The subtitle for my paper, or the title is Subjective Value in Public History, the subtitle
is How Private is Public History? And I'll start by describing what public history is.
It's a discipline concerned with preserving and presenting the physical, visual and oral
memory of the past. And those who work in this field are ultimately concerned with determining
what has value, what of the past is worth saving. So to inform their decisions, people
People like preservationists, museum workers, historic site managers, oral historians, archivists,
etc.
They gather the dispersed knowledge in society, interpret the values of culture, and shape
the discourse about its continuation.
Now, the goal of the public historian has always been to facilitate learning outside
of the classroom.
The public history movement arose in the 1960s and 70s, it was born out of this academic
job crisis, this lack of interest in the humanities, and it was hoped that public historians could
become useful in public policies, in urban planning.
This is why it was sometimes called applied history.
They wanted to be like the social sciences, relevant and useful, unlike the humanities,
according to them.
But in focusing on being useful, public historians all too often forgot to ask themselves if
what they were doing was valuable.
That is, they focus on the means to the end, the growth of their own field rather than
the end in itself, the value of the undertaking.
And there's a great quote from 1982, a public historian who writes, one must, I think, be
careful about how much we claim for history.
Oftentimes it is not relevant, not useful at all, at least in the narrow sense.
History does have a place in business and urban planning and public works and policy
analysis, et cetera.
Indeed, history has a place in everything, but we must not create a place for it that's
that's larger than it deserves just because we want a job, right?
So he makes a strong point that at any time, any given time, society requires only so many
professional historians, and I know this is a hit for us professional historians, we professional
historians, and although I don't think we've reached this point yet, it is entirely possible
to have too much history, right, to save too much, to forget that history is not the entirety
of culture.
So how then do we determine what knowledge of the past is worth saving? Free individuals
working through the market will preserve only certain kinds of knowledge about the past.
Certain powerful groups or persons may receive more attention at the expense of others. Public
historians, though, believe that when societies fail to produce inclusive history, the state
should fund institutions to compensate. Armed with mantras about the common ownership of
of the Past. Public historians try to survey the values of all segments of society when
determining how to create the best type of history. So this new discipline reversed the
roles that existed in academia, where historical knowledge flowed from the historian, where
you read the book or went home. Rather, in public history, the idea is to take the values
of the public, interpret them through a public historian and then present it back, essentially
Getting the Values of the People Reflected Through the Public Historians Work.
So questions of value are essential in public history, but this discipline presents an almost
complete neglect of value theory.
That is, public historians often discuss the value of objects, but they seldom inquire
into what value is, the nature of value itself.
And my argument is that public historians should understand that value is subjective,
that it derives from individuals, that it can be determined only through action. This
understanding will help them, to aid them in recognizing the origins of conflict in
the field. So in what I will be presenting here, I will demonstrate how a few sub-fields
of public history such as historic preservation, museum curation and archive management all
face their own peculiar problems in determining value. In making public history responsible
to Human Valuations, successful public historians will be those that can properly judge the
value society places on the past. But there is a deeper, more systematic level in which
the nature of value in public history is misunderstood. Public history has changed the rules of the
game when it comes to how we preserve the past, but can the discipline actually claim
seem to have produced valuable results. I argue that the effects of public history are
at best complementary to what already takes place in the market, likely redundant and
at worst an unnecessary taxpayer expense. Public history does not and indeed cannot
create an all-inclusive story of the past in which the values of each person in society
are taken into account and represented. Rather, state-funded history benefits particular people
and Interpretations at the Expense of Others.
This, of course, should not be surprising,
especially to someone in, say, public choice economics,
since public historians like private historians
respond to incentives and have private motivations.
In short, public historians are self-interested
and private players expressing their own values
in those of politically privileged groups
in a publicly funded enterprise.
For some background in this, we have to look and understand subjective value theory and realize that its application goes further into all categories of human action.
The theory implies, for example, that historical objects and knowledge are preserved not for their own sake, but for their importance to human beings based on our value scales.
and that conflicts arise because public historians are incapable of satisfying everyone, they are unable to know the value scales of every individual in society and how these change through time. Every person has unique values.
So in a world of limited resources where objects are valued subjectively, it is impossible to satisfy everyone. Some people may prefer preserving building A, others building B.
And if funds are only available for preserving one of the two buildings, one group will be upset.
So instead of having citizens vote on what is to be saved, public historians work for the government
and are informed by private and public interests to serve as arbiters in making decisions about what is valuable for the public.
This is a powerful role and one that I think requires a certain type of training.
And I'll start by explaining a little bit of the problem of subjective value in historic preservation,
a field that I think is the farthest from realizing the importance of subjective values,
because it's filled with poor incentives, unequal distribution of public funding, and relatively high costs.
There's also the indivisibility of the objects to be saved.
Incentives in the field encourage preservationists to save as much as possible without concern for other values.
Preservationists gain funding and prestige by saving more, not less, by encouraging tax dollars to come into their hands at the expense of other possible uses.
