Race,Self-Employment,and Upward Mobility An Illusive American Dream: Response to John Sibley Butler's Review Essay

Small Business Economics -     

JoAnne Yates. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2005. x + 351 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8086-6, $49.95.

Structuring the Information Age delineates the incorporationof the computer into the life insurance bureaucracy and howlife insurance affected the rise of computers. The life insuranceindustry is an excellent choice for a study of how informationtechnology ‘revolutions’ actually are incrementallyappropriated by enterprises and society. Insurance as a financialintermediary depends on information for its existence. Changesin information manipulation fundamentally affect managementpractice. Moreover, it was a large market for producers of businessmachines. The industry     

Andre Millard, ed. The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. x + 215 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7862-4, $45.00 (cloth).

In 1996 the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Studyof Invention and Innovation sponsored a symposium, "Electrified,Amplified, and Deified: The Electric Guitar, Its Makers, andIts Players." This book distills and amplifies the scholarshipin that encounter between researchers, innovators, and practitioners.The editor takes up where speakers left off and contributesthe introduction, conclusion, and five of nine chapters. Millardmakes a case for the electric guitar as a totem of modern Americanculture. Intended for the general     

Kent H. Hughes. Building the Next American Century: The Past and Future of American Economic Competitiveness. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005. xxiii + 542 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8204-4, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8018-8203-6, $24.95 (paper).

It is paradoxical that the United States, a nation so recentlytriumphant in the Cold War, should be so gripped by anxietyabout its economic future. A burgeoning national debt and ayawning current account deficit, among other pressures, obligeAmericans to question how—and if—the next one hundredyears will bring another "American Century." Into this debatesteps longtime Washington insider Kent H. Hughes, who sets outwith the ambitious agenda of considering "America’s economicfuture and its economic past" while seeking to define a     

Laura Hein. Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan. Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, Calif.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and University of California Press, 2004. xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-520-24347-1, $45.00.

Laura Hein begins this engaged and original study by notingthe greater economic sophistication of Japanese than of Americanstoday—and one need only browse the extensive popular economicssection of any Japanese bookstore or look at the use of economiccharts and statistics in Japanese print and television newsto see that this is so. To achieve national economic literacywas a major goal of the tight-knit cohort of progressive economistswho are the subject of Hein’s book. Why then,     

Mark Aldrich. Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xvi + 446 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8236-2, $59.95 (paper).

This is an excellent narrative of the evolution of public andindustry focus on industrial safety. It is subtitled "accidentsand safety" because accidents played a very public role of focusingattention on particular problems (e.g., brakes, bridge design,rail failures, and explosions of hazardous materials). By lookingat accidents and safety, Aldrich develops four key themes thathe weaves throughout the narrative. Aldrich’s economicanalysis, much of which is contained in the notes and in thirtypages of     

Gijs Mom. The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiii + 423 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7138-7, $54.95.

Automotive historians have long dismissed the electric vehicle;who would want a car with limited speed that had to be rechargedevery hundred miles? But in 1905, Gijs Mom reminds us, "morethan half of all commercial vehicles in the United States wereelectric powered," and by 1940 tens of thousands of electriccars and trucks had been produced (pp. 206, 265). In the UnitedStates and Europe, electric vehicles appeared as taxicabs, deliveryvans, and even fire engines, as     

Kevin Binfield. Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xxviii + 279 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7612-5, $49.95 (cloth).

On the whole this volume offers more than its title suggests.Kevin Binfield has collected and annotated a wide array of textsconcerning not only the specific activities of the Ludditesbut also the wider economic and political contention of the1810s. He takes as his purpose the "textual recovery" of workingpeoples’ rhetorical strategies from the Luddite era. Todo this, he has thoroughly scoured national, county, and cityarchives, local newspapers, collections of several major businesses     

Thomas A. Kinney. The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xi + 381 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7946-9, $49.95 (cloth).

Although ‘horse and buggy’ usually connotes a quainticon of the preindustrial world, The Carriage Trade by ThomasA. Kinney shows that horse-drawn vehicles were anything butquaint. Carriage and wagon making was a major nineteenth-centuryindustry, employing by 1890 130,000 employees in 13,000 firmsproducing $200 million in value (p. 262). These firms were leadersin production, management, and marketing innovations. Kinney’sstraightforward account shows how mechanization, interchangeability,and rationalization changed the nature of     

Marina Moskowitz. Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii + 300 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7947-7, $45.00.

In Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in ModernAmerica, Marina Moskowitz seeks to elucidate a term that cameinto broad usage at the turn of the twentieth century but seemedto have no clear definition. Sociologists, journalists, novelists,and government officials alike all referred to the "standardof living," yet they did not necessarily agree on just whatthat standard was. Moskowitz argues that the standard of livingwas a measure not of how     

Helen Tangires. Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiii + 263 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7133-6, $45.00 (cloth).

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century Americaexplores and extols the role of municipally owned markets insupplying food to the nation’s urban centers. Helen Tangiresdraws data and examples from around the country, but New Yorkand Philadelphia provide her core case studies. Tangires tracesher interest in public markets to childhood experiences witha family lunch wagon in Baltimore, which doubtless contributesto the enthusiastic warmth she brings to this study. It mayalso encourage some sentimentality     

Sean Patrick Adams. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv + 305 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7968-X, $45.00.

In this superbly crafted study Sean Adams compares the developmentof the coal industry in Virginia and Pennsylvania before theCivil War. The comparative method allows Adams to focus hisanalysis around a seemingly simple question: Did Pennsylvania’smore open and democratic state government create a more efficientinstitutional framework than Virginia’s planter-dominatedlegislature? Posing this question allows Adams to avoid somewhatstale debates about whether large numbers of slaves could workin manufacturing, or if anticapitalist planters opposed industrialization.     

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In