The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy by Daniel Carpenter

Author:Daniel Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the best evidence that bureaucratic innovation was the decisive force behind Smith-Lever comes when we consider the following thought experiment: suppose Congress had never passed the act. What would have happened in its absence? Imagine first that without Smith-Lever extension would not have grown at all beyond its reach in the spring of 1914. Even under this pessimistic forecast, the Knapp-Spillman system would still have covered 41 of 48 states, with 236 county agents in the North and 859 in the South. More than 120,000 farm youth would have been enrolled in boys’ and girls’ clubs, with as many as 50,000 demonstration farms in the South and more than 100,000 cooperating farmers. As many as 12 million visitors would have laid eyes on demonstration farms in the ensuing decade. Moreover, virtually all of the features of extension that eventually were incorporated in the Smith-Lever Act and were already in place by 1914—the county basis of organization, cooperative relations between the USDA and the land-grants, traveling demonstrators with specified demonstration farms, and the county farm bureau—would have remained as mainstays of the system.

A more realistic scenario is to assume that federal extension would have continued growing without statutory help from Smith-Lever, funded instead by the highly discretionary lump-sum monies from Congress, combined with state spending and General Education Board largesse in the South and in New England. Even under the most conservative assumption, as figure 7.1 shows, some aspects of extension would probably have grown faster in the absence of Smith-Lever. Figure 7.1 displays FCDW funding in 1910 dollars from 1904 to 1924. The figure also includes two projections based on the counterfactual that Smith-Lever had not passed and that the pre-1914 funding mechanisms had remained. The first projection is a linear extrapolation. It assumes that the rate of growth in funding after 1914 would have been equal to the average rate of increase from 1904 to 1914. Under these assumptions, FCDW funding would have been larger by an average of more than $150,000 per year in 1910 dollars. Put differently, the department would have employed an average of three hundred more demonstrators per year without Smith-Lever. An alternative projection takes account of the exponential growth pattern of extension funding before the Smith-Lever Act. If this pattern had continued, by the 1920s the USDA would have spent millions of dollars more per year than it actually spent.74

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.