“At just after 5pm on Monday, my phone rang. I missed the call – I was in one of Copenhagen’s supermarkets, buying groceries and toilet paper and soap and things I still do not need to think twice about getting…
Author: admin
Share buybacks enable predatory value extraction
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram “‘Getting government out of the way’, the neoliberal ‘free market’ mantra, was supposed to boost private investment. Instead, business investment has declined as a consequence. Many economies now seem incapable of making much needed investments to…
Stock market bubble no basis for shared prosperity
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram “The US is currently still in a stock market bubble which, if history is any guide, is likely to end, perhaps soon due to Covid19. President Trump would, of course, like to sustain it to strengthen…
Les enterprises rachètent leurs propres actions: Explications
By Loïs Siggen Lopez [Click HERE to watch the interview] (in French)
Democrats biggest threat in 2018
By Ronald Brownstein “The biggest threat to Democrats in the 2018 election may be the risk of repeating their biggest mistake in the 2016 election. That mistake was Hillary Clinton’s decision to focus almost all of her effort on convincing…
Shareholders Benefit, Don’t Add Value To Companies (Interview with William Lazonick)
“William Lazonick, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, talks about his most recent book Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored”, which keys on…
House Democrats demand fair drug pricing for taxpayer-funded coronavirus vaccine or treatment
By Rep. Jan Schakowsky “Today, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Senior Chief Deputy Whip and Chair of the Energy and Commerce Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee, led 45 of her colleagues in sending a letter to President Donald J. Trump to…
William Lazonick interviewed on “Kokusai Hodo”
By NHK [Click HERE to watch the interview] (in Japan)
Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy?
“Edith Penrose’s 1959 book, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (TGF), fits the definition of a “classic”: a work that many cite but few have read. The view that I advance in this essay is that no one should…
Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy?
The neoclassical fallacy gained popularity in the 1950s, during which decade Samuelson revised Economics three times. Meanwhile, Penrose derived the logic of organizational learning that she lays out in TGF from the facts of firm growth, absorbing what was known in the 1950s about the large corporations that had come to dominate the U.S. economy. Also, during that decade, the knowledge base on the growth of firms on which economists could subsequently draw was undergoing an intellectual revolution, led by the business historian, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. He was engaged in the first stage of a career that would span more than a half century, during which Chandler documented and analyzed the centrality to U.S economic development of what he would come to call “the managerial revolution in American business.”
