Jason Scott Smith provides a detailed history of the New Deal's efforts to build public works, and he explains those efforts in the context of public works programs before and after the New Deal. Smith motivates his book largely as a contribution to the debate among historians as to whether the New Deal was a major reform or a rearguard effort to block calls for radical policy changes. That debate, he argues, can move ahead by focusing attention on public works, because doing so allows scholars to analyze concrete measures of policies, most importantly budgets. Smith concludes that, despite its failure to solve the unemployment problem, the New Deal should be viewed as a major reform because it established public works programs that contributed greatly to long-run economic growth. As he explains, “In sum, this book argues that New Deal public works programs were not simply employment measures that failed due to insufficient state capacities. Instead, they were an extraordinarily successful method of state-sponsored economic development” (p. 19). The book will generate interest among economists, political scientists, and historians seeking to understand the history and evolution of public works programs.

After an introductory chapter, the book proceeds chronologically. Chapter 2 focuses on the political economy of the early New Deal, particularly the Public Works Administration's (PWA) efforts to build infrastructure and increase employment. Chapters 3 and 4 document the PWA's success in building infrastructure. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the later New Deal's (post-PWA) construction projects, principally those of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Chapters 7 and 8 examine post–depression era public works and how federal programs evolved in response to World War II and the end of the Great Depression. Chapter 9 concludes.

The book has much to praise. Smith provides an interesting account of many dramatic changes in policy, explaining how politicians and bureaucrats responded to external events (the depression, the onset of war, the end of war) and to their experiences with the administrative difficulties and corruption that inevitably occur when establishing such large government programs. Furthermore, I found the book very pleasant to read, thanks to careful writing and citations.

The book's weak point is its claim to have demonstrated that public works spurred economic development. Supporting such a claim would require a systematic recognition of opportunity costs: Resources such as labor, land, machinery, and raw materials, have alternative valuable uses. Whereas directing resources toward public works may promote economic development in some cases, it will hinder it in others—when the opportunity costs are high. By merely documenting the large scale of New Deal public works and describing the types of benefits the projects provided, Smith does not provide sufficient support for his conclusion that New Deal public works “were an extraordinarily successful method of state-sponsored development.”

To be clear, I do not doubt the desirability of building public works that have large net benefits but would go unbuilt in the absence of government policy (the book usefully quotes Adam Smith on this point). Yet the merit of any given project depends on costs, as well as benefits. For example, one can argue in support of federal highway programs on the grounds that state funding will be inefficiently too low (if state-level decisions count only benefits to within-state constituents), but that does not mean that increased federal funding will, at the margin, generate benefits sufficient to cover the increased costs. In practice, interstate highways are valuable (as the book explains), but the federal appropriations process is notorious for politicians' efforts to obtain pork-barrel projects; thus, increased budgets may direct resources to relatively low-value uses.

Smith does devote substantial attention to the New Deal's failures. For example, he points out that many New Deal projects paid too little attention to environmental concerns. But the book would be stronger if it explained the more general nature of the problem. From the perspective of almost any environmentalist (and of cost-benefit analysis), public works projects often waste natural resources. One reason is that, when politicians seek to create “jobs” (counting wages as benefits, ignoring the opportunity cost of labor), and when dollars of revenue generated from natural resources have more political weight than do the opportunity costs (such as the value of wilderness forgone), we get too many roads through forests and too many dams on rivers. A similar point applies to the issue of how well the New Deal served African Americans. Smith argues that the New Deal should have devoted more resources toward helping African Americans (and I agree). But evaluating the New Deal's success in lifting African Americans from poverty requires a balanced view of what went wrong—although more money spent on some types of public works would have helped African Americans, more spent on other types probably would have harmed them. For example, the New Deal could have devoted more money to building schools, which might have generated substantial net gains for African Americans. Yet spending more on the urban renewal “mega-projects” set in motion by the New Deal (and promoted by federal funding for several more decades) could have done additional harm—some of these projects demolished entire African American neighborhoods. For such projects, less federal funding would have been better for African Americans.

Overall, Smith presents an interesting and detailed account of New Deal public works, and he provides new insight into the manner in which those programs evolved from the predepression era and how they shaped policy during and after World War II. The book's historical analysis will be valuable to scholars interested in the history and political economy of public works programs, but the book would be stronger if it systematically considered opportunity costs before concluding that New Deal public works successfully promoted economic development.