Reviews for The invisible hand

The average rating for The invisible hand based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-19 00:00:00 Kyle Sellers An overall interesting look at how the Republican Party, once the home of protectionists, became a party of free markets and free trade, or at least inched in that direction, during the McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft administrations. Overall it gets way to bogged down in the details of trade associations lobbying for or against protection (it has lengthy discussions of every president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and even of the different presidents of the National Association for Agriculture Implement and Vehicle Manufacturers (NAAIVM)(which was admittedly crucial in pushing for liberalized trade laws)), but the book is still one of the few comprehensive works I've found on what I think is the great understudied subject of American history, the tariff. It shows how a new "scientific" view of tariffs took hold after frustrations with the McKinley (1890), Wilson (1894), and Dingley (1897) tariffs, which started out in Congress as attempts to reduce rates but ended up raising them after working their way through the House of Representative sausage mill. Also, the "reciprocity" provisions of the Dingley tariff (section 4), which allowed the Senate to pass treaties reducing tariffs with individual countries, failed to prevent specific business opposition to every negotiated reciprocity treaty. In the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, Taft finally got a Tariff Board that investigated costs of production and foreign rates to determine how much industries needed "protection." This would be made permanent in 1916 as the still-existing International Trade Commission (ITC). So, interesting, but I still wish somebody out there would put out a more readable history of this all. Maybe the subject just doesn't lend itself to easy reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-06 00:00:00 Tom Yeo "Land of Desire" traces the rise of American consumer culture since the late 1800's from several viewpoints: individuals purchasing goods, businesses retailing them, advertisers discovering how to spur demand for new items, the entry of fashion into mass marketing, and government encouragement of production and sales. The most interesting parts of the book dealt with the rise of large department stores, and the ways they evolved increasingly effective ways to generate demand for goods that people, initially, expressed no interest in buying. The tone of the book is on the academic side, and often degenerated into recitations of actors or events with little insight into each, but overall I found it interesting enough to finish.