(2022-11-10) Slouching Omission Mishandling The Theme Of The Industrial Research Laboratory

Brad DeLong: “Slouching” Omission: Mishandling the: Theme of the Industrial Research Laboratory: First Edition. Arthur Goldhammer has a withering critique of how the theme of the industrial research lab is developed—or, rather, left undeveloped in the book (Slouching Toward Utopia).

I'm thinking not just of the Manhattan Project but also of the MIT Radiation Lab, Lawrence's lab at Berkeley, Bell Labs, etc. University science scaled up to industrial magnitude, while industry opened itself up to basic research as never before.

sociological transformation of big science by postwar projects such as the SAGE radar system, early computer systems such as ENIAC and UNIVAC (which long predated integrated circuits), the development of FORTRAN, etc. The Edison/Tesla duality is not enough to capture the complexity of this nascent knowledge economy

He is correct.

Yes, the “varieties of capitalism” literature is shamefully neglected—Hall and Soskice, Esping-Anderson, and all their company. I feel particularly bad about this because Peter A. Hall was one of the two people who gave me my summa

there are many other figures who ought to be as prominent in the book as Karl Polanyi and FA Hayek are:

• Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, & Alasdair Macintyre on science and “rationality”
• Michael Polanyi, Vaclav Smil, & Davis Landes on science and technology
• David Landes, Alfred Chandler, and Peter Drucker on technology & the corporation
• Josef Schumpeter, Theodore Veblen, & Ronald Coase on corporations & industries
• Karl Popper, Walter Lippmann, & Thomas Dewey on hopes for rational self-government
• William Beveridge on the taming of inequality through public provision and wealth redistribution
• A.C. Pigou & John Maynard Keynes on light-fingered and soft-touch central planning as ways of aligning the imperatives of the market with the needs of society