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"Technological innovations Government policy Canada History 20th century."
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Asleep at the Switch
Since 1960, Canadian industry has lagged behind other advanced capitalist economies in its level of commitment to research and development. Asleep at the Switch explains the reasons for this underperformance, despite a series of federal measures to spur technological innovation in Canada. Bruce Smardon argues that the underlying issue in Canada's longstanding failure to innovate is structural, and can be traced to the rapid diffusion of American Fordist practices into the manufacturing sector of the early twentieth century. Under the influence of Fordism, Canadian industry came to depend heavily on outside sources of new technology, particularly from the United States. Though this initially brought in substantial foreign capital and led to rapid economic development, the resulting branch-plant industrial structure led to the prioritization of business interests over transformative and innovative industrial strategies. This situation was exacerbated in the early 1960s by the Glassco framework, which assumed that the best way for the federal state to foster domestic technological capacity was to fund private sector research and collaborative strategies with private capital. Remarkably, and with few results, federal programs and measures continued to emphasize a market-oriented approach. Asleep at the Switch details the ongoing attempts by the federal government to increase the level of innovation in Canadian industry, but shows why these efforts have failed to alter the pattern of technological dependency.
eBook
A Tomato for All Seasons: Innovation in American Agricultural Production, 1900–1945
Economic and geographic centralization are typically seen as critical components of the industrialization of food during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fresh- and processed-tomato industries during this period offers an important counterexample to this dominant narrative. Between the late nineteenth century and World War II, the most salient characteristic of both fresh- and processed-tomato production was economic and geographic decentralization. This article argues that the emergence of sites of tomato production and processing in virtually every region of the country played a vital role in fulfilling the long-standing quest for year-round access to both fresh and processed tomatoes.
Journal Article
Government and Science: A Dangerous Liaison?
This article briefly briefly surveys the relationship between government and science, concentrating on the situation in the United States in the twentieth century. It discusses in some detail the theoretical rationale for government funding, showing that it is open to serious question: its model of market failure in science is highly suspect, and its implications for the remedial effects of intervention do not stand up to even casual empirical scrutiny. Calling attention to the nakedness of the standard economic rationale, however, does not touch the actual political rationales. Following other commentators - Greenberg (2001), in particularn - the study directs attention to the interaction between these rationales and scientists' understandably strong desire to have their work well funded. Although Greenberg's and others' detailed descriptions of unease within science are compelling, they suffer from a lack of any clear theoretical model of science as a social system. Therefore, to point the way toward a more comprehensive treatment, this work devotes considerable attention to an exposition of the various ways in which government funding interacts with scientists and the system of scientific activity to produce the unanticipated effects of concern.
Journal Article
Assessing the stability of narrow money demand in the United Kingdom
It is widely accepted that the introduction of cash-saving technologies, such as credit and debit cards, and the growing network of automated teller machines (ATMs) contributed to a prolonged upward shift in narrow money velocity towards the end of the 20th century.(2) This article considers whether this upward shift might plausibly have come to an end. First, it presents data on four distinct manifestations of financial innovation, and asks whether the pace of change in each might have slowed. Second, it uses time-series data stretching back more than 100 years to present estimates of the demand for narrow money during different time periods. It finds tentative evidence that, since the early 1990s, narrow money velocity has been a broadly stable function of the short-term rate of interest. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article