(Roughly) Daily

Congressman Fred Hartley and Senator Robert Taft, namesake co-sponsors of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (which figures in the tale referenced below)

… Happily that wasn’t always the accepted belief, and may some day recede. The redoubtable Bill Janeway explains– and laments– the passing of corporations that felt a duty to constituents other than their shareholders…

In his new book Slouching towards Utopia, the economist J. Bradford DeLong points out, correctly, that the “industrial research laboratory and the modern corporation” were the keys to unleashing a radical increase in the rate of scientific and technological innovation, and thus economic growth, from 1870 onward. DeLong also identifies the Treaty of Detroit, a landmark 1950 settlement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, as a linchpin of American-style post-World War II social democracy. But what ever happened to the behemoth corporations that unlocked decades of growth while sponsoring health insurance and pensions for their employees?…

The rise of the neoliberal order in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the demise of companies that served their societies and employees as well as their shareholders. Since then, the US federal government and other institutions have managed to offset the loss of only part of the broader contributions that big business once made. The fascinating, sad story at “The Rise and Fall of the Socially Beneficial Corporation,” from @billjaneway in @ProSyn.

* Milton Friedman, intellectual leader– and avatar– of the neoliberal order

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As we learn from the past, we might send inclusively-calculated birthday greetings to a Cambridge University faculty colleague of Bill’s, Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta; he was born on this date in 1946. An Anglo-Indian economist, Dasgupta’s contributions have been broad, covering welfare and development economics; the economics of technological change; population, environmental, and resource economics; social capital; the theory of games; ecological economics; and the economics of malnutrition. His deepest interest has been in ecological economics, more particularly in the nexus of population, consumption, and the natural environment and in the economics of biodiversity. With the late Karl-Goran Maler, he developed the concept of “inclusive wealth” as a measure of human well-being.

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