Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Market Will Decide

Where is capitalism heading?  With the advent of the internet, there was, and is, much speculation about just this question.

I thought maybe this op-ed, Capitalism’s Next Stage, written by Samuel J. Robertson, and published by the Washington Post, might provide a pointer or two, but alas it does not.

Robertson’s piece is mostly a very condensed history of big business in the U.S., with a nod to Alfred D. Chandler Jr., and his book The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), which noted the influential part managers played in the rise of big business.

Robertson ends his piece this way.

Just as John Jacob Astor defined a distinct stage of capitalism, we may now be at the end of what Chandler perceptively called “managerial capitalism.” Managers, of course, won’t disappear. But the new opportunities and pressures on them and their companies may have altered the way the system operates. Chandler admits as much. Asked about how the corporation might evolve, he confesses ignorance: “All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the world.” To fill that void, someone must do for capitalism’s next stage what Chandler did for the last.

I don’t think Chandler did anything but define the part managers played in big business, it will be up to the market, you know buyers and sellers exchanging goods and services, to decide what capitalism’s next stage will be, that is as long as the state keeps its nose out of where it doesn’t belong.

Posted by John Venlet on 10/26 at 05:02 AM
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