The result is a discipline which all too often fails to compromise with the values of society,
in which it therefore has been incapable of fully gaining the confidence of the public.
It seems unfair to criticize practicing public historians for their desire to save the past at all costs,
especially since the field is new and there's lots of work yet to be done.
But the failure to recognize the necessity of compromise is glaring.
And when I was here three years ago as a fellow in the summer at the Mises Institute, I presented a short story of this, and I think it still holds.
I was a graduate student in Florida and every year I would go down to the State Capitol building and witness the tourism public funding bonanza in which all the historic preservationists from around the state would come and fight for the state's money by presenting their best plan.
Well, historic preservation of course is very important to Florida because it's tied into this tourism industry.
History.
And there's a state pamphlet from 2002 which concludes, of course written by the state,
that historic preservation creates huge dividends for the Florida economy.
For each dollar generated, it says in Florida's historic preservation grants, $2 return to
the state in direct revenue.
A dollar directed to the Florida Main Street Program modeled after the National Main Street
Program shows a tenfold return.
So if the statistics are true, and the logic is sound, the conclusion valid, one wonders
if not all the resources of the state of Florida should be channeled through the Main Street
program. The authors claim that historic preservation in Florida creates a direct impact of $350
million, and that spending through the multiplier effect creates $4.2 billion. Well, what the
study fails to mention is that each dollar generated in the program is also taxed away
The problem for the state's program is that there is no absolute measure of value, independent of the subjective preferences of its constituents, so each dollar spent in historic preservation might have been spent in health care or education.
And when funds are directed towards preservation, who is to say that one dollar spent in preserving
a bridge in Tampa is more valuable than preserving a school in a rural county?
So the difficulty here is determining how to come about the best way to measure this.
You can measure it through surveys, you can measure it through democratic elections, but
it still doesn't meet and match the market.
One particular way is the contingent value method where you go and you survey people
and you create rankings and preferences.
Of course, we can criticize this because we know the difference between cardinal and ordinal
values, the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons, and that all of this
falls apart when you try to say, you know, how much does one person enjoy preserving
this building and how much does another?
We can't compare these two things.
Well, similar problems in subjective value occur at museums. If museums are to reflect
the desires of the audiences, they will operate much like a business in the market. However,
we realize that museums aren't entirely profit, right? Some are for non-profit, some are funded
by grants. And those that would exist in the market would only be run by either those which
are grant funded or by those who are willing to pay. Now, public history proposes that
Public museums can get rid of conflict, can present a common past. Well, this we've seen
time and time again is not the case. The examples of conflict in museums, public museums are
manifold. One example is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s in which they tried
to create an exhibit on Harlem and it presented the history of the Jews in Harlem. Well, the
Conflict of course cannot be removed from museums entirely, regardless of who's at work there.
Lastly I want to talk quickly about archives, and I believe that archivists best understands
to the problems of subjective value, because they're constantly making small decisions
about what to keep and what to value. But there's a few problems here with public archives
as well. First of all, we have private archives, institutional archives, which already provide
open access and allow people in the public to place things in their collections. Public
archives can be run with political bias. We see states, former Soviet Union states that
you can't access the collections, etc. And the questions about value in archives are
are still made by individuals. So even if it's publicly funded, you still have bias
in who is creating and controlling the archives. Well, let me go towards closer to my conclusion,
not quite yet. But in valuing the past, in determining the value of an object, whether
Here it's a museum artifact, a collection of newspapers. We have to realize that these
values change from individuals, that they can move and fall, that these are economic
goods characterized as both valuable and scarce, and that historic economic, historic objects
are economic goods because they have this trait of being historic. This is, this is
their value. So this question of who owns the past is both loaded and ambiguous. First
Most it assumes that history can be owned, or that somebody already owns it. But it is
an important distinction here to be made between physical property which can be owned and intangible
ideas which nobody can claim ultimate authority over. So all these talks about who owns the
past and who controls it, I think, are misled. The end goal of presenting the past is in
relating knowledge to the audience. So public historians have to recognize that they can't
Save Everything, there's trade-offs, and in the end, what we believe is important, what we value is what should be saved.
I think the folklorist Henry Glassi put it best, he's a hero of mine, he says,
The reason that we study people
is not to produce more entries for the central file,
or more trinkets from a lord's cabinet of curiosities.
It is to stimulate thought, to assure us that there are things that we do not know,
things that we must know, things
capable of unsettling the world we inhabit.
So to conclude, publicly funded public history
cannot create a common past.
It does not remove conflict over historical interpretation.
Instead, it shifts decision making from the market
to the political sphere.
Public historians are not unself-interested players
in this game.
They seek advantages for themselves
and for their constituent groups.
A misunderstanding of the nature of value
undergirds this framework.
Public history does not represent the people after all, but the subjective values of particular
public historians whose views are acceptable in the public sphere.
Thanks for your patience.