50 years ago was the mid-1960s. There were indeed a few historians who advised policymakers (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. is the most famous, perhaps there are a few more), along with plenty of other advisers. Fat lot of good it did the policymakers — you may recall that the mid-1960s were not exactly a time of bliss and happiness for the United States, though some good things did get done as well. Some of the unhappiness of that decade was caused, the historian Ernest May once argued (in his "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy), by policymakers misunderstanding the lessons of the past, at the encouragement of historians. The situation in Vietnam was badly read by the Americans (first in their lack of support for independence against the French colonial empire, second in their misunderstanding of the nature of Vietnamese Communism) in part because of their search for historical analogies. Vietnam was not Czechoslovakia and it was not Poland; the Vietnam War was not a prelude to World War III.

May wrote many books about the potential uses and misuses of history by policymakers. He emphasized that it is actually incredibly hard to draw good, policy-applicable lessons out of history, because you are trying to impose an order on the future based on an order from the past, and usually these are bad comparisons.

Frankly I find it odd that this "Manifesto" has gotten so much attention given that historians have talked about influencing policy for decades now, and there are historians (as May was) who work in policy schools. The notion that history is not part of a policy career, as opposed to economics, seems false to me. The economists do not run the show. They advise on economic policy. This is a natural thing for them to do (we all only wish they did it better). So I wonder if the whole thing is not just a straw-man.

But let's imagine we buy the argument of Armitage and Guldi. Historians should be more central to policymaking. And how should they do that? By writing these styles of history that have gone out of fashion, the longue durée, which try to smooth over all of the bumps and local contingencies to produce master narratives. Let's imagine that they're right, that the reason microhistories took power is because historians became "enchanted" with them, and not because microhistories were found to offer up more historical tools to work with than the vague master narratives. (I suppose this is not the place to point out that much of the original longue durée approach was itself hugely influenced by the field of economics.)

OK, great. So we're all writing these longue durée histories. And we go to our policymakers and they ask, "so what should Congress do tomorrow?" And we say, "uh... well, we don't really know that, but we know in the long run that economic inequality is terrible and destroying the entire planet's environment is terrible and that wars are bad and poverty is bad and changing revolutions in technology will probably displace a lot of people and things." And our policymakers give us a gimlet eye and say, "well, you know, everybody already knows those things. What specific recommendations to you have for what Congress should do tomorrow?"

And our well-intentioned, longue durée, economist-replacing historians, what do they say? Ah, they are caught in a trap. They have renounced "short-termism" and the worrying about what should happen tomorrow or yesterday or five hundred years hence. A very lofty intellectual position to be sure, to see so far, to be so unconcerned with the mundane and day-to-day. But this kind of position gives you absolutely no traction in a world where decisions are mundane and have to be done day-to-day.

As a grizzled historian once told me (and he probably did not make this up, but whatever), we historians have such a trouble truly understanding what happened in the past. How can we expect to know a thing about the future?

As you can tell I think this is something of a crock. I feel like if Armitage and Guldi feel that they (or anyone else) can write histories that will influence policymakers and make everyone see the error of their ways, they ought to just do it and not write manifestos about it. The one book they hold up for this is (the economist!) Thomas Pickety's recent one, and while the reviews have been mostly glowing, and everyone raced out to buy it, apparently nobody actually got through the thing. So it sounds like the jury is still out on its influence, policy-wise or otherwise.

I thoroughly dispute that our world problems with planning for the long-term are caused by fewer historians writing longue durée style histories! They are not even caused by economists! They are not even caused by policy advisers in general! They are caused by the fact that we, human beings, exist in a world of the day-to-day, but our problems are on a much larger scale. It is silly to imply that politicians 50 years ago were better at this than we are today; it is obviously incorrect if you go through these people's papers or newspapers from the time. If they put things into place that had long-term effects, it was because they also solved a short-term, local problem.

I apologize for the rant; this sort of stuff drives me up the wall, as you can see. I don't think historians should make grand pronouncements on the value of history in policy unless they have tried to write a few policy recommendations of their own and seen how hard it is. I have hung around policy schools and policy recommenders and government bureaucrats and what-have-you a bit over the years, and their failures are not because they are fools, but because making good plans for the future is hard, and making good plans that actually have a chance of getting adopted is almost impossible. This is a problem of how our institutions themselves work, not a problem of too-few Braudel-style histories.

I have not read the book in question but to address some of the points:

1: "Catastrophic Results?" 50 years ago was 1964. Since then we have had the victory of the Civil Rights movement, globalization, the internet, the rise of a green movement, the end of the Cold War, and higher life expectancy and living standards that at any point prior. Meanwhile before 1964, we had World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the rise of totalitarian fascism and communism. The article mentions "climate change" without seemingly realizing that a hefty chunk of pollution comes not from contemporary industry but from the rapid accumulation of past industrial product.

2: Short-term vs. long-term? First off, the leading economists WERE historians as well. There is so much overlap between economics and history that seeing this statement makes my head spin. And there are both long-term and short-term economists, but people listen to both. Marx was a historian and economist who believed in the long-term. Keynes was the pioneer of short-term ("In the long run we are all dead"). Friedman wrote "A Monetary History of the United States" covering nearly 100 years of US economic history as well as his "Free to Choose" series of him going through various historical economic scenarios. And don't get me started on Malthus and Ricardo.