I was saddened to learn this morning of the passing of Dick Nelson, and I wanted to add my own testament to what will be an outpouring of praise and reminiscence.  As many have already noted, Dick was a mentor par excellence.  He was also an institution builder and networker, arguably the central figure in science and technology studies (not to mention many strands of mildly heterodox economics) of his generation.

I first met Dick in 1980, when I came to NYU from graduate school at Stanford.  Part of my appointment was in the Center for Science and Technology Policy.  Dick was close to the Center’s founder and director, Herb Fusfeld, and he came down from New Haven a few times a month.  Having arrived with an unusual academic background, and starting to enter a less-than-mainstream field (or indeed several less-than-mainstream fields), I probably needed mentorship more than most.  (The other part of my appointment was in the C. V. Starr Center in the Arts and Sciences Economics Department at NYU, where I began working with Fritz Machlup, who became another mentor.)

At NYU I worked behind the scenes on a project that became Government and Technical Progress (1982), a paradigm of the Nelson-edited collected volume.  Dick would bring together interesting authors to contribute case studies.  The authors would meet at least once, and sometimes more than once, to exchange ideas and compare notes, and then Dick, sometimes with a coauthor, would tie it all together in an introduction.  As the volume neared competition, Dick took me aside and suggested I help him write up a summary of the book’s conclusion.  This became an article in Science, and one of my first publications.

By the 1990s, I had become one of the chapter authors, working on book projects (including this one and this one) with a stable of usual suspects from my own generation, including the likes of Tim Bresnahan, Franco Malerba, Dave Mowery, and Ed Steinmueller.  Nate Rosenberg, who had been one of my thesis advisors at Stanford, was also involved in many of these projects.

Over the years I would interact with Dick at innumerable conferences.  The last time I saw him was in Edinburgh in 2019 at a conference organized by David Teece.  He was saddened by health problems and the loss of his dear wife Katherine, but still going strong at nearly 90.

While I’m in this somber mood, I will also note the recent passing of Ronald Howard, a charismatic figure during my graduate years at Stanford and another member of my dissertation committee.

On September 26, 2024, I was honored to deliver the Eli Heckscher Memorial Lecture at the Stockholm School of Economics. I talked on the the theme of the American corporation in the twentieth cenury. The Heckscher lecture has been given anually since 2003 by a list of distinguished economists, including two Nobel Laureates. It is named in honor of Eli Heckscher (1879-1952), known to most economists for the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem in international trade, who was the founder of economic history in Sweden.

I was pleased to be part of the Janus Forum Lecture Series at Brown University this past Wednesday, April 3.  The topic was the regulation of Big Tech industries, and I was in conversation with Tim Wu, who was President Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy.  The lectures were sponsored by the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown.

On September 29, 2023, the Penn Economic History Forum held a symposium on my new book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century.  The event was well attended, with commentators, both in-person and online, including Brian Cheffins (Cambridge University), Alexander Field (Santa Clara University), Patrick Fridenson (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale and Michigan), and Laura Phillips Sawyer (Georgia).  I am grateful to my friend Dan Raff for organizing the event.

My new book was recently reviewed in the Financial Times, by Sir Geoffrey Owen, a former editor of the newspaper.

On October 20, I published another op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I argued that contrary to a widespread meme in antitrust circles, there is little evidence that great antitrust cases of the twentieth century had the salutary effects claimed for them. Markets were in fact shaped by the capabilities and constraints of the firms involved, and they would have evolved in much the same ways had the antitrust suits never been filed. In many cases, antitrust verdicts merely called for actions that firms like IBM were already planning to take.

On October 12, I participated in a fascinating Santa Fe Institute event in New York City.  The topic was “regulation” in its most general sense.  I spoke about the history of government regulation in the U. S.  Perhaps the most interesting talk was by noted venture capitalist Bill Gurley, who talked about regulatory capture.

In September, I attended the annual conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research in Catania, Sicily, held at the historic Monastero San Benedetto.  I presented a paper on Frank Knight, which was written for a symposium at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University on October 20-21.

 

 

I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on August 5 about the Big-Tech regulatory commission proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren. My argument is that historical precedents from the Twentieth Century like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Communications Commission should give us pause about creating a new intendent regulatory commission.