This paper reexamines the extent to which the giant corporations cooperated with wage and price controls during World War II, an issue to which Galbraith first drew attention. Two forms of evidence are explored: a sample of court cases involving the Office of Price Administration and large corporations, and the monographs in which former administrators reflected on their wartime experiences. The conclusion is that the compliance record could be characterized as a good one, but that this achievement depended on the constraints on allocation and collective bargaining that existed during the war.

The Surplus Property Act of 1944 established several social objectives for the disposal of war surplus. In particular, small business was to be benefited; concentration was to be reduced. Such objectives are better considered as part of the war mobilization rather than the peacetime reconversion. While suggesting that concentration was not reduced, the evidence also suggests that concentration is not an inevitable consequence of war. Social objectives can be incorporated into war mobilization, but their realization involves a substantially higher cost.

Recent studies, when taken together, suggest that the bureaucratic elites of nineteenth-century Germany and Japan were much less successful in stimulating economic development than has been traditionally asserted. Direct government investment was neither extensive nor successful. Government-sponsored institutional change, notably in financial structures, had little if any beneficial impact. Development in both nations resulted from the gradual emergence of a commercial culture, and on world factors exogenous to government policy. The bureaucratic elites failed to adjust to changed circumstances, instead leading both nations into disastrous wars. These results call into question development strategies based on central government control.

This paper analyzes the roles of the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior in restricting the assignment of property rights to rangeland in the American West. While common property conditions encouraged overgrazing and dissipation of the rental value of the land, it was in the interest of both departments to oppose the private claims of the ranchers. Moreover, jurisdictional competition for administration of federal land holdings likely delayed the installation of bureaucratic controls on entry and range use until 1934.