Accounting as a social practice: US railroad regulation, value of service accounting, and regional economic development

Employing a methodological model proposed by Anthony G. Hopwood and refined by Peter Miller, which emphasizes the role of accounting as a social practice, this study examines how the US Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) accepted the application of the value of service accounting in rate-setting to facilitate the redistribution of income and wealth to the undeveloped economies of the South and West regions of the US.

The growing nostalgia for past regulatory misadventures and the risk of repeating these mistakes with Big Tech

Digital markets are increasingly described as the ‘railroads’ of the 21st century. Extending that metaphor, some commentators argue we should revive stale railroad-era economic regulations and adapt them to the digital age. This enthusiasm appears to be buoyed by both a sudden nostalgia for railroad and airline regulations once administered by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and an equally sudden amnesia of the enormous harm those regulations caused to consumers. ICC and CAB regulations are indeed an apt metaphor, as they illustrate perfectly how sectoral regulations sold to the public as simple, clear, and cheap can go awry. Ultimately, a bipartisan consensus emerged to disband those agencies and deregulate those industries. After deregulation, prices fell, output expanded, and firms innovated. Proposals to regulate Big Tech today in a similar fashion forget these important lessons. We should know better than to do the same thing again today and expect a different result.

FARMERS, CAPITALISM, AND GOVERNMENT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In 1884, Congress created a new federal agency of unprecedented regulatory vision. Its officials soon acquired the capacity to summarily seize and destroy millions of dollars of property and thus to police the disposition of a stock of wealth worth more than the country's total capital invested in railroads. What was this federal colossus? It was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), an agency that probably few historians know much about. Yet the hotly contested creation of the BAI—three years before the better-known Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—amounts to an epochal expansion of federal powers. Housed within the already powerful Department of Agriculture (USDA), the BAI was charged with investigating and containing potentially devastating livestock epizootics such as bovine pleuropneumonia and, later, Texas fever. Its success at doing so was little short of astounding. By 1892 it had conceived and carried out the world's first area eradication program of an epidemic disease, in the process establishing a model for future global eradication efforts. More immediately, it bolstered an economy that, for all its industrialization, remained crucially identified with agriculture.

THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION AND THE GENESIS OF AMERICA'S JUDICIALIZED ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

Revisiting the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) created in 1887 and offering a fresh interpretation that the commission was conceived and operated as a highly court-like agency, this paper argues that its emergence triggered the judicialization of the U.S. administrative state. It has been argued that the blueprint of the ICC took after existing railroad commissions. Its proponents in Congress, however, redesigned it with judicial courts as a model after facing criticisms based on the common-law principle of the supremacy of law allowing adjudication only to judicial courts. In accordance with such an institutional scheme, both the president and judiciary promoted the commission's judicialization by appointing lawyers as its members and reviewing its decisions. By the early twentieth century, the ICC was a prototypical agency whose court-like features permeated the administrative state. This paper thus offers a corrective to the literature on the U.S. administrative state building that has come to trivialize the role of the rise of the ICC. It was, instead, a critical juncture in the emergence of the modern administrative state in which being “quasi-judicial” was the norm rather than the exception for an administrative agency.