Kevin O’Rourke follows up on some of what I’ve been writing, and argues that doing good macroeconomics depends crucially on knowing a fair bit about economic history. Indeed.

By the way, he’s right that Obstfeld, Rogoff, and yours truly all had the benefit of studying with Charles Kindleberger and Peter Temin. But that’s not all. The late Rudi Dornbusch, who I’m pretty sure advised all of us, was big on the usefulness of studying history.

I still remember his advice when I began searching for a thesis topic. He urged me (and presumably his other students) to take a break from reading recent economics literature, and looking for twiddles on the currently fashionable models. Better, he said, to read a lot of economic history for a few months, plus reading up on current events, in search of real issues and real experiences that needed explaining.

I’d also say that there’s history and then there’s history. Knowing the time-series properties of US quarterly data since 1947 isn’t what I mean. In macro, in particular, you need to know about drastic events. I don’t have it in front of me, but in his book on the German hyperinflation Frank Graham said roughly this: “Disorder is, for the social sciences, the sole substitute for the controlled experiments of the natural sciences.” That means knowing about prewar experience; it also means knowing about international experience — for there have been numerous crises even since World War II, just not in the United States.

Indeed, my sense is that international macroeconomists — people who followed the ERM crises of the early 1990s, the Latin American debt crisis, the Asian crisis of the late 90s, and so on — were caught much less flat-footed than economists who limited most of their interest to the United States. The now-infamous 2003 Lucas remark about how the problem of depression-prevention has been solved was not something you would have heard from an economist who had paid attention to Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina etc..

Unfortunately, many economists have not learned from the past. And that’s at least part of the reason we are apparently condemned to repeat it.