The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

269. Tooze (2007).

270. Kennedy (1999, p. 726).

271. For a recent example of the business-won-the-war narrative, see Herman (2012); for the

critique see Wilson (2016).

272. Hooks (1991b, p. 95).

273. Rose, Houghton, and Blair (1946, p. 48). 274. Wilson (2016, p. 153).

275. Janeway (1951, p. 169).

276. Hooks (1991a, pp. 146–47).

Chapter 8: The Corporate Era

1. Clark (1944, p. 5).

2. Goodwin (1989).

3. The literature on Keynes is of course massive. I recommend the analysis of Axel Leijon-

hufvud (1968), who provides his own distinctive interpretation. For a concise and accurate treatment, see White (2012, pp. 126–54).

4. Goodwin (1989, p. 94).

5. Skidelsky (1979, p. 32).

6. White (2012, p. 136).

7. Skidelsky (1979, p. 32).

8. Backhouse (2017, p. 383).

9. Meltzer (2003, p. 609).

10. Taylor, Basu, and McLean (2011, p. 445).

11. Samuelson (1943, p. 51, emphasis in original). In the same edited volume, Samuelson’s

former Harvard professor Joseph Schumpeter predicted the opposite. Consumer wants would be “so urgent and calculable that any postwar slump that may be unavoidable would speedily give way to a reconstruction boom. Capitalist methods have proved equal to much more diffi- cult tasks” (Schumpeter 1943, p. 121).

Notes to Chapter 8 627

12. Wilson (2016, pp. 193–94).

13. Although the military was generally seen as favoring big business, in many cases contract terminations had the opposite effect. GM’s Frigidaire Division gladly stopped making the .50 caliber machine gun so it could return to making refrigerators, leaving the military market to small players like Colt and Savage Arms (Wilson 2016, p. 195).

14. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, p. 574).

15. Gordon (2016, p. 536).

16. Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “What Was the U.S. GDP Then?” Measuring

Worth, http://www.measuringworth.org/usgdp/ (accessed August 9, 2022). 17. Rockoff (1998, p. 82).

18. Higgs (1992).

19. Rockoff (1998, p. 83).

20. In the event, Americans consumed slightly less literal butter in 1944 than in 1939, but they consumed more ice cream (Rockoff 1998, p. 93).

21. Mitchener and Mason (2010).

22. Gordon (2016, p. 537).

23. Higgs (1999).

24. Taylor, Basu, and McLean (2011, p. 446).

25. I return below to arguments about urbanization and human-capital formation.

26. The pipelines were crucial during the war because German submarines had effectively

shut down the coastal tankers that carried oil from the Gulf to the Northeast. After the end of the submarine threat, however, oil companies once again began to ship the vast majority of the oil in tankers despite the availability of the pipelines (Field 2022).

27. Field (2008, p. 692).

28. Lilley et al. (1947, pp. 54–55).

29. Levinson (2016, p. 25).

30. Wilson (2016, p. 196).

31. Gordon (1969, p. 234).

32. Wilson (2016, p. 200).

33. Hooks (1991, p 159).

34. Morris (1989); Solo (1953).

35. Chapman (1991, p. 75).

36. Morris (1989).

37. Solo (1954). Although General Tire ran GOCO facilities, the company made sure not to

install its innovations at government-owned facilities to avoid having to share the intellectual property. General contracted with a Canadian company instead. Even when innovations re- sulted from government contracts, firms were reluctant to use them in the GOCO plants.

38. The extent to which we can consider atomic energy a civilian technology is open to question.

39. Davies and Stammers (1975) provide one list. As Mowery (2010, p. 1225) notes, “most economic historians assess the effects of war on technological innovation as largely negative.”

40. Graham (1986, p. 59). The NDRC funded television research by RCA and others in the hope of using the technology for guided missiles and bombs, little of which was ready by the end of the war. For this purpose, RCA developed the image orthicon tube with government

628 Notes to Chapter 8

funding. But after the war, it turned out that the older prewar orthicon tube was superior for commercial uses (Bannister 2001, pp. 133–66).

41. It is true, however, that wartime work on crystal rectifiers proved useful in transistor research after the war (Hoddeson 1994).

42. Zachary (1997, pp. 270–71).

43. Stern (1981, p. 15).

44. It took anywhere from a half hour to an entire day to “replug” the machine for a new

calculation (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray 1996, p. 91).

45. The machine had been proposed by Howard Aiken of Harvard for use in scientific cal-

culation. IBM supported it largely to further its research connection with Harvard, and did not expect it to lead to a commercial product (Cohen 1999, p. 83).

46. Ridley (2020, p. 196).

47. Gross (2020).

48. Bush (1945).

49. Kevles (1977, p. 344); Zachary (1997, p. 327). 50. Kevles (1977, p. 358).

51. Rosenberg and Nelson (1994, pp. 334–35). 52. Mowery (2010, p. 1229).

53. Merges and Nelson (1990).

54. Nelson and Wright (1992, p. 1953).

55. Field (2008, p. 673). Field (2022) elaborates on this point. 56. Higgs (1999, pp. 609–10).

57. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, p. 561)

58. Rockoff (1998, p. 108).