Q&A: Naomi Lamoreaux
by Greg Larson
April 18, 2024
As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. In this sense, economic historians – who use quantitative techniques to explore how earlier economies developed and evolved – can shed light on how today’s economic challenges often have echoes in the past.
That is certainly true for economic historian Naomi Lamoreaux, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History at Yale. Over more than four decades of celebrated research, Lamoreaux has illuminated a broad range of business and economic topics with contemporary resonance, from the histories of big business to banking and finance, patents and innovation, corporate governance, anti-trust, and the relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Lamoreaux’s career is the inspiration for Charting the Future of Economics, Governance, and Economic Development in the United States and Beyond, a conference at Yale on April 26 and 27 that will examine the future direction of multidisciplinary research on these and other areas to which she has made significant contributions.
EGC recently spoke with Professor Lamoreaux to discuss her far-reaching research and how the study of economic history can help us think about the economic challenges of today.
You’ve focused on a lot of different topics during your career. Is there a common thread?
Well, there may not be one common thread, but there certainly are lines of connection. One of my first projects, for example, focused on the “great merger movement” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the size and distribution of firms in the American economy really changed. How did it happen that thousands of firms suddenly disappeared into mergers? There was nothing like that before, so I wanted to understand why it happened and what it meant for how the economy worked. More recently, I’ve worked on anti-trust – how these large firms matter, and what stance the government or society should take. Should we worry about big companies like Google and Apple today? Thinking about Standard Oil in the late nineteenth century can help us think about those issues.