The year 2023 began with a few great losses for Economics/Economic History. The first was the demise of Prof. Paul David.

An obituary here says:

Perhaps Paul’s deepest legacy for the department was establishing Stanford as a leading center for economic history.  The patriarch for the field was Moe Abramovitz, who remained active in both research and the workshop long after his retirement in 1979.  But it was Paul who recruited or helped to recruit Nate Rosenberg, Gavin Wright, Avner Greif, and Ran Abramitzky – to name only those who became full professors of economics.  We claim that there are more active economic historians from Stanford than from any other program.  A much larger number of graduate students did not become history specialists but were exposed to Paul’s perspective through his teaching or that of his colleagues.  We like to think that some of this historical thinking rubbed off and became something of a hallmark for a Stanford economics Ph.D. 

Always an economic historian, Paul soon extended his horizons in diverse and seemingly disparate ways.  He became a strong advocate of the view that historical research should be fundamental to the economics discipline; in brief; “history matters.”  The essence of the argument was captured by Paul’s incisive account of the persistence of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard despite its technical disadvantages, one of the most cited articles in all of economics (AER 1985).  “History Matters” is the title of a festschrift presented by a group of Paul’s former students in 2004, in which the editors write: “No scholar has more forcefully and influentially argued the case for making economics a truly historical social science – one that, like evolutionary biology, gives past events a central role in understanding the present.”