Author Archive
Williamsoniana
| Peter Klein |
My, we live in a fast-paced world: the Nobel announcement is just a few hours old, and we’re already being taken to task for not blogging enough about Williamson. For the high-time-preference folks, please see previous posts on Williamson and transaction cost economics, and the preview chapters of the Elgar TCE Handbook, while we work on our usual careful, thoughtful, and well-researched blog posts.
It’s Williamson, at Last!
| Peter Klein |
A hearty congratulations to Oliver Williamson, co-recipient (along with Elinor Ostrom) of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. As Williamson’s former PhD student, I’m thrilled beyond belief. The O&M crew have all been heavily influenced by Williamson (and, to a some degree, Ostrom too) and will have much more to say about this in the coming days. But, for now, just enjoy!
Ashley Judd and Bob Lucas
| Peter Klein |
The lovely and talented Ashley Judd was the celebrity guest this morning on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” (Ashley and I have a close personal connection, she being a junior-high-school classmate of my wife’s younger brother. Can’t get closer than that.) She answered trivia questions about the Nobel prize, one of which centered on Bob Lucas. What unfortunate thing happened to Lucas, she was asked? (a) He died from eating bad fish at the awards dinner, (b) his ex-wife got half the Nobel money from a previous divorce settlement, or (c) [I forgot (c)]. The correct answer, I’m sure you know, is (b). Ashley and the other participants thought it hilarious that someone would include a Nobel-prize provision in a divorce agreement, but even in 1987, when Lucas was divorced, it was a foregone conclusion that he would eventually win (he got the prize in 1995). Next time I see dear Ashley I’ll point this out. Personally, I’ve already pledged half my future Nobel winnings to charity.
The Fate of Famous Economists
| Peter Klein |
Even very famous ones. The Dundee Courier (what, you don’t read it?) reports that Adam Smith’s gravestone, in the courtyard of Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, is in bad shape: “Smith’s gravestone could be in danger of deterioration after years of exposure to the elements, vandalism and neglect” (HT: MGK). According to a spokesperson for the World Monument Fund, cemeteries in the central parts of cities like Edinburgh have become “unsafe environment[s] home to illicit activities.” Apparently David Hume’s grave, elsewhere in Edinburgh, is also threatened. How ironic that we put dead politicians in great cathedrals and mausoleums (and, while living, give them Nobel Prizes), while actual heroes are abandoned and forgotten.
Nobel Stuff
| Peter Klein |
Because O&M is an econ-themed blog, I guess we’re obligated to post something about next week’s Nobel prize announcement. I confess I don’t follow the buzz that closely; the committee’s picks often make little sense to me and there are better things to do with one’s time. But, along the lines of this 2007 post, I note that several folks on Mankiw’s list of favorites work in the general area of organizational economics: Tirole, Milgrom, Hart, Holmström, Ostrom, Williamson, and Wilson.
Update: After today’s peace prize announcement, there is an obvious frontrunner: Ben S. Bernanke. Clearly actions and accomplishments don’t matter, only image and self-promoting rhetoric. (See also Mankiw’s take.)
Update II: Nolan McCarty (via Joshua Tucker) has an even more audacious prediction:
- Whereas Tirole, Nordhaus, Milgrom, and others have made important and fundamental scholarly contributions to economic theory and policy analysis, only Obama has the audacity to hope for better economic policy in the future. Can he design a health care system that covers everyone and saves money? Yes, he can! Can he reengineer the financial system to eliminate systemic risk, protect consumers while maintaining the benefits of modern finance? Yes, he can! Can he reduce greenhouse emissions without reducing jobs and economic growth? Yes, he can! What actual economist would dare say those things? For his vision alone, he deserves the prize.
- Obama has never been associated rational expectations theory or the efficient markets hypothesis. In fact, he’s turned his administration into one big Behavioral Economics Seminar.
- I’ve heard rumors that Obama still plans to broker a peace treaty between Paul Krugman and Bob Lucas. Unfortunately, the track 2 negotiations seem to have broken down.
- The Scandinavians could really stick it to George Bush by giving Obama two Nobel Prizes.
- He taught at the University of Chicago.
Masters of Finance
| Peter Klein |
The American Finance Association has assembled a terrific set of video interviews and lectures with eminent financial economists including Markowitz, Sharpe, Samuelson, Merton, Scholes, Arrow, Fama, and Myers. (HT: Fama/French.)
