Author(s): | Nash, Gerald D. |
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Reviewer(s): | Hill, Peter J. |
Published by EH.NET (January 2000)
Gerald D. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth
Century West. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999. xvi
+ 214 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8165-1863-7; $17.95 (paper), ISBN:
0-8165-1988-9.
Reviewed for EH.NET by P. J. Hill, Department of Economics, Wheaton
College.
Gerald D. Nash, Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, has
written a survey of the influence of the federal government on the economic
growth of the American West. Nash hypothesizes that the federal government was
the
dominant force that shaped the western economy throughout the twentieth
century and his monograph details that role. The author also fits the region’s
economic history into a larger framework of Kondratieff cycles, arguing that
these cycles explain the successive waves of growth in the western United
States.
Nash provides a useful compendium of the different ways that the national
government influenced the West. He discusses transportation, moving through
railroads, West Coast harbors and rivers, and en ding with automobiles. The
national government also had a substantial impact on agriculture through the
Reclamation Act of 1902 and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. The fact that it
retained ownership of much of the land also affected how agriculture was
organized and the path that agricultural production took.
During World War II, considerable industrial production moved to the West Coast
and after the war urbanization was sped up by housing subsidies and government
investment in city infrastructure. Finally, the increased demand for
recreation and other environmental amenities starting in the 1970s had a
substantial impact upon the western economy.
If one wants a cataloguing of the federal government involvement in the West,
Nash’s book may be an appropriate place to start. However, it is not
particularly useful beyond its descriptive details and even there it is not an
especially strong source. Nash does not have a felicitous writing style and the
overall tone is one of simplistic triumphalism. An appropriate subtitle might
be “How the Federal Government Won the West.” Also, the book is flawed in
several important ways. The use of Kondratieff cycles as the major form of
analysis is not particularly helpful. The author presents no evidence that such
cycles really do exist or that they have any substantial influence upon the
western economy. They are primarily used as a descriptive tool to explain
whatever events Nash wants to describe. It is unfortunate that, in his attempts
to provide a theoretical structure for his work, he drew upon a concept that
plays an insignificant role in most American economic history accounts of the
region.
Second, Nash does not understand comparative advantage and the fact that
through much of its early history it was appropriate for the West to be a
resource intensive economy. He makes repeated references to the colonial status
of the West and finds the move to industrial production advantageous in that it
removed the West’s dependency upon the rest of the economy.
Certainly the scope of the economy widened during the twentieth century,
but it is not accurate to view this as the federal government rescuing the
region from its colonial status.
Finally, Nash assumes that the West was a capital scarce area and that the
investment by the national government was an appropriate response to capital
shortages. He presents no theories as to why private capital was inadequate or
why capital markets were not functioning well in the region.
The federal government is seen primarily as
an agent of positive change in capital markets and little attention is given
to special interests or rent seeking.
The book, while presenting some interesting details about the role of the
federal government in the region, is probably not of great interest to
economic historians. At the most, it can serve as a marginally useful reference
for someone looking for a catalog of federal government projects and influences
in the region.
Peter J. Hill is George F. Bennett Professor of Economics at Wheaton College
and Senior Associate at the Political Economy Research Center. His research
focuses on the evolution of property rights in the American West.
He has published articles in the Southern Economic Journal, the
Journal of Law and Economics, Economic
Inquiry, the Independent Review and other journals. Among his books
is Growth and Welfare in the American Past with Terry Anderson and
Douglass North.
Subject(s): | Economic Planning and Policy |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |