Category — Edison to Enron (Bradley)

“Edison to Enron … [is] the second part of a three-volume series on the history of American energy, told through the distinction between productive and predatory capitalism.  Bradley is a very much underrated economic historian, largely because of his ‘amateur’ [nonacadmic] status, but there is a remarkable amount of learning in his books.”

- Tyler Cowen, ‘What I’ve Been Reading,’ Marginal Revolution, November 15, 2011.

Last Friday afternoon in our nation’s capital, Robert L. Bradley, Jr., a prominent figure in the esoterica of energy markets, unveiled the Project on which he has labored for a decade before a full room at the American Enterprise Institute. Kenneth Green moderated, and comments were provided by Stephen Hayward and yours truly. My formal remarks follow.

The Project

Enter stage right, our protagonist with The Bradley Project. He has three arrows in his quiver, a trilogy of books that will be the authoritative commentary on American political capitalism and energy policy inspired by the rise and fall of Enron (where Bradley worked for 16 years).

He artfully aims his first arrow, (Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy) a political economy text that forges a path for his second onslaught (Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies), a history text that applies the economic principles of Book 1 to the natural gas and electric industries from their 19^thcentury inception to about 1985.

Both books are dense and lengthy–but very readable. Bradley tackles the vast literature behind subjects and provides hundreds of pages of documentation. For the most serious scholars (are there many anymore?), he provides Internet appendices per chapter, no less than 52 for Book 1 and 74 for Book 2. The extra mile seems to have been run in virtually all instances.

His actions set the economic, political, and historical stage for his yet unleashed third arrow, a text that will mine the Enron debacle and its aftermath for trenchant insights that will help both academics and energy professionals better understand what happened but more importantly, develop insight for the future regarding the nexus of politics and the market economy.

· Act I (today): the Bradley Project is brilliantly conceived, brilliantly executed, and will stand the test of time.

· Act II (tomorrow): his perspective pierces the veil that hides the excrescence that passes as the current sorry state of energy policy.

· Act III (Saturday): dare we venture that there is such a thing as sound government intervention, heretical as that may be in this crowd.

· Act IV (Sunday): the future or, who is John Galt? [Read more →]

“This scholarly work fills in much missing history about two of America’s most important industries, electricity and natural gas.”

   – Joseph A. Pratt, NEH-Cullen Professor of History and Business, University of Houston

“An engaging look back at the market and political development of the U.S. energy industry. Industry and policymakers will benefit from reading this book.”

   – Dr. Robert Peltier, PE, Editor-in-Chief, POWER magazine

Edison to Enron is the second book in my trilogy on political capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron (order information: Amazon, Scrivener Publishing, John Wiley & Sons).

Book 1, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, provided a worldview of market-based versus political business, as well as an interpretation of energy sustainability. The present volume (Book 2) examines the individuals and companies that are related to Enron’s prehistory.

Book 3, Enron and Ken Lay: An American Tragedy, will chronologically describe the rise and fall of Enron and the post-Enron world.

The trilogy and other writings on the intersection of business and government are featured at my website, Political Capitalism.

A video on Book 2 in the context of my book output is here.

Dust Jacket Description

Energy is the resource of resources—the master resource. The fossil fuels in particular—and the electricity generated from them—have made human life longer and better. For many, they have made life possible. Without energy, there would not be the modern world of production and consumption.

During the last 150 years, the United States has been at the forefront of energy development. Edison to Enron chronicles important swaths of that history, focusing on the great entrepreneurs in electricity and in natural gas, who turned potential into plenty and privation into prosperity.

Author Robert L. Bradley Jr. traces individuals and companies that made America an energy nation, from Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull in electricity, to John Henry Kirby in oil, to Clint Murchison, Ray Fish, Robert Herring, and Jack Bowen in natural gas. Companies such as General Electric, Houston Oil, Southern Union, Fish Engineering, Houston Natural Gas, TransCanada, Florida Gas, and Transco Energy are integral to Bradley’s energy history, which links the country’s nineteenth-century past to its twenty-first-century present. [Read more →]