‘The Rise and Fall of Management’ highlights some issues as of particular importance to the current situation. For instance, the universal adoption of agency theory. Agency is a legal relationship where the agent acts on behalf of the principal who is bound by the agent’s actions, and the agent is bound to act, in his [...]

Keynes recognised that the legislation protecting worker’s rights might lead to powerful trades unions, motivated by political ideals rather than the long term interests of their members, being the cause of wages led inflation damaging economic activity. His mistake was to argue that it was a political problem for governments, rather than a problem for [...]

A key tenet of the free market philosophy, elegantly expressed by Milton Friedman, was that businesses should focus exclusively on maximising shareholder value and not allow other considerations, apart from compliance with the law, to intrude on their business activities. That’s what Friedman stood for. And that’s what governments over the past 30 years have [...]

Economists, by whom we are all ruled (to quote Keynes), are themselves ruled by abstract theory, rather than by observation of anything which actually exists in the real world. They tend to focus on dichotomies defined by ideal types, such as socialism and capitalism, both easy to describe in their pure forms but non-existent in [...]

Profit is wilThe idea of profit has caused much aggravation over the years and even today is still the source of heated debate. Marx borrowed Ricardo’s idea that profit was no more than the wages earned by labour but stolen by the providers of capital. This explained the grossly unfair divergence between the poverty of [...]