Prophets of Regulation

Thomas McCraw approaches the history of American economic regulation through four lives rather than a survey of policy: Charles Francis Adams, the railroad regulation pioneer of the nineteenth century; Louis Brandeis, the reformer and eventual Supreme Court justice; James Landis, the New Deal architect of federal securities law; and Alfred Kahn, who dismantled airline regulation under President Carter rather than expanding it. Each figure anchors a different era and a different kind of regulatory battle, from railroads through banking and securities to a late twentieth century turn toward deregulation.

McCraw builds his argument through their choices rather than stating it abstractly, tracing how each of the four read a persistent American mistrust of concentrated business power and turned that suspicion into workable, if often contested, policy. Adams, who chaired the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners in the 1870s, pioneered the idea that public disclosure alone could discipline corporate behavior, an approach McCraw traces forward to Brandeis's fight against what Brandeis himself called the curse of bigness, to Landis's work drafting the federal securities laws and then leading the agency that enforced them, and finally to Kahn's tenure atop the Civil Aeronautics Board, where he pushed to dismantle the very controls he had been appointed to run. A New York Times reviewer credited McCraw with explaining sophisticated economic theory in accessible terms and with a historian's knack for isolating basic American traits such as a mistrust of big business, following each figure's own reasoning as he built or, in Kahn's case, deliberately unbuilt a regulatory agency.

Reading the book means following a readable, chronologically ordered narrative built around four careers rather than a policy textbook's abstractions, moving from Adams's nineteenth century railroad commissions to Kahn's late nineteen seventies push to open the skies to competition. It suits a reader who wants economic history made concrete through the people who actually wrote, and sometimes unwrote, the rules, rather than a purely theoretical account of how regulation works.