Gardiner C. Means

"Gardiner Means has a secure place in the history of 20th century economic thought, as the co-author with A.A. Berle of "The Modern Corporation and Private Property." But according to Samuels and Medema, Means should be remembered for major contributions in both micro- and macroeconomics. The authors discuss Meanss ideas of administered pricing and profit maximization within the giant corporation, the possible links between industrial structure and macroeconomic performance, a theory of the firm as it relates to the market, and the micro foundations of macroeconomics. Central to Meanss macroeconomics is his theory that administered pricing generates inflation and stagflation. Means, in the authors view, was a seminal thinker and a post-Keynesian economist, as well as an institutionalist. This book also gives an precis of Meanss unusual career in government and the academy."

"Gardiner C. Means [was] an economist whose theory regarding pricing practices in some industries was influential in setting national policy in the New Deal and later when inflation struck after World War II... In the mid-1930s Dr. Means, then a comparatively obscure adviser to Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace, developed a theory to explain why prices did not always rise and fall in response to the classical law of supply and demand. The theory developed a popular name, ."

"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."

"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 "."

"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."

"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."