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Week 3

The book for this week, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, was written in a distinctly different manner than last week’s book.  This week the material felt more historically grounded and I felt more comfortable reading it, though parts of the book were difficult for me to grasp, not having a background in economics.  While the biographical book of last week was easier, conventionally, to read and probably appeals to a much wider audience than does Chandler’s book, I have become accustomed to reading certain kinds of history books and The Visible Hand fit that mold better.

 

The differences between the two books were vast.  While the author of last week’s book decided to write his book using the historical ‘great man/woman’ theory, this week’s selection, while it certainly discussed important players of the time, was more concerned with the general trend of the family/bank owned business turning toward the manager based business.  While their arguments were not contradictory, they were not entirely related either.  As they were not discussing the same time period, however, this is not entirely unexpected.

 

The aspect about this class that I am enjoying is the amount of knowledge that I feel I am gaining.  The probable cause for this is because I had so little knowledge of economics before.  This has been a mixed blessing because while I feel as though I am learning a ton, I also feel that I do not already know enough to fully participate.  This week's book, for example, discussed the "unseen hand" of the marketplace.  I think that if I would have helped me understand the reverse to that theory.  Though it was not really a reverse theory just a theory of how the "invisible hand" market evolved.

Week 2

The reading for this week was immensely informative.  It is important to remember that while the United States was dealing with the failure of the banking system over here, the same thing was happening in much of Europe.

 

I found it interesting the xenophobic French, because of their distrust of foreigners, insulated themselves from the economic turmoil, at least partially, for some time.  As I was reading that and wondered if a leading economic power in the world today would be able to isolate themselves from the rest of the world to avoid tough global economic recessions.  I personally think that the economy is far too global to allow a country to be a major player in the world market, and also afford them the benefit of being isolated from any economic problems that may arise.

 

While outside the scope of this study, I would be interested in seeing how the European and United States economies were doing in relation to the rest of the world.  Very little was said in the book about what was going on in the Soviet Union or Southeast Asia.  While this book did hint that the Soviet Union was looking at the financial collapse as the natural end of capitalism.  It was not really a surprise to them, it was expected.  And what were the Japanese thinking about this?  Again these question were certainly outside the scope of this work, but they were questions that I thought of when reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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