William W. Bratton is the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law & Economics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. This post is based on a recent paper by Professor Bratton.
My paper, The Modern Corporation and Private Property Revisited: Gardiner Means and the Administered Price, prepared for the Berle X conference at Seattle Law School, views the famous book from its junior coauthor’s perspective. It is a project that began with a memory. Back in 1982, the Hoover Institute at Stanford sponsored a conference on The Modern Corporation on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. The apparent objective was to bury the book as a living policy statement. Luminaries of economic theory of the firm presented: Demsetz, Fama, Jensen, Stigler, and Williamson, among others. Their papers, collected in the Journal of Law & Economics in 1983, remain essential reading.
Means, the surviving co-author and then well into his 80s, appeared at the conference and contributed a paper and a comment to the collection, writings that I found somewhat mystifying when I first read them back in the mid-1980s. Everybody else at the conference addressed microeconomics and governance, talking past Means; Means in turn talked past them, going on about macroeconomics and product pricing, repeating old points in a hostile environment populated by a new and different generation, a generation just then hitting its stride as a force in public policy. I came away wondering whether he should have turned down the invitation, for it looked as if he had played into the hands of hostile conference organizers with shopworn, irrelevant contributions. That read lingered in my memory.
READ MORE »
