Kinks, tools, spurts and substitutes: Gerschenkron’s rhetoric of relative backwardness

Alexander Gerschenkron, one of the thin, bright stream of historical economists before the name, was educated as an economist and then used his education on historical questions. Economists believe in numbers. Gerschenkron the economist became a master of numbers in the 1930s and 1940s, when national income accounting and index numbers were on the frontier of statistical economics.