Making Sense of Smoot-Hawley: Technology and Tariffs

Three-quarters of a century after its enactment, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act remains an enigma. Either U.S. policymakers were grossly mistaken or we have missed something. Could there have been a method to their apparent madness? Could the upward tariff revision have made sense, however little? This book, based on the author's earlier work on Mass Production and the Great Depression, offers an alternative interpretation of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, namely as a response on the part of U.S. policymakers to the problem of underincome, itself the result of the massive technology shock that was electrification and the ensuing extremely-high-throughput, continuous-flow production techniques pioneered at the Ford Motor Company at its Highland Park plant. Productive capacity increased faster than income and expenditure, opening the gap that Reed Smoot, Willis C. Hawley, and the Republican Party set out to close via a generalized upward tariff revision.

Bernard C. Beaudreau is Professor of Economics at Université Laval in Québec City, Canada, and author of Mass Production, the Stock Market Crash, and the Great Depression: The Macroeconomics of Electrification (Greenwood Press, 1996). His research interests include economic theory, economic history, and consilient science.