The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences

by Edited by Mary O. Furner , Barry Supple

• ISBN13: 9780521523158
• ISBN10: 052152315X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book adresses an important but inadequately recognized dimension of the activities of the modern state - the role it plays in producing the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for economic policy-making. The traditional assumption, which this collection of essays challenges, is that despite this profound dependence governments have generally acted as passive consumers of whatever ideas economists in the private sector and professions had to offer. This book brings together papers from an Anglo-American conference, held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, that reveal the ways in which modern states have helped to generate new economic changes, specific political institutions, and ideological contexts. The approach is comparative, focusing on developments in modern Great Britain and the United States.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Michael J. Lacey	xiii
Part I. The state and the uses of economic knowledge
1 Ideas, institutions, and state in the United States and Britain: an introduction
Mary O. Furer and Barry Supple	3	(37)
The problem	4	(7)
Some categories of economic knowledge	11	(15)
Knowledge and institutions	26	(14)
2 Economic knowledge and government in Britain: some historical and comparative reflections
Donald Winch	40	(33)
The nineteenth-century legacy	41	(5)
Academic recognition and public service	46	(8)
The interwar state and economic knowledge: technocratic possibilities and hopes	54	(7)
Some Anglo-American comparisons	61	(6)
Ideas and action	67	(6)
Part II. The state and economic performance
3 Liberty by design: freedom, planning, and John Quincy Adams's American System
John Lauritz Larson	73	(30)
Adams's message	76	(3)
Adams's meaning	79	(5)
Inheriting the Revolution	84	(5)
Reaction in 1825	89	(8)
Liberty without design	97	(6)
4 Government as a laboratory for economic learning in the years of the Democratic Roosevelt
William J. Barber	103	(35)
The administration and the state of the art, 1933-1936	104	(8)
The recession of 1937-1938 and its intellectual fallout	112	(8)
Consolidation of the Keynesian beachheads in 1940	120	(2)
Girding for war in 1941	122	(6)
Economic argument in the environment of all-out mobilization	128	(5)
The American Keynesians and their vision of postwar planning	133	(2)
The educational legacy of a dozen years	135	(3)
5 The emergence of economic growthmanship in the United States: federal policy and economic knowledge in the Truman years
Robert M. Collins	138	(33)
The policy context: from the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance, 1932-1946	139	(7)
The Council of Economic Advisers and the emergence of economic growthmanship, 1946-1952	146	(9)
The policy-knowledge interface	155	(13)
Perspectives and conclusions	168	(3)
6 The Treasury's analytical model of the British economy between the wars Peter Clarke	171	(37)
The role of the Treasury	173	(35)
Treasury personnel	175	(2)
The orthodox theory	177	(12)
Changing the premises	189	(14)
Conclusion	203	(5)
7 Old dogs and new tricks: the British Treasury and Keynesian economics in the 1940's and 1950's
George C. Peden	208	(33)
The "old dogs"	210	(4)
The "new tricks"	214	(4)
Policy-making, 1940-1945	218	(5)
Policy-making, 1945-1951	223	(4)
Policy-making, 1951-1959	227	(5)
The compilation of economic data	232	(2)
Microeconomic aspects of policy	234	(2)
Conclusion	236	(5)
Part III. Industrial maturity and economic policy
8 Knowing capitalism: public investigation and the labor question in the long Progressive Era
Mary O. Furer	241	(46)
Economic knowledge and the American New Liberalism	242	(4)
Carroll Wright, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the limits of state power	246	(22)
The United States Industrial Commission and the corporatist vision	268	(6)
The Commission on Industrial Relations and democratic collectivism	274	(10)
Ideological systems in tension	284	(3)
9 Economic inquiry and the state in New Era America: antistatist corporatism and positive statistu in uneasy coexistence
Ellis W. Hawley	287	(38)
The context	288	(5)
The Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1922-1930	293	(6)
The National Bureau of Economic Research, 1920-1930	299	(8)
Tension and conflict	307	(6)
Recent economic changes	313	(7)
The 1920's in perspective	320	(3)
Conclusion	323	(2)
10 Official economic inquiry and Britain's industrial decline: the first fifty years
Barry Supple	325	(29)
Industrial performance and economic axioms	326	(4)
Maturity, competition, and free trade	330	(7)
The audit of war	337	(3)
Industrial structures and economic performance between the world wars	340	(4)
Industrial economics and structural dislocation	344	(2)
Regional economic policy	346	(5)
Industrial maturity, politics, and economics	351	(3)
11 Economic ideas and government policy on industrial organization in Britain since 1945
Leslie Hannah	354	(25)
Industrial policy	354	(1)
British antitrust policy	355	(5)
The economist class	360	(3)
Electricity: nationalization and privatization	363	(8)
Conclusions and further research	371	(8)
Part IV. Economic knowledge and social action
12 Economic knowledge and British social policy
Jose Harris	379	(22)
The problem	379	(2)
Definition, convergence, and tension	381	(2)
Theory and policy: an erratic relationship	383	(4)
The "sovereignty" of facts	387	(4)
The culture of policy: four epochs	391	(10)
13 Economists and the formation of the modern tax system in the United States: the World War I crisis
W. Elliot Brownlee	401	(35)
Taxation and economic knowledge before World War I	402	(5)
Anticorporate, statist taxation and Thomas S. Adams	407	(4)
Seligman versus Adams	411	(4)
The state investigates	415	(6)
The victory of "progressive capitalism"	421	(8)
Tax reform under "progressive capitalism"	429	(5)
Economic knowledge and the modern state	434	(2)
14 Population, economists, and the state: the Royal Commission on Population, 1944-1949
Jay M. Winter	436	(25)
Population decline: some European initiatives in the 1930's	439	(6)
The British debate in the 1930's	445	(4)
Population and World War II: the origins of the Royal Commission	449	(1)
The Royal Commission and its Economics Committee	450	(8)
Conclusions and implications	458	(3)
About the authors	461	(4)
Index	465