Gardiner C. Means
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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 science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this field there are ...
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 high ...
, 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 ...
, ''
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, 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 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 situation where a speci ...
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 agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...
, 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 ''Öffentlichk ...
, 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. Soci ...
.


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 * History of economic thought


References


External links

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