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 higher le ...
, where he met lawyer-diplomat Adolf A. Berle. 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 th ...
, ''The Modern Corporation and Private Property
''The Modern Corporation and Private Property'' is a book written by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published in 1932 regarding the foundations of United States corporate law. It explores the evolution of big business through a legal and economi ...
''. 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 Cons ...
, Means served as an economic adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
and Henry A. Wallace.
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 activities o ...
, 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 sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
, 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. Socie ...
.
Bibliography
* ''The Modern Corporation and Private Property
''The Modern Corporation and Private Property'' is a book written by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published in 1932 regarding the foundations of United States corporate law. It explores the evolution of big business through a legal and economi ...
'' with Adolf A. Berle (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.
See also
*Administered prices Administered prices are prices of goods set by the internal pricing structures of firms that take into account cost rather than through the market forces of supply and demand and predicted by classical economics. They were first described by inst ...
*History of economic thought
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Means, Gardiner
20th-century American economists
1896 births
1988 deaths
Harvard University faculty
Harvard University alumni