I missed this too when it came out three years ago: Chris Blattman: Black Lives Matter, Economic History Edition: "Trevon Logan’s Presidential address to the National Economics Association. Partly he calculates the productivity of his sharecropping ancestors relative to slave holding estates a century before (a persistent question in American economic history). But mainly he makes an argument for doing more qualitative interviews, which seems like an obvious point, except that systematic qualitative work is the exception in economic history (as it is in development economics): 'That richer, fuller picture reveals that the work behind the estimates came to define the way that the Logan children viewed racial relations, human capital, savings, investment, and nearly every aspect of their lives..... We also learn that it is impossible to divorce the work from its social environment, an era in which Jim Crow, segregation, and other elements of overt racial oppression were a fact of life...
#noted
