By William Lazonick Lack of stable and remunerative employment opportunity results in socioeconomic precarity. A nation can mitigate socioeconomic precarity when the investment triad of household units, government agencies, and business corporations develop and utilize its productive capabilities. Within the…
AIR BOOKS
The Rhetoric and Reality of Shareholder Democracy and Hedge-Fund Activism
by Jan-Sup Shin In this Element, AIRnet’s Jan-Sup Shin investigates the historical and systemic roots of hedge-fund activism. It argues that the spirit of the New Deal financial regulations was subverted in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of…
Wall Street’s War on Workers
How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It By Les Leopold In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can…
Investing in Innovation
Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation by William Lazonick Business corporations interact with household units and government agencies to make investments in productive capabilities required to generate innovative goods and services. When they work harmoniously, these three types…
From Financialisation to Innovation in UK Big Pharma
AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline by Öner Tulum, Antonio Andreoni and William Lazonick The tension between innovation and financialisation is central to the business corporation. Innovation entails a ‘retain-and-reinvest’ allocation regime that can form a foundation for stable and equitable economic growth….
Shredding Paper
The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry by Michael Hillard “From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production,…
Cooperation Networks and Economic Development
Cuba’s High-Tech Potential By Andrés Cárdenas O´Farrill “For most Western audiences, Cuba is a touristic paradise stuck in time and virtually detached from world technology networks by the US embargo – anything but a hub of industrial innovation and high…
Innovation in Real Places
Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we’ve been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism.
Predatory Value Extraction
In this book William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin explain how an ideology of corporate resource allocation known as “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV), that emerged in the 1980s and came to dominate strategic thinking in business schools and corporate boardrooms, undermined…
China as an Innovation Nation
By Yu Zhou, Yifei Sun and William Lazonick (Editors) This volume assesses China’s transition to innovation-nation status in terms of social conditions, industry characteristics and economic impacts over the past three decades, also providing insights into future developments. Defining innovation as the…
