Consideration of how the US economy might be stabilized in the face of costly cycles has a long history in economics. As early as 1886, Herbert Davenport urged the deferment of public works until times of recession and two years later Commons called for tariff and currency reform and for a program of public works designed to stabilize employment. However, such contributions were rare and market stabilization did not become a topic of serious economic analysis until after Britain introduced national unemployment insurance in 1909. This disinterest in business cycle stabilization reflected both the economic profession's conviction there was little that intervention could achieve and a disinclination to concede capitalism was inherently unstable and needed governance by a visible as well as an invisible hand. At the dawn of the twentieth century the prevalence of this perspective among economists stood in marked contrast to the situation in industry where managers had instituted a litany of measures to insulate their firms from the seasonal and cyclical crises that periodically beset the business world. These embryonic attempts at managing the business cycle at the level of the micro

As a result of this better control and planning ability a scientifically managed organization is better able to adapt itself to conditions and to make such economies and plans as are advisable for the maintenance of the business. When conditions are such that it becomes impractical to maintain any part of the indirect organization intact, it can be reduced as under any other type of management, and the effects of the reduction more accurately estimated. Under scientific management this reduction, if found necessary, can be made more intelligently and more fairly to those affected. (1922, 127-128)

Taylor approved of these practices but believed that even the best of traditional managers failed to fully realize their potential capacity to stabilize production and employment because they were insufficiently rigorous in their commitment to empirical analysis and "rule by fact" as opposed to "rule of thumb." Management practice, he tirelessly reiterated, must be based on detailed empirical information and on having this information made available to all sectors of society. The importance he accorded the need to found decision making on empirical data, rather than on tradition or pre-conceived assumptions and axioms, is attested to by his famed metal-cutting exp

Some topics in this essay:
Herbert Davenport, Richard Feiss, Llewellyn Cooke, Stabilization Consideration, Tugwell Banfield, scientific management, Morris Cooke, metcalf 1972, practices advocated, management practice, traditional managers, business cycle, seasonal cyclical, taylor 1912, twentieth century,