ABSTRACT
Lance Edwin Davis is the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was born in Seattle, Washington in 1928 and was educated at the University of Washington (B.A., 1950) and The Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1956). He taught at Purdue University from 1956 until he moved to Caltech in 1968, has been Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1964-5) and at The Australian National University (1996), and was Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford (1985-6). Davis was President of the Economic History Association in 1978-9 and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1991. He now lives in Arkansas. The interview was conducted by fax and telephone in late 1989 and early 1990 by S W and J L. Sam Williamson writes:
I first met Lance Davis while I was a student at Purdue. My first class with him was the second course of the two-semester sequence in economic history required in Purdue’s economics graduate program at the time. I don’t think any of us thought that his approach was “revolutionary” or “new” – after all it was history. As a seminar project for Lance, I was running a linear programming model of the 1820 US economy which tested Doug North’s model. It seemed like a reasonable approach to me. Little did I know how foreign this was to many then in the field. One of my early impressions of Lance was about his frankness. If you wanted advice, he would give his honest opinion. If he thought something was lousy, he would tell you. And he had this way of asking “Why not?” when you were not sure you could do something, but he was. And he was usually right.
