Gardiner C. Means: Economics

“It is in the development of further administrative coordination that we must come to political scientists for aid. We ask that you apply to the field of economic administration the technique of analysis and principles of organization which you have developed in the study of administrative organization in the form of the state.”

Gardiner C. Means

Source: "The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy", 1935, p. 64

Study

“Gradually but steadily, great segments of economic activity have been shifted from the market place to administration.”

Gardiner C. Means

Source: "The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy", 1935, p. 67; as cited in: Dimock (1937; 29)

“In traditional economic writings dealing with the economy as a whole, it is usually assumed that prices are highly flexible and that economic adjustment is brought about through price changes. We are going to examine inflexible prices.”

Gardiner C. Means

Gardiner C. Means, "Price inflexibility and the requirements of a stabilizing monetary policy." Journal of the American Statistical Association 30.190 (1935): 401-413.

Change

“Earlier writers have recognized that economic activity is only in part trading and that the element of administration enters in, but they have tended to minimize this administrative aspect. The modern corporation has not only increased this aspect by bringing a greater part of economic activity within the administrative limits of single units, has altered the character of the market by making price not an outgrowth of trading but of administration.”

Gardiner C. Means

Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 18

Parting

“The Modern Corporation has undermined the preconceptions of classic economic theory as effectively as the quantum undermined classic physics at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Gardiner C. Means

Source: The Corporate Revolution in America, 1957, p. 287

“Both… the separation of labor from control and of the owner from control… have made possible the continuing development of the size of the individual enterprise, have reduced the area within which economic processes is organized through the interplay of prices and have increased the area within which production is organized… and the coordination of production on a planned basis.”

Gardiner C. Means

Gardiner C. Means (1933; 6) as cited in: Samuels and Medema (1990; 69)

“Economic and political developments have forced upon us a great problem of analysis in the field of politico-economic organization. The center of this problem lies in the midground between the science of politics and the science of economics and its scope is coterminous with the scope of both. It demands the best minds of both science to forge a new pattern of thinking which will weld the elements of politics and economics into an integrated whole having validity in the present day.”

Gardiner C. Means

Source: "The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy", 1935, p. 59; lead paragraph

Problem , Thinking , Science