James Wilson's Epistle

[William S. Lear]

On Thursday, February 25, 1999 at 02:58:17 (-0500) Rakesh Bhandari writes:
>...
>But Schumpeter's explanations for the Great Depression were pretty
>irrational. He tended to blame the whole descent from recession to
>depression on the New Deal (he claimed to hate anything that smacked of
>planned economy, only to later embrace monopoly control of the economy),
>though he forgot that Depression had taken hold of European states where
>public spending was even less aggressive (Switzerland?).

Where does he blame the Depression on the New Deal?  In *Cap, Soc,
Dem*?  Blaming the Depression on the New Deal is beyond irrational,
it's downright idiotic.


>Not at all. We still have not explored the reasons for this mind boggling
>centralisation of capital, the significance of the deals being mostly in
>stocks, and the effects we can expect. It seems that the American author to
>study is  Frederic Scherer, author of the leading textbook on industrial
>structure.

I think also worth mentioning are Alfred Chandler's heroic but
extremely important *The Visible Hand* (Harvard University Press,
1977), William Lazonick's *Business Organization and the Myth of the
Market Economy* (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Walter Adams
and James Brock (eds.), *The Structure of American Industry*, 9th
edition (Prentice-Hall, 1995).

Bill