The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

59. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, pp. 569, 557–58). 60. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, p. 561).

61. Eichengreen and Garber (1991).

62. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, pp. 583–84).

63. Rockoff (1984, pp. 177–99; 2012, pp. 252–54).

64. Brownlee (2016, pp. 157–58).

65. Hetzel and Leach (2001); Meltzer (2003, pp. 699–712); Stein (1988, pp. 241–80).

66. “[We are making] it possible for the public to convert Government securities into money

to expand the money supply. . . . We are almost solely responsible for this inflation. It is not deficit financing that is responsible because there has been surplus in the Treasury right along; the whole question of having rationing and price controls is due to the fact that we have this monetary inflation, and this committee is the only agency in existence that can curb and stop the growth of money. . . . We should tell the Treasury, the President, and the Congress these facts, and do something about it. . . . We have not only the power but the responsibility. . . . If Congress does not like what we are doing, then they can change the rules” (Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, February 6, 1951, pp. 50–51, quoted in Hetzel and Leach [2001, p. 47]). President Truman had declined to reappoint Eccles as chair of the Board of Governors when his term ended in 1948, but Eccles was still on the Board as vice-chair and continued to be the Board’s intellectual leader.

67. Stein (1988, pp. 272).

Notes to Chapter 8 629

68. The rapid improvement of cataract surgery—beginning about the time Snyder entered the hospital—must count as one of the most dramatic feats of technological change in the twentieth century. Cataract removal is ancient, but quite apart from its danger and long- recuperation time, removal left sufferers with no lens in the eye. Harold Ridley of the Moorfields Hospital in London had noticed that wounded aviators during the war tolerated fragments of windshield plastic in the eye. In 1949, he pioneered the implant of acrylic lenses to replace the clouded natural lenses. Despite determined opposition from the medical establishment, Ridley and other practitioners—whom Stanley Metcalfe and his collaborators call “hero surgeons”— improved surgical techniques and materials over decades of trial-and-error learning within the professional community, eventually aided by private firms in the 1970s and 1980s (Metcalfe, James and Mina 2005). Cataract surgery today is a quick outpatient procedure that typically improves the patient’s visual acuity.

69. Irwin (2019).

70. Van Dormael (1978, p. 95).

71. Boughton (2019).

72. Steil (2013, p. 3).

73. The unpublished paper that Currie and White coauthored in 1932 has been portrayed as

proto-Keynesian, but it was in fact an argument for the monetary causes of the Great Depres- sion (Laidler and Sandilands 2002). Of course, by 1937, White was a convinced Keynesian. The names of Currie and White (or, rather, their codenames) appear conspicuously in the Venona Project decrypts and opened Soviet files, and many scholars consider them, especially White, to have been Soviet spies. Boughton and Sandilands (2003) attempt to cast doubt on this by suggesting that the legitimate words and doings of two important New Dealers were simply being transmitted to Moscow by actual spies, whom they concede to have been numerous among the friends and underlings of Currie and White. Benn Steil (2013) unearthed a document in White’s handwriting that heaped praise on the Soviet economic system, finishing with the exclamation “And it works!” But in fact the entire postwar Keynesian mainstream was fulsome in its praise for the supposed efficiency of the Soviet system (McCloskey 2010, pp. 441–42).

74. Bordo (1993).

75. Keynes (1980, p. 17).

76. Eichengreen (2019).

77. Helleiner (1996, p. 58).

78. This is the title of the reissued e-book version. The original had the more sedate title The

Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana (Mee 1984).

79. Cowen (1985); DeLong and Eichengreen (1993).

80. White (2012, pp. 321–35).

81. Steil (2018, pp. 361–62). The traditional account is that Erhard forced the decontrol of

prices on a reluctant Clay. A widely reprinted anecdote has Erhard telephoning Clay to request permission to lift price controls. “Professor Erhard, my advisors tell me that you are making a big mistake,” said Clay. “So my advisors also tell me,” Erhard replied. By contrast, Steil portrays Clay as imposing decontrol on a reluctant Erhard. The truth is probably that both favored de- regulation (White 2012, p. 231).

82. Morck and Nakamura (2005).

83. Miwa and Ramseyer (2002b, p. 172).

630 Notes to Chapter 8

84. Okazaki (1994).

85. Miwa and Ramseyer (2002a, p. 132).

86. Yamamura (1967).

87. Hamada and Kasuya (1993); Kosai (1988).

88. Minford (1993); White (2012, pp. 174–87). The Labour Party largely occupied the politi-