Reading for Economic History

Except when scrutinizing TIAA-CREF reports or ciphering the discrepancy between annual merit increases and the rate of inflation, most theatre scholars probably avoid evidence of the economic and ignore its relevance to their careers. Perhaps in protest at the surfeit of economic data present in our everyday lives, we align with humanists who distrust the collection and employment of such data; yet, when we know we must refute an administrator's budget allocations, we condescend to read past the economists' mathematical apparati to the prose summaries that inevitably (though not necessarily more lucidly) follow. We are perfectly correct to distrust the media's obsession with moment-by-moment prognostications of the economy. We are thoroughly justified in believing that statistics lie, particularly when they do not lie in our favor. And it is understandable that, given most of our backgrounds in performing arts and comparative literatures, we are better equipped to read musical scores and phonetic symbology than the numerical, tabular, and graphical languages of mathematics

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