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Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy

Shane Hamilton, Princeton University Press, 2008, 344 pages, £17.99.

This is a terrific book which combines social history, economic analysis and political insight. It takes the reader from the very beginnings of the processing of food and its early distribution by rail to urban markets in late 19th and early 20th century America all the way to Wal-Mart, the retailer of cheap food to the masses in an automotive society. It is rare to find an author, and especially an academic, who tackles a big canvas. Anybody who is interested in the interaction between technology, busi-ness and society will find much to fascinate them, with an accumulation of interesting detail along the way. What’s more, it’s written from the heart: Professor Hamilton was born into one of the mid-western farming families whose history and future is at the heart of his story. One of the strands running through the book is the diversion of policy by big agri-business and big unions, at the expense of the family farm.

The independent truckers, who are the stars of this tale, are those white (mainly) men (mainly) who were squeezed out of farming by the combination of the Depression and New Deal farm policy which favoured the Teamsters and the big firms for the sake of keeping cheap food and milk in the stores for urban consumers. An opportunity created by policy permitting unregulated truckers to carry agricultural goods, and technological developments – cheaper trucks, pneumatic tyres, refriger-ation, the highways built under the New Deal – created an economic niche in which small independent-minded folks could remain on the land, even if not farming it themselves. Government, for them, was certainly the problem not the solution. This history also contributes an explanation for the subsequent political rift between small-town rural American whites and the Democratic party, about which much has been written, and to whose ‘bitterness’ President Barack Obama famously referred on the campaign trail.

My favourite moment in the book is a quote from a woman interviewed by a sociologist in the 1920s. When asked why her family had bought one of the new Ford Model Ts, rather than spending the money on something less frivolous like indoor plumbing, she replied: “You can’t go to town in a bathtub!” This is a wonderful cautionary tale for anyone pondering bold predictions about what technology spells for the future; only consumers know what value they derive from new goods and services. The economic and social effects of new technologies are hugely unpredictable. As Professor Hamilton writes: “Technological fixes …. tend to produce simplistic, reductionist ‘solutions’ to complex social problems. Even when ‘successful’, a technological fix more often displaces than resolves the source of conflict.” Words which should be included in any introductory primer for the young policy maker.

There’s also much food for thought here (forgive the pun) for anyone concerned about the mass consumption of cheap processed food. The Wal-Mart economy of agri-business and long-distance distribution cer-tainly makes food cheap in America, a great benefit to those on low incomes. But many campaigners think the non-monetary price paid is too high, in terms of obesity, nutritional deficiencies, and the social impact on families (of not cooking their own food) and the countryside (mainly given over to agri-business farms). The book doesn’t address this debate directly, but does illuminate the way government policies will have unintended consequences which can decisively set a society on a particular path.

Diane Coyle

Enlightenment Economics

See more on economics books on my blog The Enlightened Economist, http://blog.enlightenmenteconomics.com

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