Big Is Beautiful by Robert D. Atkinson & Michael Lind

Author:Robert D. Atkinson & Michael Lind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: big business; startup; technology; economic growth; productivity; GDP; productivity growth; economic policy; public policy; United States; new business; Progressivism; Jefferson; Brandeis; economic development; Industrial Revolution
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

Instead, electric conveyor belts plus trucking made possible the construction of even larger factories on greenfield sites. The geographic scope of centralized corporations expanded as passenger air travel allowed trips from headquarters to facilities hundreds or thousands of miles away in a day. And vast shopping malls and suburbs sprang up at the intersection of interstate highways, to the horror of Mumford and other proponents of small, walkable, human-scale “garden cities.”

In the late 1960s, Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog followers envisioned a similar blossoming. He wrote that “personal power is developing power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own aspiration, shape his own environment and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”18 Armed with new tools, catalog readers could reestablish themselves as independent artisans and farmers.

The failure of Mumford’s electric cottage society and Brand’s intentional communities to evolve did not prevent the futurist Alvin Toffler from predicting that the third industrial revolution, based on information and communications technology (ICT), would produce “the electronic cottage” in his 1980 book The Third Wave.19 Technology would liberate workers from vast, faceless corporations, allowing them to be connected “entrepreneurs.” While telecommuting has risen slightly, the global trend, as we have seen in earlier chapters, has been toward even larger continental and global corporations and far-flung supply chains united by container shipping and the Internet, with ever-greater concentrations of wealth and income among entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals clustered in a small number of immense “world cities.”

To those developments, adherents of the antimonopoly tradition may reply that, while technological innovation may have permitted the growth first of national and then of transnational firms, technology in itself did not require it. Society, driven by corporate interests supposedly, crafted this result.

While it is true that technology does not directly determine any legal or political outcome, this view fails to take into account the transformative effects on society and the economy of technology-driven productivity growth. A simple thought experiment illustrates this point.

Suppose that, in the twentieth-century, antimonopolists had achieved all of their legislative goals for the American economy. Suppose that the Justice Department had wielded antitrust laws far more aggressively to break up all large and medium-sized companies. Suppose that small companies had received even greater subsidies and protections than they have received to date.

Would most Americans still be small farmers or small craftsmen? The answer is no—as long as the victorious antimonopolist regime permitted labor-saving technology. In our imaginary America run by the intellectual disciples of Brandeis and Mumford, technological productivity would not have manifested itself in larger, more efficient enterprises, thanks to the constant smashing of companies larger than a certain size by the all-powerful antitrust division of the Justice Department. But the mechanization of agriculture and manufacturing still would have led those sectors to shed labor, even if those sectors were artificially divided among numerous small, less efficient firms rather than a few large efficient companies. Tractors still would have replaced field hands; robots still would have replaced assembly-line workers.

The

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