead of geography. The second book was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. With the hopeless idealism of youth I decided that a terrible tragedy like the 1930s would be better averted if more people knew a little bit of economics. I had no notion that I might one day be an economist, but rather naïvely I aspired to be a better citizen, better equipped to vote in a responsible and effective manner. As a result I decided to drop one of the sciences and take-up economics. I dropped physics, which was later to haunt me as I did more economics and it became more mathematical. I should have dropped chemistry instead. Or better still I should have been educated in a country with a proper appreciation of the benefits of a broad curriculum!
Of course, studying history and economics at A level does not make you an economic historian. I studied 20th century political history for O-level, and then the Reformation and the Civil War for A-level. I then went to Oxford to study modern history and economics, primarily because I was very good at them, and I enjoyed pretty much everything I studied. I emphatically did not want to study economic history, which seemed to me to be a very boring subdiscipline of history. I wanted to study the exciting stuff, the grand strategies of war and peace. As a result, I was extremely cross when my first history tutor, the late Alistair Parker, himself a distinguished historian of the Second World War, compelled me to take economic history in my first year. The regulations were very clear that the student got to choose whether to take a paper in political history, social history or economic history. I wanted to take the political history paper, but Alistair refused. I pointed out that the regulations clearly said it was my choice and not his. He retorted that that was correct, but that it was his obligation to find me teaching, and whichever course I decided to take he would find me teaching in economic history. He said that in that context it would be better for me to sit the examination in economic history, since that’s what I was going to be taught. He pointed out that I could appeal, but given that I had to take the exam in about eight weeks I would have failed by then, and the appeal would be essentially pointless. Thus I took economic history, very much against my will.
The lecturer was Patrick O’Brien, later to be Centennial Professor here at LSE, with the tutorials given by a young research scholar called Edmund Newell. I was later to have his research Fellowship and later still as an ordained minister he presided at my wedding. I enjoyed economic history immediately, and proved to be good at it. That experience has always limited my enthusiasm for student choice at undergraduate level. There are times when, quite simply, faculty do know best. And even if students don’t always like the courses we force them to do, it is often good for them to be forced to try new things.
Economic history is one of those subjects that spans both academic journals and academic monographs. As a quantitative economic historian, I tend towards the journal end of the spectrum. I have never written a book myself, but I serve as editor of Explorations in Economic History, one of the top three journals in our field. Two recent books stand out for me. For content, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz The Race Between Education and Technology, and for methodology Jane Humphries Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Goldin and Katz show how technology in the last 60 years or so has favoured those with a good education. As such, the United States benefited from very high levels of high school participation graduation, and very high levels of participation in college-level education. This generated both high rates of economic growth and reduced levels of economic inequality. Put simply, if you have a lot of graduates, they don’t command that high a wage premium, and inequality is kept in check. The authors argue that America has been losing that race in the last 20 years, but there is an obvious agenda for action whichever country you are interested in.
Humphries’ book is remarkable for taking a large number of autobiographies of people who worked as children in the Industrial Revolution. Humphries treats these as individual pieces of evidence, with a traditional historians’ deference. But, more innovatively, she also shows that they can be aggregated to yield quantitative data to which quantitative techniques can be applied. It deserved to win the Economic History Association’s prize for book of the year last year.
These, however, are books for economic historians: the book I recommend to others is Robert Allen’s Global Economic History: a Very Short Introduction. At less than 200 pages and £5, it is a book you can actually read, rather than resolve to read…
In my spare time I read 40 to 50 novels a year, most of them airport thrillers bought for £2 from my local charity shop. I don’t claim to be a fussy or discerning reader in my spare time: I read cheap novels in the way that some people watch television. Most recently I read Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1996. I confess that I found it rather dull, but it’s probably better to see that as a failing in the reader rather than the author!
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Tim Leunig is a reader in Economic History at the LSE, and specialises in 18th and 19th century economic history. He has written on history of railways, the cotton industry, the housing market, and historical quality of life measures. His most recent work is The glamour of speed: an analysis of postwar investment in Britain’s railways in Hood, Christopher and Margetts, Helen, (eds.) Paradoxes of modernization: unintended consequences of public policy reform (Oxford University Press). He is the Chief Economist at CentreForum, and writes regularly for the British Politics and Policy at LSE Blog.
