But at the same time, I was the one who edited them, putting them together in one sustained piece. The booklet was not a “two article” affair, with his name on his and mine on mine. There was one sustained argument from front to back. Both our names were on the cover. And I was the one who had the editorial responsibility for blending them. And even if this had been a “two article” booklet, I still would have been the editor, and an essential part of a good editor’s responsibility is to anticipate the possibility of this kind of error, and check on it. Accidents do happen, and an editor’s responsibility includes an active awareness of the fact that accidents happen, and to therefore check. I didn’t check, and I should have. Mea maxima culpa. I had not read Time on the Cross at that time, and given the nature of the errors, had I read that book we would have been spared a lot of grief.
Douglas Wilson
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DW’s statement that he hadn’t read Time On the Cross tells me everything. It’s not a difficult or overly technical volume of economic history — I read long excerpts as an AP US History student in a “government” school. Not to read the dang thing while co-authoring a book that uses it is unimaginable to me.
It’s an incredibly easy read. They wrote it at tenth-grade level. No footnotes (or very few, they published their citations afterwards in a different volume, which still baffles me). And Wilson & Wilkins predicated their entire thesis for SSAIW on a misreading of Time on the Cross — and that’s not just my opinion, that’s what one of the authors told the Daily News back in 2005 or so, when asked for a comment about the plagiarism. He said he was more disturbed that they took him out of context than that they had plagiarized him.
I’m an economist by trade, and it’s obvious that The Learned Duo completely twisted/misused/lied about Time on the Cross. What has me flabbergasted is that DW didn’t even read it.
In addition to his other charming qualities, he is lazy.
Or one could imagine the possibility of Doug wanting to gain some form of plausible deniability by not reading it. Or that he’s flat out lying. Or, as Gracie mentioned, laziness. Doug keeps ending up in places where the best case scenario is pretty bad.
“Mea maxima culpa” Doug? Consequences then? Naaaaaaaw. Empty confessions will always suffice. Special Doug privilege of course.
And the citations you mention are in a separate volume for a reason. Engerman and Fogel were using statistical methods from economics as well as archival research. If they had written all of the analyses in the ways economists wanted to see it, historians (at that time) would not have read it. Hence two volumes. The research was controversial and spawned a huge literature and debate that continues among us academics.
Not that you would know that if you’d only read Doug and Randy.
Historians debunked TOTC across the board. The KKK applauded (seriously). Eugene Genovese, who was lifelong friends with both authors, ripped it as the poor effort of economists trying their hands at history. However, Genovese also said that the follow-up volume, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, was on his top-5 list of must-read books. Without Consent delicately walked back some of the crazier findings of TOTC.