ABSTRACT
Peter Temin is Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was born in 1937 in Philadelphia and was educated at Swarthmore College (B.A., 1959) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1964). From 1962 to 1965 he was a Junior Fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows and joined the MIT faculty in 1965. He has interrupted his tenure at MIT as Visiting Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University (1976-7), and as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions in the University of Cambridge (1985-6). He was President of the Economic History Association in 1996 and of the Eastern Economic Association in 2001, was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1986 and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The interview took place in Peter Temin’s office in the MIT Economics Department on October 5, 1999, and was conducted by J B of Clark University, who writes:
I first became acquainted with Peter Temin’s work as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, when we members of Gavin Wright’s seminar in American economic history wrestled with the controversy over labor scarcity. Immediately thereafter, Peter reappeared in our discussions as a major protagonist in the battle over the “Soundness School” interpretation of the Panic of 1837, in which he contested the long-held view that Jackson’s mistakes – his veto of legislation re-authorizing the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 and then his issuance of the Specie Circular in 1836 – prompted the panic and the subsequent economic downturn. We encountered Peter Temin a few weeks later as we worked our way through the debate over antebellum slavery and yet again in what, at that time, was a bold attack on the new orthodoxy of the FriedmanSchwartz perspective on the causes of the Great Depression. Peter was also at a conference on the performance of the Victorian economy that I attended in the third year or
so of graduate school, so that it was clear to me that his interests extended across the Atlantic. Moving east to Clark University brought me gainful employment as well as the opportunity to attend the Economic History Workshop at Harvard. There, my appreciation grew for Peter’s approach to economic history, from the give-and-take of the seminar as he probed visitors on the logic and, just as importantly, on the quality of evidence offered in support, of their arguments.
