Gardiner C. Means’s Institutional and Post-Keynesian Economics

Abstract

Gardiner Coit Means died on 15 February 1988 at the age of 91. A man of continuous activity in the public arena and not a professional academic,1 Means was one of the leading and most conspicuous economists of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’. But scholars will long remember him as the co-author, with Adolf A. Berle, Jr, of one of the truly epochal books of the twentieth century, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932; 1933) and subsequently as a principal developer of the ideas of administered pricing and administered inflation. The impact which The Modern Corporation and Private Property had on people’s (and not only economists’) understanding of the modem economy is in the same class as that of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). Indeed, the relationship of Means’s theories to those of Keynes, and of post-Keynesian economics, is one facet of the historic interest in Means.