The First Secretary of Agriculture
| Peter Klein |
Mises.org has posted Frank Chodorov’s 1952 classic, “Joseph, Secretary of Agriculture”:
The dream plan worked wonders — for Pharaoh and his secretary of agriculture. . . . On the other hand, it is told how a delegation of Egyptians came to Joseph and declared: “Thou hast saved our lives: let us find favor in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s servants.” Showing that the proletariat had come to terms with collectivism (since that was the only way to get by in this world) and were content with whatever security the secretary would provide.
Joseph, however, had to make some concession to private property, perhaps to encourage more taxable production; he restored to some of the Egyptians the land he had taken from them in their adversity, on a rental basis. The rent? One-fifth of all the annual output. By this well-timed act of policy, informs historian Flavius Josephus, “Joseph established his own authority in Egypt and increased the standing revenue of all its succeeding monarchs.”
Though the succeeding monarchs and the succeeding commissars did well under the plan introduced by Joseph, it seems (according to later historians) that it put upon the proletarians a moral blight, so that when conquerors from other lands came to Egypt they met with little resistance; those who had nothing to lose had nothing to fight for, so that even the monarchs had to beg the invaders for administrative jobs. And lots of dust fell on the civilization of Pharaoh.
Chodorov goes on to describe the obvious analogy to twentieth-century agriculture policy. Of course, without farm programs, how would we have food?
Management Miscellany
| Peter Klein |
1. We are not big on Jim Collins here at O&M but Toyota president Akio Toyoda is a fan, explaining his company’s woes in terms of Collins’s five stages of business decline. (Is “be headquartered in a country with an overvalued currency” one of the stages?)
2. Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke, 2008) is reviewed by fellow anthropologist Gillian Tett in the FT. The key to understanding the financial crisis, we learn, is Bourdieu (why haven’t I read about this book on orgtheory.net?). “Massive corporate restructurings are not caused so much by abstract financial models as by the local, cultural habitus of investment bankers, the mission-driven narratives of shareholder value and the institutional culture of Wall Street.” Why didn’t I think of that?
3. I’ve been reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the first of great dystopian novels (in Natasha Randall’s new translation). I had head that Taylorism figures prominently in the novel, but didn’t know Taylor would be mentioned by name. “Yes, that Taylor was, without doubt, the most brilliant of the Ancients. True, he didn’t think everything through, didn’t extend his method throughout life, to each step, around the clock. He wasn’t able to integrate his system from an hour to all twenty-four. But all the same: how they could have written whole libraries about the likes of Kant — and not take notice of Taylor, a prophet, with the ability to see ten centuries ahead?” Of course, as we’ve noted before, there’s more to Taylor than meets the eye.
Tweets of the Great Economists
| Peter Klein |
Cliff sent me Andrew Pessin’s “Twitter Tour of Western Philosophy.” Samples: “Socrates: Drinking hemlock; toes tingling; legs getting numb. Maybe unexamined life worth living? Guard!” “Plato: Symposium 2nite 7pm, @ The Cave. Open mike, open bar. Under 21 admitted free.” “Schopenhauer: All is empty, pointless. Deep, dark despair. Could use snack.” So, what would the great economists and management scholars have said in 140 characters or less?
Hayek: @maynard: Demand 4 commodities not demand 4 labor. Come on, dude!
Porter: Got 4 forces now; need ideas for 5th.
Williamson: Anybody out there want to transact? No hazards pls.
Help me out here.
Stewart Macaulay
| Peter Klein |
Here’s a lecture I wish I could have attended: Stewart Macaulay gave today’s Annual Distinguished Lecture at BYU Law School. Macaulay, as noted in BYU’s blurb, is “an internationally recognized scholar and a leader of the law-in-action approach to contracts. He pioneered the study of business practices and legal work regarding contract law. He is also one of the founders of the law and society movement.” More important for our purposes, Macaulay’s emphasis on what Williamson calls “private ordering” — the governance of contractual relations by convention, private arbitration, and firms’ own “internal courts” — has been extremely influential for transaction cost economics.
