Paul David (1935-2023)

 My Stanford colleague Paul David has died. He was an exceptional, iconic economic historian.

Gavin Wright has written this obit:

Professor Paul David died at the age of 87

"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.” 

"A continuing focus throughout Paul’s career was the diffusion of new technologies.  An important early paper considered the adoption of the mechanical reaper in the American Midwest.  Invention occurred in the 1830s, yet the first wave of adoption occurred only in the 1850s.  The twenty-year delay, according to Paul, was explained by the fact that a minimum scale was required to cover the fixed costs of purchasing the reaper.  Only when farms size passed this “threshold” did mechanization make economic sense.  Specialists have debated the specifics ever since, but the basic form of Paul’s diffusion model has been highly influential.  In many respects it formalized the accounts of delayed diffusion presented by our late colleague Nate Rosenberg, and thus became something of a “Stanford school” of thought in this area.  Scrolling forward to 1990, the era of the “Solow paradox,” Paul offered an analogy between the delayed productivity effects of computer technology and a similar lag in the impact of electrification between the 1880s and the 1920s.  With the IT-driven productivity surge of the late 1990s, this article also attained iconic status (AER 1990)."