Employers' Economics versus Employees' Economy (eBook)

John F. M. McDermott is Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York. He is the author of four previous books, two of them on economics: Corporate Society (1991) and Economics in Real Time (2004).

Acknowledgments 5
Contents 6
Introduction: The Argument 7
Chapter 1: We Invest More than They 10
Some Background 11
Public Investment 12
Producing a Labor Force 12
“To Create a Modern Labor Force!” 14
Analyzing the Investment Numbers 15
Ideology Trumps Facts: An Informative Detour 16
Creating Infrastructure 19
Public Co-investment 20
Agriculture 21
There Is More Besides 22
“The Money Pasture” 23
Taxes: Who Pays? 28
Pipers and Tunes 29
Looking Ahead and Finishing the Job 32
References 35
Chapter 2: The Paradoxes of Market Economics 37
That Inner Logic 38
Three Degrees of Competition 39
Firm-to-Firm Transactions 41
Consensual, Not Competitive 42
That Consensual Economy 44
Firm-to-Consumer: Competition? 45
The “Competitive” Fiction 47
The Atomic Transaction 50
Time Out 52
Futures Market 53
Ceteris Paribus 55
Time Out and Time In: An Exercise in Theory 56
Reconstructing 60
References 63
Chapter 3: Economics and Mis-Mathematics 64
Introduction 64
The Mis-Mathematics of Economics: First Approach 67
Two Infinites 68
A Helpful Detour 71
The Decisive Turn 73
Two Kinds of “Individualism” 75
The Argument 76
Adam Smith Revisited and Extended 77
A Mathematical Pause: The Power Set 78
Introducing Mis-Mathematics 79
Methodological Irony 82
Transparency 85
Countable and Real Number “Lines” 85
Economic Laws 86
Abstractions and Ideotypes 88
Rounding Off the Discussion 91
References 94
Chapter 4: Cornucopia, Inc. 96
The Process of Capitalist Production 98
Managing Managers Capitalistically 102
Managing Workers: Taylor, Taylorism, and Schmidt 105
Assembling the Model 112
Capping Some Social History 114
The Merchant’s Model Revisited 115
Nothing Stands Still 116
References 119
Chapter 5: From “Employees” to “Servants” 121
History as Opportunity and Burden 122
The Great Evasion 124
Private Property and the Workplace 127
Can We Afford the Private Property Workplace 131
Property and Efficiency 134
The Growing Mastery of the Master 136
The Workplace and the Constitution 142
A Civic Solution 143
References 147
Chapter 6: Economic Science and Social Reform 150
The Science 150
What Can Empirical Economics Offer? 155
The Workplace 155
The Firm 159
Ethos and Charter 163
CEOs and Their Boards 167
The Terrain of Reform 169
References 175
References 177
Index 184