Larry Neal, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has some earthshaking advice for his fellow economists: Act like geologists!

He urges them to stop thinking of their discipline as an exercise in applied mathematics, and look on it instead as a historical science, like geology. Just as geologists range the globe, "search[ing] in each location for the remains of catastrophic events in the history of the earth itself," so economic historians, he says, should focus more on the "shocks" to economies of the past, rather than on the longer periods of "normal" economic activity, undisturbed by depression, war, or natural disaster.

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