Böcker av Bernard C. Beaudreau

The Oxford Dictionary defines a prophet as..a person who advocates or speaks in a visionary way about a new cause or theory, a definition which describes to a tee, the set of early 20th century authors whose writings on power are presented here. In short, the early 20th century witnessed a power surge, the likes of which the world had never experienced. As power and/or energy is the basis of material civilization, it stands to reason that this surge would surely go on to revolutionize life in general.

In this Volume, the various measures taken by successive Administrations to fully utilize the new-found potential are examined critically. These include the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The readings in this case consist of my own published work on the topic over the course of the past decade. The articles in question set out to do two things, namely situate the relevant policy measure in the appropriate historical context, namely the presence of output gaps, and second, evaluate the efficacy or wisdom of the proposed policy measures. For example, contrary to popular belief, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was a response to growing excess-capacity-related stagnation in the form of unemployment. Evidence is presented which shows that the output gaps referred to above were clearly on the minds of Ranking Republicans at the Kansas City National Convention in June 1928.

The decade of the 1920s is colloquially known as the Roaring Twenties, when modernity came to the U.S. and the World, ushering in a decade of unbounded growth and new-found optimism. GDP growth was particularly strong, as was employment and investment. However, as counterintuitive as it may sound or appear, the 1920s were also years of stagnation, stagnation that owed to the fact that the new, greater potential was not being fully exploited. In other words, while things were great, they still fell short of the potential that had been created, resulting in a form of ?growth stagnation.? That is, stagnation in the midst of what was exceptional growth.Bernard C. Beaudreau is Professor of Economics at Universit? Laval in Quebec, Canada.

Economists and historians have viewed the events of the 1920s, the stock market boom and crash, the Great Depression and the New Deal, as largely independent events.

The First and Second Industrial Revolutions were about energy: steam power revolutionized 19th-century Great Britain and electric power revolutionized 20th-century America.

The result is a model of production based on the two universal factor inputs-broadly defined energy and broadly defined organization. Once the model of production is developed, the book then tests an empirical model with data from U.S., German, and Japanese manufacturing.