Reviews for Industrial structure, pricing and inflation

The average rating for Industrial structure, pricing and inflation based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-29 00:00:00 Neil Anstett Distilled down to its essence, this is the story of two reports on the business cycle written by prominent economists in the 1920s: "Business Cycles and Unemployment" (1923) and "Recent Economic Changes" (1929). Both reports were written under the aegis of Herbert Hoover, who was assisted in his task by new, supposedly objective, economic think tanks, especially the National Bureau of Economic Research under Harvard Business School founder Edwin Gay. Hoover tried to give these reports further "carrying power" by having them overseen by a prominent and inclusive board of government, labor, and business directors. But these diverse groups had to compromise and therefore attempted to keep the reports to dry statistical compilations with minimal policy recommendations. Not surprisingly, the reports seemed to offer few surprises. They called for more research and better statistics (naturally), which they argued would help individual business managers predict and therefore mitigate upcoming recessions. Unfortunately, the author spends most of the book trying to prove that these reports represent the rise of social science expertise and statistics in government. In fact, this is so obvious and part of a such a clear trend that it's hardly worth mentioning let alone building a book around. This focus also distracts the author from a more enticing story. Namely, that Herbert Hoover worked harder than any politician in American history to predict and prevent depressions, while as President he was hit with the biggest one of all time, and completely failed to stop it. The author wants to make it seem that Hoover's supposedly languid reaction to the Depression was the result of these inconclusive reports. In fact, the author provides hints that the reports contained significant insights into the business cycle that Hoover acted on. Economist Harold Moulton, one of the founders of the Brookings Institute, said the earlier report's real contribution was to prove that there were non-financial causes to depressions. This may itself have distracted Hoover from the financial meltdown he confronted. In any case, how these and other works influenced Hoover remains ambiguous, since the author is so busy trumpeting every "expert" that walks into his story that he paid little attention to what they were actually saying.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-02 00:00:00 Alena Peterson "This New Era planning reflected both the antistatism of American political culture and the modern search for national managerial capabilities. Committed to voluntarism, it embraced the kind of 'individualism' that concentrated private power at the level of the business firm and refused to challenge managerial prerogatives. But it also fixed responsibility for the economy's overall performance at the level of the firm, and sought to educate individual businessmen to respond to the countercyclical prescriptions of social scientists. Such planning was, in effect, a microeconomic approach to macroeconomic coordination, one based on the assumption that if enough managers stabilized their operations along the lines recommended, then the sum of individual decisions, much like the invisible hand of the classical market, would add up to increased productivity, moderation of distributive conflict, and, thus, the collective good." (4) "[T]he war had helped to blur the traditional distinction between advocacy and impartiality. It had enabled economists to demonstrate the utility of their techniques, to fuse science and services, and in the end to establish their professional identity along explicitly technocratic lines." (31-2) "[F]undamental to those designs was a tendency to depoliticize authority, to remove political issues from political processes, and to encourage the determination of public policy within the administrative precincts of technocratic and managerial elites. This approach, be it in the New Era vision or its modern variants, appears capable of acquiring legitimacy in America only when linked to an economic expansion that can sustain the historic compromise between modern managerial impulses and the democratic ideals of mass opportunity and equity." (171)