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jimmacsyr's review against another edition
2.0
Interesting discussion on the uses of sabotage, but other than that... I have no idea how this book has any relevance, or is part of any serious discussion on economics.
The book focuses solely on price, while ignoring any discussion of the more relevant topics of cost, supply, demand, and especially profit. After an interesting review of management divisions, the author then supposes that the technical team can develop a more efficient system, without any method of determining demand.
The book focuses solely on price, while ignoring any discussion of the more relevant topics of cost, supply, demand, and especially profit. After an interesting review of management divisions, the author then supposes that the technical team can develop a more efficient system, without any method of determining demand.
kevin_carson's review against another edition
4.0
This was an excellent book in many ways, and an indispensible part of the Institutionalist canon. It's certainly useful for analyzing the largely tacit institutional assumptions behind marginalist economics and the power relations it conceals.
Its main drawbacks result from Veblen's shared technological assumptions with the vulgar Marxists (and with Galbraith and Chandler, for that matter). He takes at face value the received doctrine tying capital-intensiveness, size, and centralization to productivity, and assumes that the capital-intensiveness and scale of American industry is the neutral result of objective technological imperatives toward increased efficiency. From this it follows that chronic problems of idle capacity, and the capitalists' consequent resort either to restrictions on ouput or to waste production as a remedy, are simply an issue of the irrational and backwards of the capitalist price system interacting with technologies of abundance that no longer fit within their "capitalist integument" or the existing "relations of production."
In fact the mass production model was by no means the objectively most efficient model for the second industrial revolution (i.e. the integration of electrically powered machinery into manufacturing), in terms of the ratio of material inputs to outputs. It was one competing model that was chosen because it was the most efficient at promoting what James Scott calls "legibility," and ease of labor discipline and surplus extraction.
In terms of purely material efficiency, arguably, a preferable model would have been the industrial district model of Kropotkin, Mumford, and Borsodi: integrating electrically powered, general-purpose craft tools into job-shop production near the point of consumption, frequently switching between product lines on a lean basis.
Mass production, on the other hand -- an industrial model based on extremely expensive, product-specific machinery -- required long production runs to fully utilize capacity, amortize capital outlays and minimize unit costs. This meant production undertaken without regard to preexisting orders, and an entire society organized around supply-push distribution to guarantee consumption of the output.
So the chronic idleness of mass-production industry was not, as Veblen assumed, the result of its generic technological superiority exceeding the ability of capitalist productive relations to cope with. It was the result of a technological system which was itself irrational, undertaken to serve capitalism's perverse institutional requirements.
Its main drawbacks result from Veblen's shared technological assumptions with the vulgar Marxists (and with Galbraith and Chandler, for that matter). He takes at face value the received doctrine tying capital-intensiveness, size, and centralization to productivity, and assumes that the capital-intensiveness and scale of American industry is the neutral result of objective technological imperatives toward increased efficiency. From this it follows that chronic problems of idle capacity, and the capitalists' consequent resort either to restrictions on ouput or to waste production as a remedy, are simply an issue of the irrational and backwards of the capitalist price system interacting with technologies of abundance that no longer fit within their "capitalist integument" or the existing "relations of production."
In fact the mass production model was by no means the objectively most efficient model for the second industrial revolution (i.e. the integration of electrically powered machinery into manufacturing), in terms of the ratio of material inputs to outputs. It was one competing model that was chosen because it was the most efficient at promoting what James Scott calls "legibility," and ease of labor discipline and surplus extraction.
In terms of purely material efficiency, arguably, a preferable model would have been the industrial district model of Kropotkin, Mumford, and Borsodi: integrating electrically powered, general-purpose craft tools into job-shop production near the point of consumption, frequently switching between product lines on a lean basis.
Mass production, on the other hand -- an industrial model based on extremely expensive, product-specific machinery -- required long production runs to fully utilize capacity, amortize capital outlays and minimize unit costs. This meant production undertaken without regard to preexisting orders, and an entire society organized around supply-push distribution to guarantee consumption of the output.
So the chronic idleness of mass-production industry was not, as Veblen assumed, the result of its generic technological superiority exceeding the ability of capitalist productive relations to cope with. It was the result of a technological system which was itself irrational, undertaken to serve capitalism's perverse institutional requirements.
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