Here’s the abstract of Macaulay’s lecture:
A Contract Crisis? “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
There are several proposals for a new contract law. On one hand, our economic crisis suggests that many see the need to rewrite or rescind contracts to reflect the drastically changed conditions of the past few years. On the other hand, there are proposals for a far more formal law of contracts than are found in the Uniform Commercial Code and the Restatement (2d) Contracts. Drawing on calls for “a new legal realism,” Professor Macaulay suggests that there is much that we don’t know about the need for and the consequences of such major revisions. He stresses, however, that a key word in Ira Gershwin’s lyrics from “Porgy and Bess” is “necessarily.” The first step must be a better picture of contract law in action. Such a picture might support some but not other changes.
I hope the lecture will appear soon on Macaulay’s website, and that Gordon Smith will post reactions at the Glom.
Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics
| Peter Klein |
Mike Sykuta and I are editing a volume for the Elgar Companion series, The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics. The volume is currently in production with an expected publication date in mid-2010. We’ve created a page here on O&M with more information, including a table of contents and some sample chapter drafts. Enjoy!
The Most Interesting Scholar in the World
| Peter Klein |
With apologies to Dos Equis:
His work would pass peer review . . . if he had peers.
Students take his classes, just because they find them interesting.
His main intellectual predecessor . . . is himself.
His Erdős number is negative.
He once rejected one of his own articles, just to see how it felt.
He reads Sanskrit . . . in mathematics.
A man came out of a coma after touching one of his books.
Football players at his university have season tickets to his lectures.
Stay thirsty for knowledge, my friends.
Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Dallas Cowboys Edition
| Peter Klein |
In Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) nexus-of-contracts approach to the firm, bosses don’t necessarily hire workers; workers may just as easily hire bosses. Recall Cheung’s (1983, p. 8) famous illustration: “My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.” In Alchian and Demsetz’s example, the employee can “fire” his employer by quitting, just as I can “fire” my grocer by shopping at a different store.
Here’s the Onion applying this logic to the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys:
IRVING, TEXAS — In an attempt to cut the franchise’s losses and “move forward in a positive direction,” the Dallas Cowboys severed ties with controversial owner Jerry Jones Monday, ending their tumultuous 20-year relationship with the divisive figure.
According to sources within the Cowboys organization, the decision to release Jones was influenced by the lack of any playoff victories in more than 12 years, the owner’s distracting sideline antics, and his selfish, “me first” attitude, which many said was having a cancerous effect on the clubhouse.
“We value Jerry’s contributions to the Cowboys over the past two decades, but it has become painfully clear that we just don’t share the same priorities,” Cowboys public relations director Richard Dalrymple said. “This wasn’t an easy choice to make, but we’re confident it is a decision that can only make our team better.”
I can see it now: “An NFL owner has no power of fiat, no authority, no disciplinary action any different in the slightest degree from ordinary market contracting between any two football players. . . .”
Nerd Rap
| Peter Klein|
Weird Al’s version — already deconstructed by our friends at orgtheory.net — has style, but the CERN Rap has substance. As do these econ vids.
The Soviets Really Did Have a Doomsday Machine
| Peter Klein |
According to the new issue of Wired (via the Economist), the Soviets really did have a doomsday machine and, as in Dr. Strangelove, didn’t tell anyone about it. Interestingly, the interpretation is that the Soviets, like Schelling’s rational addict, were directing the credible commitment not toward their opponents, but toward themselves:
The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.
By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”
This wouldn’t deter a Jack D. Ripper type, I suppose. Still, fascinating discussion for those who teach about strategic commitment.
Page and Reference Counts: AER versus AJS
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Teppo for linking to these interesting graphs. Since 1960, the page count and reference list of the average American Journal of Sociology article have risen dramatically, while those for the American Economic Review have remained about the same. I’d be curious to see these figures for the Academy of Management periodicals as well. What explains these trends? Are sociologists simply more verbose than economists?
Update: Here are some more graphs, this time including ASQ and Management Science, as well as some additional sociology journals. ASQ and MS appear to be somewhere in the middle.
John Gray on the Greenspan-Bernanke Economy
| Peter Klein |
From Gray’s April 2009 NYRB review of Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth:
Concepts of debt figure centrally in Western religion, while the notion that debt is something to be avoided, or incurred with caution, has long been important in Western capitalism. Without institutions facilitating borrowing, capitalism would not have developed to the degree that it has; but the belief that debt could be dangerous was until recently also an important part of capitalism. It is only lately, Atwood notes, that debt has been celebrated as positively benign, “a thing we’ve come to feel is indispensable to our collective buoyancy.” From being a necessary tool in productive enterprise, debt came to be viewed as an instrument of wealth creation. Using cheap credit, hedge funds and investment banks were able to multiply their profits, while society at large — including some in its poorest groups — came to see taking on large amounts of debt as a way of building up capital. Now that this structure of debt is unwinding, older ideas may be on their way back: “We seem to be entering a period in which debt has passed through its most recent harmless and fashionable period, and is reverting to being sinful.”
