Harold F. Breimyer

Emerging Phenomenon: A Cycle in Hogs

In the non-farm sector of the economy, cycles in individual industries such as housing and textiles, and in such areas as investment and inventory accumulation, are well known. The business cycle itself dominates all other cycles. In agriculture cyclicality finds much expression. The cattle cycle is the classic example.1 Other cyclical patterns also are numerous, although not so clearly demonstrated nor so well advertised as that for cattle.

Conceptualization and Climate for New Deal Farm Laws of the 1930s

Seniority is a status of ambiguous appeal, but the happenstance of my having been on the farm policy scene from the earliest New Deal days has been felicitous. We veterans of the 1930s will never lose our poignant memory of the circumstances of the time. Whether we can communicate the atmosphere, the nuances, of those intense days is another question. For my part, I will try. The New Deal story is worth the telling. The New Deal introduced a conceptualization of the governmental role in the economy that was truly revolutionary. Essentially, during New Deal years citizens invested the federal government with responsibility for performance of the economy, and the government accepted it. In 1980-81 President Reagan as candidate and initially as president announced a divestiture, but in 1983 (State of the Union message) he explicitly returned to the position first taken by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. The federal government assumes a responsibility. In telling the New Deal story I will interweave three themes. The first is that the eco-

Agriculture in an Energy-Hungry World

Energy is a complex and pervasive subject, whose frontiers are still in the process of being defined. Many of the data are in dispute. Technical judgments do not agree. Conflicts of interest abound. The Nixon Administration, in its allocation plans for summer 1973 and January 1974, gave farmers top priority for fuel – ahead of hospitals, firemen, and police. Critics called this “cockeyed,†preferring to put other sectors of the economy ahead of agriculture.

The AAEA and USDA in an Associationistic Age

HIS paper, breaking with traditional presidential addresses, is contemporary and utilitarian in scope and thrust. It relates, as the title indicates, to the nature and role of our professional Association and of another organization close to our area of concern, the United States Department of Agriculture. Remarks that follow on the AAEA were stirred by a nagging uncertainty as to whether our way of conducting Association business provides enough communication between members and officers. The chance timing by which significant changes in organization of our body are inaugurated coincident with my administration, and persistent raising of certain thorny issues as to the proper philosophy and format for Association activity, gave further cause for writing and delivering the first half of the paper. But the topic is dual; it includes not just our professional organization but a much larger, more complex, and more controversial one, the USDA. This ambitious attempt to combine them requires a conceptual backdrop, and it introduces the one global abstraction of the paper. It turns on the meaning of the unifying term associationism. Agricultural economics is an empirically based science. It must ever understand its universe. There is reason to believe that we are currently losing touch with that universe. To use a mod word, we stand in danger of alienation.

Man, Physical Resources, and Economic Organization

Formal economics has centered on the combination of resources. Contemporary events force concern for forms of economic organization, inquiry into which must put the human role uppermost. A taxonomy of economic organization contains three systems of production and three of control. The Enlightenment brought freedom of contract as a control system, which fits well with proprietary production in farming but clashes with industrial nonfarm production. The nonfarm economy faces institutional reform, while farming must choose its production-control pattern. Examination of alternate production and control systems can aid in organizational choice.

The Stern Test of Objectivity for the Useful Science of Agricultural Economics

Agricultural economics as a discipline has long found itself in the dilemma that to realize its highest potential of service in meeting real-world problems, to hold public support, and to be called a science, it must not only perform well technically but also demonstrate unblemished objectivity. The challenge to objectivity is more pervasive than is generally realized. It is greatest in the field of policy, where political and private interests are expressed. It takes on more importance now that action programs for agriculture are apparently a fixture and there is such a close organizational tie in agricultural economics—unlike general economics—between work on policy and management counseling. Although compromises, active or passive, are doubtless few, the preserving of objectivity is of crucial importance.