In No Little Plans: How Government Built America’s Wealth and Infrastructure, Ian Wray grapples with the impact of state intervention on American political development. In particular, Wray is interested in the ways that state, specifically federal intervention fostered economic growth, enhanced Americans’ quality of life, and spurred innovation in new fields. Wray argues, through a series of brief but illuminating case studies, that federal intervention has produced a range of social goods.
Wray’s manuscript is well organized, with the opening chapters focused on critiques of government intervention from both the political right and the left. Wray makes a compelling argument that distrust of government intervention has become widespread, regardless of our ideological preferences. Following this, he presents a series of case studies that include the development of roads and highways, national parks, manufacturing capacity, and technical innovation. In each of these cases, Wray argues that government intervention made a critical difference in the success of these policy areas. Through these case studies, the author challenges common notions that government intervention is wasteful or even harmful.
Wray’s manuscript is a smart, well researched contribution to discussions of planning, political development, and geography. What is especially valuable about Wray’s approach is that he takes a wide view of infrastructure, considering everything from American manufacturing capacity to the growth of the Internet in his discussion. As part of this wide lens view, Wray also moves beyond just considering economic growth as the only pertinent measure of state intervention’s value. For instance, he discussed the national park system, and the benefits of preserving America’s natural spaces. This is a large-scale government project whose final value does not come primarily from fostering economic growth or technical innovation but instead through improving Americans’ quality of life. By considering such a diversity of cases and outcomes, Wray is able to more strongly assert his claim that government intervention generally produces good outcomes.
While there is a great deal to admire about Wray’s text, the manuscript does raise some questions that he does not fully consider. First, Wray’s text spans a great deal of time and policy areas but does not fully exploit this variation. It seems possible that state intervention, in terms of both form and outcome, might differ across time and/or policy area. State actors might furthermore have borrowed lessons they learned in one policy area and applied it in another locale, or updated policy intervention strategies as the public reacted to previous state development efforts. Similarly, while Wray does suggest that in some cases large scale state plans can be awry, he does not recommend a strategy about how to best engage in these large-scale plans. In other words, Wray does not fully engage the critics of large-scale projects with which his text opens when it comes to considering how similar large interventions might unfold in the future. In effect, the trade-off for Wray’s numerous but brief case studies is that he is unable to fully develop these other theoretical questions. However, despite these limits, the book presents an interesting, compelling defense of large-scale state interventions that successfully covers a wide range of policy areas.
Department of Political Science, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA, USA
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