There is a version of economics that treats history as scenery. Background. The thing that happened before the data starts. In this version, what matters is the model, the variable, the coefficient - and the past is at best a robustness check and at worst a distraction from the clean work of analysing the present.

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This issue is not that version.

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"History Pays Interest" begins from a different premise entirely: that time is not neutral, and that the past does not simply precede the present - it funds it. The economist who understands what came before does not just have...

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