Gardiner Coit Means (June 8, 1896 in

Windham, Connecticut Windham is a town in Windham County, Connecticut, United States. It contains the former city of Willimantic as well as the boroughs of Windham Center, North Windham, and South Windham. Willimantic, an incorporated city since 1893, was consol ...

– February 15, 1988 in

Vienna, Virginia Vienna () is a town in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. As of the 2020 U.S. census, Vienna has a population of 16,473. Significantly more people live in ZIP codes with the Vienna postal addresses (22180, 22181, and 22182), bordered approx ...

)New York Times obituary
/ref> was an American

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...

who worked at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

, where he met lawyer-diplomat

Adolf A. Berle Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. (; January 29, 1895 – February 17, 1971) was an American lawyer, educator, writer, and diplomat. He was the author of ''The Modern Corporation and Private Property'', a groundbreaking work on corporate governance, a pro ...

. Together they wrote the seminal work of

corporate governance Corporate governance is defined, described or delineated in diverse ways, depending on the writer's purpose. Writers focused on a disciplinary interest or context (such as accounting, finance, law, or management) often adopt narrow definitions ...

, '' The Modern Corporation and Private Property''. During the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...

, Means served as an economic adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt and

Henry A. Wallace Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States, the 11th U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and the 10th U.S. ...

Academic work

Means followed the institutionalist tradition of economists. In 1934 he coined term "administered prices" to refer to prices set by firms in

monopoly A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situati ...

positions. In ''The Corporate Revolution in America'' (1962) he wrote:

"We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of dollars' worth of the instruments of production, serving millions of customers, and controlled by a single management group. These are great collectives of enterprise, and a system composed of them might well be called "collective capitalism."

Means argued that where an economy is fueled by big firms it is the interests of

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activitie ...

, not the

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

, that govern

society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soc ...

Bibliography

* '' The Modern Corporation and Private Property'' with

(1932) * ''"Industrial Prices and their Relative Inflexibility"'' (1935) * ''Patterns of Resource Use'' (1938) * ''The Structure of the American Economy'' (1939) * ''Pricing Power and the Public Interest'' (1962) * ''The Corporate Revolution in America'' (1962) * ''"Simultaneous Inflation and Unemployment: Challenge to theory and policy"'' (1975) * * ''A Monetary Theory of Employment'' 1994.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Means, Gardiner 20th-century American economists 1896 births 1988 deaths Harvard University faculty Harvard University alumni

Academic work

Bibliography

See also

References

External links