Index Volume XIII – 1979

Abstract:

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 has been typically viewed as being the Republican Party’s policy response to weak farm prices which – via political logrolling – snowballed into a full-fledged, across-the-board tariff bill, wreaking havoc at home and abroad (Irwin 2011; Shattschneider 1935; Taussig 1930). Empirical evidence, however, has failed to confirm this hypothesis (Callahan, McDonald and O’Brien 1994; Destler 1986; Pastor 1980). Rather, voting patterns in the Senate have been consistent with the “party platform” hypothesis. This paper presents an alternative account of the origins of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which is in keeping with the “party platform” hypothesis, and whose results are consistent with the “log-rolling” hypothesis. Specifically, I argue that the demand for protection on the part of U.S. farmers and manufacturers in the late 1920s, and the subsequent supply of protection by the Republican Party, were the direct result of a general-purpose technology shock – namely, electrification whose diffusion throughout the 1920s led to significant excess capacity in manufacturing and agriculture. In manufacturing, more productive firms became increasingly constrained on product markets. The resulting tractorization of U.S. agriculture and the motorization (trucks and automobiles) of transportation throughout the 1920s wreaked havoc on an already weakened agricultural sector (owing to lower post-war exports) by decreasing the demand by 48,294,887 grain- and hayequivalent acres. The proposed tariff bill sought to increase domestic firms’ market share in these industries by reducing imports.     

Index Volume VIII – 1974

This article, written in the first days of the Bush Administration, is part of what will no doubt be a flood of “end of term” assessments of the Reagan era. Much of this work, naturally enough, will be concerned with evaluating the economic record of that administration and discussing the economic legacy inherited by George Bush. This article, however, is a rather different endeavor; it is an attempt by two observers from across the Atlantic to explain the triumph in the United States of supply-side ideas.     

Index Volume XI – 1977

Abstract:

This essay adapts Commons’s model of the legal foundations of capitalism to the peculiar circumstances of the neoliberal era. So doing provides a lens for seeing the steady erosion of state capacity to protect the commonwealth, even in nations with hegemonic currency. Our focus here is on the links between the “triple crisis” of the 1980s and the subprime and foreclosure crisis of the 2000s. We show how Brady bonds, after being used to resolve the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, provided a governing contractual context for subprime lending, and as such constrained the capacity of the U.S. government to respond to a crisis that preyed on the vulnerable, undercut community life, and contracted the commonwealth.     

Volume XXXIV – 2000

In the attempt to deepen the understanding of Keynes' thought as an international macroeconomist, we explore the hypothesis of consistency between his general methodological approach to the economic material and his way of reasoning about international economic relations. As a first step toward this direction, we investigate the methodology of The Economic Consequences of the Peace and find that it reflects Keynes' attempt to cope with the attributes of the complexity characterizing the European settlement for the post-war period, e.g., 1) organic interdependence among variables at play, 2) irreducible dilemmas and situations of conflict, as well as 3) the need for external, public assistance to overcome the impasse and promote a "shared responsibilities" approach to the imbalances. Striking similarities appearing with the method of Keynes' economic diplomacy in the 1940s are shown to substantiate the current rediscovery of his plans for Bretton Woods.