essays about american economy

We should not accept social life as it has “trickled down to us,” the young journalist Walter Lippmann wrote soon after the twentieth century began. “We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization. . . educate and control it.” The ambition to harness and organize the energies of modern life of which Lippmann spoke cut through American economy, politics, and society in many different, sometimes contradictory ways between 1900 and 1929, but it left virtually none of its major institutions unchanged. The modern business corporation, modern politics, the modern presidency, a modern vision of the international order, and modern consumer capitalism were all born in these years. More than in most eras, Americans in the first years of the twentieth century felt the newness of their place in history. Looking back on the late nineteenth century, they stressed its chaos: the boom-and-bust cycles of the economy, the violent and exploitative aspects of its economy and social life, the gulf between its ostentatious new wealth and the lot of its urban poor and hard-pressed farmers, and the inefficiency of American politics in a world of great nations. A Revolution in Organization The pioneers in the reorganization of social life on more deliberate and systematic lines were the architects of the modern business corporation. In the aftermath of the 1890s depression, they undertook to supplant the unstable partnership and credit systems of the past with the forms of the modern corporation: broadly capitalized, more intensely managed, and national in scope and market. The reorganization of Andrew Carnegie’s iron and steel empire by the J. P. Morgan banking house into the mammoth US Steel Corporation in 1901 was a sign of the trends to come. By the 1920s, corporate giants in production, communications, finance, life insurance, and entertainment dominated the.
Author(s):Fogel, Robert W.Reviewer(s):Davis, Lance Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964. xv + 296 pp. Review Essay by Lance Davis, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology. led@hss.caltech.edu For those of us who lived through the exciting days of the “cliometric revolution,” the publication of Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth represented a very major milestone – it was as if we now had proof that we had left the bumpy and unpaved dirt road of the first few years and could see ahead a straight and well-paved highway into the future. (See note 1.) The roots of “clio” clearly lay in the 1956 publication of Cary Brown’s “Fiscal Policy in the Thirties: A Reappraisal” and, a few months later, in Alfred Conrad and John Meyer’s initial presentation of “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.” Brown showed that, unlike the findings of the then-current historiography, government economic policy during the 1930’s was not an example of President Roosevelt’s imaginative application of the modern tools of Keynesian fiscal policy; and Conrad and Meyer demonstrated that, despite nearly a century of traditional historiography, ante-bellum slavery was profitable and, at least by implication, that, if the goal was to eliminate slavery before the 1940’s, the Civil War was not an extremely costly and totally unnecessary enterprise. However, these findings – findings that have been well substantiated by later research – while convincing to the small cadre of “converted,” were still not generally accepted by the historical profession. Thus, cliometrics did not really begin to flower until the publication of Robert Fogel’s study of the impact of railroads on American growth in the nineteenth century. Not only did it generate a spate.
In this work Professor Fogel has dealt some devastating blows to many widely held beliefs about the magnitude of the railroads' contribution to the development of the American economy during the last century. He is additionally skeptical of W. W. Rostow's thesis about the take-off period between 1843 and 1860 when presumably this nation moved into self-sustained growth. Some of the findings of the book will not be new to economic historians who have read earlier efforts of Professor Fogel, especially A Quantitative Approach to the Study of Railroads in American Economic Growth which appeared in the Journal of Economic History in June, 1962. Scattered writings of other economists and historians have given inklings of the thesis to which the author devoted himself. All this, however, is scarcely preparation for the frontal assault. A reading of the Preface is likely to cow a skeptic. Fogel has acknowledged help from so many outstanding minds in economics and history that a timid reader will be overwhelmed by the opposition and reluctant to question the findings. Beyond this, Professor Fogel has anticipated rejoinders of critics. Within the book, and especially in the final section, he deals with expected objections with great certitude, skill, and perspective. Fogel sets out to question the axiom of indispensability of the railroads, and he refuses to accept the thesis that the railroads were largely responsible for much of the nation's development, especially that of the agricultural West. He is skeptical about the value of the chronological record of railroad achievements and about early utterances of railroad officials as well as those of contemporary scholars. Fogel sets out with modern statistical techniques and mathematical models to ascertain what the contribution of the railroads was in the last century, especially as it relates to agricultural commodities. In.