Immigration fuels the engine of corporate America. Fortune 500 corporations routinely recruit talented managers from their offices around the world to work in the United States. Smaller businesses operating in regional markets also rely on immigrant employees, who are willing to fill jobs when the domestic labor market cannot meet demand. Between 25 and 30 percent […]
The requirements for notice and comment rulemaking have been well established for decades. When an agency decides that a new rule should be promulgated, an initial version of that rule is published in the Federal Register. The public is then invited to comment on it for a period of time, typically 30 or 60 days. At the end […]
Cambridge University Press has just published a fascinating new volume of essays about International Law and the Cold War, edited by Matthew Craven, Sundhya Pahuja, and Gerry Simpson. This volume covers a broad array of topics, including the crucial question of how Cold War politics affected or inspired new legal instruments. Tensions between ‘East’ and […]
Pierre Larouche is right, but it is not just legal scholars: almost everyone who encounters the vast (but rarely noticed) world of private standard setting ends up like the blind men and the elephant of the fable. Most scholars of standardization, and even standards setters themselves, can only describe those parts with which they have […]
Law is often thought to provide the bedrock of order in modern society. But as important as law can be, social and economic order also emerges from a host of non-legal norms and non-governmental institutions. In their new book, JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy trace the history of non-legal institutions dedicated expressly to producing order: […]
JoAnn Yates and Craig Murphy compiled a compelling and enjoyable history of private standardization from the late 19th to the earliest 21st century. I read the book from the perspective of an empirical economist who studies today’s Standards Development Organizations (SDO). Economic analysis is often oblivious of the history of the organizations it studies, and […]
Adam Smith famously observed that self-interest serves the public interest, because markets act as “an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” To which Finley Peter Dunne offered a rather less sanguine response: “A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.” In […]
Yates and Murphy’s Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 provides a fascinating account of almost a century and a half of standard setting; of many of the men – and the few women –who were the drivers of these rule-making processes and who in many fields took them to the international level as early […]
“Engineering Rules” is a clever triple entendre, evoking rules (the industrial standards that are its concern), the emergence of engineering (the profession largely responsible for their creation) and the consensus processes developed over time (the engineering) by which they have been created. The book is an extraordinarily detailed history of the movement from national to […]
JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy’s new book Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019) offers a comprehensive and detailed institutional history of international standardization from its origins in the nineteenth century through the present day. Especially with regard to its treatment of early- and mid-twentieth century standardization efforts and […]
“Engineering Rules” by Joanne Yates and Craig Murphy recounts stirring tales from the noble brotherhood of engineers, on a mission to improve the world through standard-setting. The engineers tackle nonuniform screw threads, creating the first national screw thread standard (the appealingly named “Whitworth thread”), address railway cars of varying sizes and shapes, and devise the […]
Over the past years, as standardization took an increasing place in my research agenda, I frequently thought of the ancient Indian fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant.[1] In this story, a number of blind men observe an elephant: each of them comes into contact with one part of the elephant only, leading each […]
Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 [1] is a fountain of information about the origins, use, and changes in the world of standard setting. To even the casual reader, it makes a convincing case that those who started convening groups of knowledgeable volunteers have performed a very useful service by creating standards for many […]
In their detailed history, Engineering Rules, Professors JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy describe some of the people and processes that have featured prominently in standard-setting movements from the 1880s forward. The authors’ admiration for them is clear, as they describe the personal commitment of organizers and committee participants who travel, sometimes on their own […]
Markets vs. Regulation Many of us think about regulation in somewhat dichotomous terms, namely as a choice between free markets and government regulation. Under the standard view, the market optimally provides many goods and services. In the competition of various firms pricing their goods and services, the “hidden” hand” of the market will lead to […]