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For years one topic has preoccupied many of us: bureaucracy's cost. It's the kind of cost you feel when you go through security at the airport -- how exactly do you quantify that cost though?

In The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression our artist Paul Rivoche captures that cost painstakingly through the story of a collective and government-managed farm, Casa Grande.

Anyone who is interested in slow-burn irritation of bureaucracy or the phenomenon of the Tragedy of the Commons might want to look at these pics.

The farmers received homes and equipment better than the standard, and leagues better than what was available to say the migrant workers captured in "Grapes of Wrath."
But was the trade off worth it? The farmers were told how to hang their clotheslines (in parallel) and whether they could buy a milking machine (no). In the end they destroyed their common place, the community house. The facts come out of an underappreciated sociology study, "Government Project" Edward C. Banfield. The hope of illustrator Paul Rivoche and myself is that readers will like these pictures in our book along with the images of more famous scenes of the Depression or New Deal.

Have been thinking about Coolidge, the Forgotten Man and Memphis, in part because I had the honor of speaking at the Economic Club of Memphis last week.

The TVA has always been served by pro-TVA narrative, including beautiful photos at the Library of Congress. There is no general narrative available that is skeptical of TVA, though some marvelous speciality books including books about those who had to move because they were eminent domained out. The Forgotten Man/Graphic tries to supply what is missing by telling the story of TVA's slow but inexorable conquest of Commonwealth and Southern.

This illustrated Forgotten Man is a utilities book, in short. Coolidge: do readers know the Pres died in the days it was becoming clear TVA would be reality? He opposed such projects.
Amity Shlaes