Designs Within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933-1945.

• Author: Steindl, Frank G.

By William J. Barber.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. ix, 178. $44.95.

This most interesting, enjoyable book continues William Barber's exploration into the role of economists as they tried to and did influence policy during the Hoover and Roosevelt years. His earlier study, From New Era to New Deal, concentrating on the Hoover administration - takes events to 1933. The present essay continues the story. The subtitle captures the book's purview, the title its thesis.

With Roosevelt coming on the scene in March 1933 - the Depression's trough - the emphasis was on recovery measures. The principal design that emerged out of the plethora of recovery proposals was a home-grown deficit-finance version of 45 degree Keynesianism, with the deficit the policy instrument with which "gaps" - deflationary and inflationary - were to be dealt. This Barber christens as the "official model," one in which there is no place for monetary considerations, much to Fisher's chagrin. The Washington economists, and here Currie as intellectual light and empirical resource and Eccles as pivotal policy advocate are among the most influential, intuited an aggregate demand framework for policy, "an American version of Keynesian doctrine," (p. 128) which later adopted the formal trappings of Keynes as undergirding for their intuition. As for his personal influence, the December 1933 and June 1935 Open Letters to the President and his mid-1934 personal meeting with Roosevelt, Keynes had no impact: he "impressed the president as 'a mathematician rather than a political economist'" (pp. 83-84), one of a number of digs at economists Barber records.

The Americanized macroeconomic approach to recovery came only after the administration's preferred and first all-out recovery policy - the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) planning experiment emanating from Roosevelt's Brains Trust and its National Recovery Administration (NRA) inspired price codes, in which "concentration and control" replace "competition and conflict" - foundered as Tugwell and his structuralist theoreticians increasingly found the rhetoric of the "public interest" and "fairness" with its "balancing of conflicting interests" to bring about "harmonious agreement" more difficult to implement than had been initially thought. The internal inconsistencies and confusions about the purpose and operation of the codes were resolved when the Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional...