By Frank Dobbin

The USA, France, and Britain use markedly other kinds of commercial guidelines to foster fiscal development. to appreciate the origins of those assorted guidelines, this e-book examines the evolution of public rules governing one of many first glossy industries, the railroads. the writer demanding situations traditional pondering in economics, political technology, and sociology by means of arguing that cultural which means performs a big function within the improvement of purportedly rational regulations designed to advertise business development. This booklet has implications for the learn of rational associations of all kinds, together with technology, administration, and economics, in addition to for the examine of tradition.

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Additional info for Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age

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Neither state nor local governments employed accounting staffs, who might have warned them that they were making financial commitments they would not be able to honor. The results were dramatic. Local governments in twenty-five states defaulted on their obligations to railroads. In the years after the Civil War, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota failed to make good on their obligations, and eight Southern states defaulted on Reconstruction-Era railway bonds (Cleveland and Powell 1909, p.

By contrast, the French saw myriad problems with allowing private railroads to establish their own technical and managerial guidelines. Entrepreneurs would sacrifice safety, dependability, speed, and everything else that was in the nation's interest - to cost. Market mechanisms would encourage this sort of behavior. In all technical matters, then, the French saw private decision authority as problematic because it would undermine efficiency and fail to serve the nation. British policymakers came closer to their American counterparts.

In so doing they developed greater coordinative capacities than they might have otherwise (Chandler 1977). In practice, then, expertise in railway administration (rate setting, scheduling, and so on) that arose in the public sector in most European nations rose in the offices of privately held railroads in the United States. One consequence was that Americans increasingly understood industrial growth to be the province of the private sector, for state action always seemed to end in corruption and the railways got along quite well without state oversight.

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