Not to get too lost in Klein's post, I happen to think he's wrong. He concludes that economists do the prediction thing and people like that stuff thus making them more popular. Okay maybe he's not wrong, I just disagree. I tend to agree with one of the historians mentioned in his post that says the study of history has moved too much in the direction of studying identity, gender and other social issues. Politics gets left to political science and economics gets left to economists and historians would rather write books about victimizations. That's my stance at least.
I know from first hand experience that someone like me who studied political history was frowned upon by the graduate history department. Unless I studied and wrote about a bottom up history that told the story of how people were oppressed by government, I really didn't stand a chance. Often times political history was called DWM history for dead white male history. It really was a long two and a half years for me. Whatever the case, historians make predictions all the time, maybe more than economists, especially when talking about current events. What historians have quit doing is writing about the positive and relating it to today.
