Business Responsibility toward the Market

Stolk William C. , Chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Business Economists, Management Review, LVII (Dec. 1968), 43.

See, e.g., Votaw D. Sethi S. P. in this issue of CMR.

Churchman C. West , The Systems Approach (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968) p. 229. Churchman also notes that the management scientist in his models “forgets many things: Basic human values and his own inability really to understand all aspects of the system, and especially its politics” (p. 228).

Grether E. T. , “Consistency in Public Economic Policy with Respect to Private Unregulated Industries,” American Economic Review, LIII: 2 (May 1963).

See, esp., Galbraith John K. , The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), and Berle A. A. , The American Economic Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963).

The reference to “an invisible hand” appeared in a discussion of the use of capital in the support of domestic industry as follows: “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry … he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (italics added). The Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV, chap. II.

The reference to “a great society” is as follows: “The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain” (italics added). Ibid., Bk. V, chap. I, pt. III.

See, esp., Bain J. S. , Barriers to New Competition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956, 1965).

For an excellent rationalization of this approach, see Kaysen C. Turner D. F. , Antitrust Policy: An Economic and Legal Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959). For a summary of cases to 1967, see Brodley J. F. , “Oligopoly Power Under the Sherman and Clayton Acts—From Economic Theory to Legal Policy,” Stanford Law Review, XVIX:2 (Jan. 1967), 287–366.

See Collins N. R. Preston L. E. , Concentration and Price-Cost Margins in Manufacturing Industries (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968) for a summary of previous empirical work and for the most recent extension of cross-sectional empirical analysis.

Gardiner C. Means, who for many years has stressed (1) the separation of ownership and control in modern big business and (2) administered pricing, has proposed a new category of “collective enterprises” under special legislation midway between the private enterprise and public utility categories. Pricing Power and the Public Interest: A Study Based on Steel (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962).

Averitt R. T. , “American Business: Achievement and Challenge,” Daedalus, Winter 1967, p. 74.

As I write these words on March 8, 1969, I note a story in today's San Francisco Chronicle about an experimental teaching program at the junior high level in which computer hardware is used. According to the story, “the curriculum is written, planned, and supervised by Lockheed Corporation of Sunnyvale, which believes that a systems approach to learning works.”