On the jacket of Alexander Field’s new book A Great Leap Forward, my colleague Greg Clark says this:
As we sit mired in the Great Recession, Alexander Field’s exciting reappraisal of the Great Depression offers surprising solace. By showing the Great Depression was coupled with the most rapid technological advance in U.S. history, he fundamentally recasts the history of the 1930s. But he also offers hope that our own depression likely will have no long-run costs to the U.S. economy.
By measuring total factor productivity (TFP), or the improvement in productivity not accounted for by traditional inputs, Field finds tremendous gains during the Depression. They owe in part to private investment in manufacturing efficiencies, chemical processes, and other technical improvements. Historiographically, there’s a major payoff in showing that the vast majority of such innovation came during the Depression, not during the war.
But (as the bulk of Field’s book is devoted to showing) the productivity improvement owes mostly to construction transportation infrastructure – to the construction of roads, bridges, and all that made the modern trucking industry possible. Field even goes so far as to say the end of the golden age of productivity in the American economy in 1973 “coincides with [he does not quite say owes to] a tapering off of gains from a one-time reconfiguration of the surface freight system in the United States”.
And this massive public investment in infrastructure, which made possible the postwar suburbanization and boom, went along with financial regulation. Field attributes both the current crisis and that of the 1920s to “a failure to control, or really to be interested in controlling, the growth of leverage.” If we want to come out of the Current Unpleasantness with less than a Great Depression to show for it, we’ll have to see regulation that responds accordingly, he says. “If an even more serious crisis occurs within the next decade, it will be because the regulatory response ended up being less effective than that which was summoned during the New Deal.”
Which makes Field sound a lot less optimistic than Greg. The Great Depression turned out relatively well in the long run because we had not only significant private investment in R&D and other improvements, but also the New Deal – road-building and regulation. Do we have that, or anything like it, now?
13 comments
February 15, 2012 at 10:50 am
chris
They owe in part to . . . chemical processes
So we really do have better living through chemistry?
the construction of roads, bridges, and all that made the modern trucking industry possible
ISTM that by this standard, Ike may deserve as much of the credit as FDR. Or is his association with the highway system a red herring?
(Not that it matters for purposes of modern politics — Ike didn’t believe in trying to blow up the New Deal and is therefore, by modern Republican standards, a flaming socialist.)
February 15, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Malaclypse
Slightly off-topic, but my darling daughter’s kindergarten class is now learning about Presidents. We discussed her lesson, and she now knows that the most important thing to remember about Presidents is that Franklin Roosevelt was the best one ever, while Abraham Lincoln was the second-best.
February 15, 2012 at 4:27 pm
eric
Hurray for excellent parenting, Malaclypse.
And chris: Ike deserves some credit, but Field finds the big gains before the war: “By 1941 … the network of national routes that remains with us to this day, although subsequently expanded and paralleled by the interstate system, was essentially complete”.
February 17, 2012 at 8:21 am
ajay
Ike didn’t believe in trying to blow up the New Deal and is therefore, by modern Republican standards, a flaming socialist.
Don’t forget that by the standards some contemporary Republicans he was, at the very least, a Communist dupe…
February 17, 2012 at 8:31 pm
William Adelman
So… a book-length refutation of what everyone now knows to be true: that the war got us out of the previous, lesser, depression. And justification for something we need, but which won’t be hardly enough to make a dent unless we physically bulldoze everything built before the year 2000. Lemme guess, Yale University Press? Yep.
The author: Alexander J. Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University and Executive Director of the Economic History Association.
About Michel and Mary Orradre: (dead link) http://www.scu.edu/business/research/recognition/orradre.cfm
Darn, wayback machine doesn’t have an archived version of the page.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.scu.edu/business/research/recognition/orradre.cfm
Mary Orradre: “Mary was Cattlewoman of the year in 2001, 2005 Ag Woman of the year and the 2011 recipient of the Spirit of Agriculture Award from Monterey County Ag. Education. She has served on the boards of San Ardo School, Monterey County Ag Education, the Grower Shipper Foundation, and on the Community Foundation for Monterey Countyboard. Currently she serves on the Panetta Institute Board”
Get that last bit?
http://www.cfmco.org/index.cfm/id/198/news_id/77/
And what’s going on at the Orradre San Ardo Ranch, exactly? From this, it looks like some hunting. “Life In The Shadows?”
Here we see that it looks like oil is involved:
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2011/jun/23/oil-range/
(But in the article, they talk about her husband “John”. Did she marry a John after Michel/Mike?)
Are Mike and Leon close? Do the Orrandes get to pay tiny taxes because they have wildlife on their oil fields? Zoned Agricultural sort of thing?
Summary: People who look like they have close contact with Leon Panetta, the guy who ran the CIA and is now SecDef despite serving as a lawyer in the army, fund the chair of the economic historian-propagandist fellow who writes a book (published by Yale) that tries to convince us that what really got us out of the previous, lesser, depression, was all the New Deal stuff, which we already know isn’t true. Thus… paving the way for another grand yet ultimately impotent program that enriches friends of the Panettas and Orradres?
February 17, 2012 at 10:05 pm
ari
You forgot the Pentaverate.
February 18, 2012 at 1:16 am
Dave
Whereas you, William, clearly have no friends.
February 18, 2012 at 6:46 am
silbey
You voted for Ron Paul, didn’t you, William?
February 18, 2012 at 10:56 am
William Adelman
Silbey: No. I did, however, help expose his Nazi/Neo-Nazi connections and trace the Paul family name back about 376 years in the Hohenzell-Schluchtern area, raise questions about what business the family was in before dairy farming and preaching, investigate Ulrich von Hutten (the fellow who is said to have inspired Martin Luther) and the small but influential monastery just down the road from where he grew up.
February 18, 2012 at 11:12 am
silbey
And all before 9 am, I assume?
February 18, 2012 at 12:55 pm
William Adelman
{smile}
February 18, 2012 at 3:34 pm
William Adelman
[Deleted for being way off the post topic and generally crazy as well.]
February 19, 2012 at 2:22 am
Peter T
Does he look at the way the war expanded the population of drivers, mechanics, truck factories, oil refineries, logistics experts – therefore made much cheaper and more accessible all the things needed to make roads surface transport work apart from roads?