My main thought is that Noah Smith fundamentally misunderstands how doing history works, and perhaps does not understand what history actually is. This is not surprising - he's an economist not a historian - but it is disappointing to see him fail to engage with history as a discipline when there is no shortage of historians happy to help.

Noah's blog really started as a tweet that read:

My beef with academic history is not that it's woke. Nor that it's anti-woke. It's that the theories are given even more credence than macroeconomics even though they're even less empirically testable.

So the starting point of the blog is that in the post-2008 world historians are more trusted than macroeconomists, and he seems a bit bitter about it. He really dislikes historians, having tweeted on August 24th 2022:

Great to see history majors being abandoned. Maybe now all the historians will have time to go read a book

Let that set the tone.

From what I understand reading his blog, his issue is that he dislikes when historians move out of their lane and engage in punditry; that we should have higher standards of evidence than we do when historians try to apply historical trends to predict current or future trends. To be honest, I think that's a reasonable opinion to have. I think most people can agree that our current discourse would benefit from higher standards of evidence, and historians can fail at that as much as anyone else. And if that's what Noah stuck to and argued clearly throughout, I don't think there would be an issue. I also think it would have helped if he hadn't been so provocative on Twitter - don't pick fights on Twitter and then be surprised when there's a fight, seriously, the site is basically designed to create engagement from ill will - but that's a whole other thing.

The problems start with the heading "Historical Analogies are Theories." Now, almost every historian on the planet will tell you that they're not. Indeed, prominent history blogger Bret Devereaux made this exact point. Noah was displeased:

One frustrating thing about demanding empirical confirmation for historians’ theories is that some (many?) historians will insist that they don’t make theories at all. For example, when I brought this issue up on Twitter, Bret Devereaux — a historian of the ancient Mediterranean who is currently a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina — asserted that historians don’t make predictive models.

Bret's right. We don't make predictive models. Our information is mostly qualitative, it is often extremely fragmentary, it has a habit of defying theoretical frameworks. At most, historians can identify broad trends that may be indicative, but nothing close to a "predictive model". However, Noah picks on Bret extensively in his blog, and particularly on an observation Bret makes in his own blog that tyrants in ancient Greece tended to keep trying to gain power until they succeeded, with the implication that we in the modern day need to take attempted usurpations of power by demagogues more seriously. A lot of Noah's blog attacks Bret's work specifically - and it does seem Noah's understanding of Bret's work is weak - but I think it would be best to read Bret's response.

Even if you don't, I will restate Bret's point that Noah Smith also engages in the exact kind of punditry that he is criticising as a columnist for Bloomberg as well as on his very active Twitter account. Clearly, Noah has higher standards of historians than he does of himself.

Moving away from Noah's beef with Bret, the argument starts to become muddled. Noah says:

Note that I am not arguing that we shouldn’t try to draw lessons from the past! Instead I am arguing that when we do try to draw lessons from the past, we should have some sort of empirical procedure for testing whether and when those lessons are good or bad ones. Otherwise, historians are just free to use their personal judgment — or their personal politics — to pick and choose whichever historical examples they feel like analogizing with the present day.

Opining on what historical analogies would suit the present to indicate the future is not what the discipline of history is about. Historians might do it as a part of their personal social media use, which seems to be how Noah primarily interacts with the field of history, but that is not history as a field. Noah seems frustrated that the Twitter takes of historians are not held to an academic standard. Of course they aren't, Twitter is not the English Historical Review or Speculum (two of the more prestigious history journals). Furthermore, there is no empirical procedure for testing predictions based on history because the nature of the evidence, which Noah does not acknowledge at any point or show any understanding of, does not permit anything of the sort. When we're going back by one or two thousand years the idea of empirical models becomes laughable, and indeed many historians have had a good chuckle at Noah's blog on account of this.

And if we don’t have any such empirical testing procedure in place, then we should view the predictions and policy recommendations historians make in the media as punditry rather than as academic knowledge.

This statement is correct. But Noah is arguing (more through implication than an actual argument with evidence, which is interesting given his standards) that this is not how historians having opinions on Twitter or on political programming is viewed. He thinks historians expressing their views on Twitter is an expression of academic knowledge, but it isn't. It's Twitter. It is punditry, and historians are not under illusions that it is not. It might be informed by history, and some people certainly value that knowledgable background to whatever take the historian might have, but there are very few historians who would argue that what they write on a blog or on Twitter is "academic" in any way. Throughout the blog post, I don't think Noah understands what "academic" really means. It's the stuff we write in peer reviewed journals. It's the stuff we publish in niche books that will only sell 100 copies. It's the papers we give at conferences. It's what we naively hope our students will read. It is not what we say if we get invited to a political show like the BBC's Question Time or a CNN segment. We call that stuff "public engagement", and it's all Noah seems to have ever bothered to encounter regarding history.

Noah then takes issue with an argument made by some historians that slavery helped instigate the industrial revolution. Although he is right in my opinion to criticise that argument (and historians of the industrial revolution certainly do too), it is a bit of a non-sequitur as far as his main argument goes. This takes up much of the blog post and it's not wrong, but he's using this case as a prop to make an argument that it doesn't actually support. He writes as if the work of a controversial group of historians is representative of the field. It is not. It's more evidence that Noah does not care to understand history as a field.

After bringing up an understandably frustrating tweet about segregation and student loans, Noah says:

And this is a proposition we could actually test! For example, we could probably look at the differences in college funding between more segregated and less segregated states before and after Brown v. Board of Education (this is known as a differences-in-differences approach). Or we could find other factors that integrated colleges in different states at different times and see how state funding decisions responded. Whatever the method, though, it’s important to test this sort of causal hypothesis before concluding that we believe it. This is what political scientists do, and if historians want to horn in on the territory of political scientists, they should be held to the same standards.

I'm trying to find a more charitable way of reading this statement, but I can't get away from thinking that his argument is seriously that historians don't have to justify their opinions with evidence. If a historian were to write something about the impact of desegregation on higher education funding that wasn't as pithy as a tweet, they would be expected to look at such things. However, we're talking about a tweet. A tweet! Again, I think Noah has based his idea of what historians do primarily on his social media use. It's the only way his perceptions of the field make sense. Obviously, historians ordinarily look at evidence to substantiate their claims, but maybe not when they're scrolling through Twitter on the train home and have 280 characters to work with.

Although the core desire for higher standards of evidence in public discourse is reasonable, Noah is mostly arguing against a strawman made of tweets, and in doing so comes across as understanding nothing about history as a skill or as an academic field. He also engages in the kind of punditry he is criticising historians for. He does not understand historical evidence in general, let alone in specific concerning particular periods or topics. To me, he comes across as someone who spends too much time on social media, because the root of his blog post is frustration that a historian says something on Twitter and gets believed, while a macroeconomist says something on Twitter and is not believed on account of 2008. His understanding of what history is seems to come mainly from Twitter. His understanding of what historians do also seems to be shaped by Twitter. Having taken a look through the last couple of weeks of his social media use, he seems to enjoy picking fights on Twitter to make himself feel right. His blog post is not really about history, or macroeconomics, or standards of evidence in public discourse.

It's about social media validation.