Proposal for the Second Conference on German Cliometrics 

     ....... Cliometrics is an approach to historical research which combines explicit models with formal statistical techniques to analyze painstakingly collected and refined data, often very large quantities of data. Most scholars date the genesis of the field to 1958, when two economists — Alfred Conrad and John Meyer — applied their techniques to one of the most important hypotheses of U.S. economic history, that the Civil War was unnecessary because slavery would have "collapsed of its own weight" as a result of its inherent inefficiency. Conrad and Meyer found the returns to slavery to have been at least as high as the returns to other forms of investment; slavery was profitable and therefore would not have collapsed of its own weight, contrary to the conventional wisdom. Since that time, cliometrics has come to be the dominant paradigm in economic history in North America, where now the greatest numbers of economic historians have their graduate training in economics, rather than in history. In 1993 two cliometricians, Robert Fogel and Douglass North, jointly received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. 

     ....... Despite its success in North America, cliometrics has moved only slowly to Europe. It has established an important position in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavian countries, but still is only limited in Germany (and France). But recently a number of new studies has been created both in Germany, and by foreigners who worked on German cliometric history. Hence there was a first meeting in Toronto in the late 1990s, and now a second meeting in Tuebingen is an important desideratum. Tuebingen is a particular good location for a first meeting within Germany, because it has a large graduate school in cliometrics, and it can be reached from nearby Hohenheim, Zuerich, Strasbourg, Mannheim, Munich within a few hours, and flights from Berlin are also available at modest rates. Moreover, the castle Hohentuebingen with its famous Fuerstenzimmer offers an amazing conference site that will stimulate the spirit of the discussion.

    ....... The conference will bring together participants from Canada, the U.S., U.K., Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. They will range in age from retired professors to new graduate students. We are particularly encouraging the presentation of papers by graduate students and recent PhDs, but every age group will be represented among those presenting papers. 

    ....... The conference will have two particular features of note, both aimed at the coming generation of cliometricians: We propose to offer bursaries to cover the cost of attendance by both German and North American graduate students newly embarked on their studies (so still in the pre-dissertation phase), and will give one long session over to a discussion of methodology: Experienced researchers will bring some of their data and demonstrate how they have processed them and how they have solved the research challenges that both their data and their research questions have posed. ......