At the heart of all science is the isolation of a handful of powerful factors that account for the majority of the variance in what is being measured. Employing the comparative method with such natural experiments of history is no different from what sociologists and economists do in comparing natural experiments of society today. So it is time for scientists to respect history as a science and for historians to test their historical hypotheses by the comparative method and other techniques.

This article was originally published with the title Doing Science in the Past.

4 Comments

1. 1. frgough 06:58 PM 5/4/10

   A lot of rhetoric that can be boiled down into one phrase.
   
   Haiti is poor because it is socialist, the Dominican Republic is prosperous because it is capitalist.
   
   See, that wasn't hard. I think the reason university brainiacs write books when a sentence will do is because the sentence is so unpalatable to them.

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2. 2. scasagra 09:38 PM 5/4/10

   frgough, I think you should re-studied your assumptions about what's capitalism and socialism. Dominicana is "socialist" from a US perspective, and Haiti is anything else except socialist if you consider Cuba (although poor and non democratic, with highest level of educated people and much better health care indicators than many other latin american countries). I will say that Haiti is when the invisible hand of market got concentrated in few powerfull and bad people: everything to me, nothing for you

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3. 3. scasagra 09:52 PM 5/4/10

   It's amazing how comparative studies can give a glimpse on history analysis. Reading The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, it's surprising to find these type of remarks in his book: from slavery in Brazil (when the economy is based on slavery a good chance of cronic empoverish of part of the society), the harhsness of the environment (the deserts of Patagonia, Chile and Peru), to earthquakes (in Chile and Peru), the access to natural resources (mine ore in Chile, something that never developed in the east side of the Andes), and a general likeness of dictators in the population (Argentina) or populists: a chronic disease in all Latin America. For the particular enforcement of economic policies (and social, like abolition of slavery, gender balance, access to education/health care, etc) there is a lot of possibilities around some "center". It would be interesting to be able to do quantitative history to learn more about this. For me the work of Jared Diamond is like Hari Seldom's from Asimov's Foundation! Instead of non-linear equations, statistics models.

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4. 4. JoMoore 09:03 AM 6/28/10

   This article misses the point completely (well...not as much as frgough, but that is quite an exceptional case of point-missing)
   
   One of the fundamental factors leading to Haiti’s current poverty is the historical level of debt imposed on the country, firstly by the French, and then by the US and other international agents.
   Due to Haiti’s successful slave revolt, the French were forced to leave the country in 1804, but demanded reparations of the Haitians for loss of earnings totalling 90 million gold francs (the slaves’ refusal to work for free was seen by France as a theft of labour and resources). Faced with the invidious choice between payment or re-colonisation and enslavement, Haiti was thus shackled with a debt that would crush its economy. In 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on this debt (now with added interest), and would not make its final payment until 1947, 143 years after winning its ‘freedom’.
   Haiti’s debt nightmare was not to end there; the country was struck once again by crushing repayments following the brutal militia-enforced leadership of the Duvaliers, who embezzled foreign aid to the tune of around 80%, (a figure known to Washington). Although much of Haiti’s aid and foreign loans were proved to be arriving directly into the Duvaliers’ Swiss bank accounts, while its people starved on the streets, the US and French governments, the World Bank and the IMF (amongst others) insisted that after the fall of the Duvalier regime, Haitians must repay the loans they barely saw, once again crippling the nation’s economy. Every pound spent on repayment was one not spent on infrastructure, education and development.
   
   An analysis of Haitian poverty which fails even to mention these repayments can only be judged as deeply flawed. Although Jared Diamond is cited as acknowledging the ‘many other factors’ in the history of the island, ignoring such a decisive one would surely discredit any scientific analysis – surely the same standards should be applied to historical study?
   

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