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OK, you win!

Thanks for these corrections.  The really interesting story (for me) is why the German economy so completely outperformed most of the rest of the world's during the 1930s.  I THINK Veblen's explanation would be included in the following:

"The industrial system is handicapped by dissension, misdirection, and unemployment of material resources, equipment, and man power, at every turn where the statesmen or the captains of finance can touch its mechanisms." (1921)

What I know about this subject (which apparently isn't much) I got while reading Wm. Manchester's "The Arms of Krupp."  Manchester was a WWII vet who actually saw real combat (not a LOT of them from USA, you know) and spent the next 25 years trying to make sense of it all.

If you ever write a diary about this, please let me know

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 01:43:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The question of German industry and Hitler was the background to one of the nastiest disputes in recent American historiography, over a book by David Abraham which agreed with you, but was riddled with errors. Most of them were trivial sloppiness (ranging from minor cite errors to passing off paraphrases as direct quotes), but a few were quite serious (you do NOT cite non existent documents or insert/remove a negative to make it look like a key primary source says the opposite of what it really does to make your argument more convincing). Henry Turner, a very eminent historian at Yale who has specialized in the subject launched a campaign against Abraham and succeeded in getting him drummed out of the profession (he had gotten a TT at Princeton, lost his job, went to law school and is now a law prof). There was a strong political subtext to the mess as Abraham is very left wing while Turner fairly right wing.

In any case, if you want serious reading on the subject from opposite perspectives, you can try the revised Abraham The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (don't read the first version) or Henry Turner's German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler

by MarekNYC on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 02:48:34 PM EST
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Would you mind writing a diary about this subject (you being a qualified historian), of course if you have time to do so?

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 04:11:18 PM EST
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Just remember here, we are discussing whether Veblen in 1915 actually predicted something that happened in 1932 so accurately that valid historians argue--with HINDSIGHT--whether he got it right.

The historical argument is interesting.  The validation for institutional analysis is overwhelming!

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Mon Feb 26th, 2007 at 03:01:30 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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