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This book illuminates the role of technological stagnation in the decline of the American electric utility industry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike other interpreters of the industry's woes, Professor Hirsh argues that a long and successful history of managing a conventional technology set the stage for the industry's deterioration. After improving steadily for decades, the technology that brought unequalled productivity growth to the industry appeared to stall in the late 1960s, making it impossible to mitigate the economic and regulatory assaults of the 1970s. Unfortunately, most managers did not recognize (or did not want to believe) the severity of the technological problems they faced, and they chose to focus instead on issues (usually financial or public relations) that appeared more manageable. Partly as a result of this lack of attention to technological issues, the industry found itself in the 1980s challenged by the prospects of deregulation and restructuring.
"Challenging traditional scholarship on the New Deal, the book reinterprets the history of rural electrification. It tells the previously unacknowledged story of how private power companies, with allies in land-grant universities, engendered social and technical innovations in the 1920s and early 1930s that enabled growing numbers of farmers to obtain electrical service, well before the creation of Depression-era government programs"--
Argues that the US Navy's commitment to high-steam propulsion for its World War II fleet was a tactical, technological, and bureaucratic failure
The major American industries—agriculture, petroleum, electricity, banking, telecommunications, movies, college sports, airlines, health care, and the beer, cigarette, and automotive industries—intersect our lives every day. Studying these industries raises a number of economic questions: How are the individual industries organized and structured? What is their history? What are the dominant organizations in each field, and what share of their market do they represent? What is the nature of competition in these fields, and how effectively does it govern economic decision making? The nature of these industries also raises a host of public policy challenges: What significant policy issues do they pose, what options are available for addressing them, and what role can and should the government play? Unlike other books that offer economic treatments focused on theoretical expositions and analyses, the thirteenth edition addresses all these questions in a manner that treats each industry in a comprehensive, holistic way. Brock’s approach focuses on everyday experience, enhancing readers’ understanding through examples that emphasize incident and detail. Each chapter, written by an expert in the field, has been updated or rewritten for this edition. A new chapter on the movie industry has been added as well. This outstanding overview of American industry offers the reader a live laboratory of clinical examination and comparative analysis.
In the winter of 1996, after 4 years of planning and research, the Symposium on the Virtual Utility was held in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was sponsored by Niag ara Mohawk Power Corporation, Co-sponsored by CSC Index and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and hosted by Rensselaer Poly technic Institute, Troy, NY. The symposium sought to identify new areas of inquiry by presenting cutting-edge academic and practitioner research intended to further our understanding of the strategic, technologically-driven issues confronting the elec tricity production and distribution process. The program sought to offer new in sights into rapid changes in the utility industry, in part, by examining analogues from manufacturing and telecommunications. In addition to identifying new research areas, the symposium yielded a number of important findings and conclusions. This volume contains the presented papers of the meeting, the discussant reports and two special papers prepared by the meet ing rapporteurs who performed superbly in analyzing, synthesizing, explaining and generally bringing a cohesive perspective to the interesting yet complex set of ideas presented at this unique meeting. We would like to acknowledge the people and organizations that contributed to this effort. We thank Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation and Albert Budney, its President & Chief Operating Officer for sponsoring this project, and Andrew Vesey, Vice President, I whose vision, support and championing made this project possible.
Americans continually cross paths with major industries that comprise the U.S. economy. These industries face and raise challenging issues that in turn generate important economic questions: How are individual industries organized and structured? What share of their market do they represent? What are the major public policy issues they affect? What are the economic consequences of addressing them? A single text examining every industry would provide a disjointed, haphazard analysis. The case-study approach taken in The Structure of American Industry avoids such shortcomings. The expert author of each case studyfourteen in allpresents a comprehensive and coherent analysis of a specific industry. The holistic, in-depth treatment sparks lively interest, does not succumb to theoretical abstractions, and offers practical answers to economic questions.
Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet - the "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century. The steam engine; the incandescent bulb; the electric motor-inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. The cast of characters includes inventors like James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen like J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, bare-knuckled battles in the marketplace. In Klein's hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat--a biography of America in its most astonishing decades.
This book takes on a central quandary in the study of energy and environmental policy: What myths continue to exist in American culture concerning energy, the environment, and society? It enrolls twenty-four of the nation’s top experts working on energy policy to debunk and contextualize thirteen energy myths relating to electric power, renewable energy, energy efficiency, transportation, and climate change. The book will appeal to an international audience.
"Contextualizes and analyzes the key energy transitions in U.S. history and the central importance of energy production and consumption on the American environment and in American culture and politics"--