The Political Economy of Technical Change

This book focuses on the management of technical change in the British economy since the 1950s, with US experience as the reference point. It employs the well-known device of looking at crises, in this instance the “technology scares” that have erupted in twentieth century Britain. They began with “national efficiency” concerns, flowing from the demonstration of US and German productive power in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.1 During the First World War, the threat of postwar German industrial competition briefly gripped British political and business leaders, but did not penetrate far beyond that (Cline 1982). There was a low-grade technology scare in interwar Britain around the impact of rationalisation, but was rather small beer when compared to the intense concern in Germany during the 1920s and in the USA in the 1930s.2 In fact, the US debates of the 1930s were so powerful that they coloured the attitudes and expectations of American producer groups into the 1960s (Bix 2000).