Mason Gaffney asks how Knoedler and I (in our article on "Veblen and the Engineers") handled what he calls the "antinomy" created by Hoover's support for "associationism" and his career as an engineer, which led him to the overlap of his views on waste and efficiency with those of Thorstein Veblen. Janet Knoedler and I did not address this issue in our article as we were primarily concerned with the way in which Veblen's views on the engineers had been understood by historians of economic thought. However, I would say that there is no necessary conflict between Hoover's support for associationism and Veblen's views on what the engineers might achieve. Both Hoover and Veblen hoped for more coordination among firms involved in the industrial system and less use for pecuniary advantage of what Veblen called the "interstices" created by business organization. I think that William Barber makes a pretty good case that this is how Hoover saw "associationism" when he was Secretary of Commerce. For more on this see my article on "How American Economists Came to Love the Sherman Antitrust Act" in the HOPE collection FROM INTERWAR PLURALISM TO POSTWAR NEOCLASSICISM edited by Mary Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford. Associationism looked like something quite different at the end of the 1930s than it did when Hoover first supported it. Anne Mayhew