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Scientific Management and Business Stabilization Consideration of how the US economy might be stabilized in the face of costly cycles has a long history in economics. As early as 1886, Herbert Davenport urged the deferment of public works until times of recession and two years later Commons called for tariff and currency reform and for a program of public works designed to stabilize employment. However, such contributions were rare and market stabilization did not become a topic of serious economic analysis until after Britain introduced national unemployment insurance in 1909. This disinterest in business cycle stabilization reflected both the economic profession's conviction there was little that intervention could achieve and a disinclination to concede capitalism was inherently unstable and needed governance by a visible as well as an invisible hand. At the dawn of the twentieth century the prevalence of this perspective among economists stood in marked contrast to the situation in industry where managers had instituted a litany of measures to insulate their firms from the seasonal and cyclical crises that periodically beset the business world. These embryonic attempts at managing the business cycle at the level of the micro