All-UC Group in Economic History
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Learning from the Past The mission of the All-UC Group in Economic History is to bring together individual faculty and graduate students from the departments and campuses of the UC, to form a critical mass that can productively engage with the historical dimensions of economies. We do this through an integrated program of interdisciplinary conferences, graduate workshops, graduate fellowships, and scholarly exchanges. We request funding to continue this program for the next five years, and to strengthen the Group’s research activities though competitive seed grants. Recent economic crisis in California and the wider world have highlighted the value of historical expertise. Almost all the economic issues of today are variants of past challenges. It is no accident that a member of our group, Christina Romer of UC Berkeley, a scholar of the Great Depression, has been appointed Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. The All-UC Group will focus over the next five years on the historical dimensions of modern economic problems. California and the USA, for example, now struggle to integrate immigrants of very different social backgrounds. But we are just one of a long series of societies that have faced this issue. What were the successful and the failed strategies for this integration in earlier societies? The same is true for almost all pressing social issues: the fiscal crisis, problems of economic infrastructure such as transportation, water, education, and health, currency and price fluctuations, and tariffs. All these issues have long histories that are surprisingly easily forgotten by modern policy makers. We need to provide a new generation of graduate students access to this historical repository so that they can function effectively as educators and policy makers. We need to inform contemporary debate with historical insight. We need to continue to build the databases that quantify the historical experience, and which are essential for modern policy analysis. The Group has established a world-leading reputation for economic history at the University of California (see http://allucgroup.iga.ucdavis.edu). We pioneered the establishment of effectively a multi-campus interdisciplinary department, enhancing the efficiency of any one campus’ resources. All this was made possible by modest core funding from the President’s office. As in the past we will continue to leverage this core funding. We already have commitments to augment the conference funding under this proposal by $45,000 from outside sources for three of the conferences. This demonstrates the value other institutions in California place on our initiatives. But all these commitments are dependent on continuing the core funding. We believe that in terms of academic status, graduate student opportunities, and outside support, the modest budget requests of the All-UC Group in Economic History represent a highly productive investment by the UC system.