Latest news from Washington: “The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it would keep short-term interest rates near zero for the foreseeable future, even though the central bank acknowledged that the economy was recovering from its long downturn.”
Uncle Miltie on Economic Communication
| Peter Klein |
No, not Milton Friedman, but John Milton. See “Areopagitica: Milton’s Influence on Classical and Modern Political and Economic Thought” by Isaac M. Morehouse in the excellent new online journal Libertarian Papers. Says Morehouse:
Milton’s work has something to teach economists not only in its content but in its style and strategy. Milton did not restrict his theories on free speech to scholarly journals. Though his rhetorical style hardly seems accessible to the masses today, he intentionally wrote a short pamphlet with conscious allusions to popular sentiment in order to communicate rather complex ideas to the body politic. Economists who lament the lack of economic knowledge among the “man on the street” and the preponderance of antigrowth economic policy which result have much to learn from Milton. He wrote his work because he truly wanted change. For that reason, he made it accessible to the people whose hearts and minds he would have to win to see change come about. Modern economists would do well to more frequently attempt communication with more than a handful of scholars.
Along these lines I have to admit that I admire Paul Krugman, not because of the substance of arguments, which I find puerile and unformed, or his writing style, which is haughty and shrill, but because he tries to write for a popular audience, not just to his fellow specialists. (OK, actually, Krugman seems to have quit doing or writing about serious economic research, and doesn’t seem to have read a journal article in the last 15 years, but you get my point.)
Update: See also “Heroic Milton, Happy Birthday” from the NYRB.
Another Economist Gets a Genius Award
| Peter Klein |
This year it’s Esther Duflo, leader in the experimental approach to poverty reduction. She joins past economist-MacArthur fellows Matt Rabin, Avner Greif, Kevin Murphy, Nancy Folbre, Michael Kremer, and (way back in 1983, Alice Rivlin).
Niche Markets for Obsolete Technologies
| Peter Klein |
One of the most interesting papers I saw presented at this year’s ACAC meeting was Ron Adner and Daniel Snow’s “‘Old’ Technology Responses to ‘New’ Technology Threats: Demand Heterogeneity and Graceful Technology Retreats.” They show how incumbents sometimes react to disruptive innovation by repositioning the old technology as a niche product, aimed at specialized users or enthusiasts. Their examples are fascinating. One-way pagers, for example, are still popular in hospitals because their low-powered signals work better around, and interfere less with, complex medical equipment. Many audiophiles prefer vinyl records, with their rich, analog sound, to digital media. (Needles for high-end turntables sell for thousands of dollars.) Calligraphers prefer fountain pens to ball-point pens. And so on. Adner and Snow present a taxonomy of “reactive” strategies by incumbents facing innovative entrants and characterize the benefits and costs of each strategy. Here’s the abstract:
We explore the implications of a real and common alternative to attempting the transformation required to embrace a new, dominant, technology — the choice to maintain focus on the old technology. In considering this choice we distinguish between ‘racing’ strategies, which attempt to fight off the rise of the new technology by extending the performance of the old technology, and ‘retreat’ strategies, which attempt to accommodate the rise of the new technology by repositioning the old technology in the demand environment. Underlying our arguments is the observation that the emergence of a new technology does more than just create a substitute threat — it can also reveal significant underlying heterogeneity in the old technology’s broader demand environment. This heterogeneity is a source of opportunities that can support a new position for the old technology, in either the current market or a new one. Using this lens we explore the decision to stay with the old technology as a rational, proactive choice rather than as a mark of managerial and organizational failure. We then consider the distinctive challenges and organizational dynamics that arise in technology retreats, and their implications for the ways in which managers and scholars should approach questions regarding the management of capabilities, lifecycles, and ecosystems.
I came across another example this summer, in a NY Times piece on a Dutch firm resurrecting the Polaroid camera. And there was the 2006 Darren Aronofsky film The Fountain, which used a low-tech combination of soap bubbles, oils, and other liquids rather than digital technology to create its unusual visual effects.
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