Thinking About Robert Wood Johnson II

3 06 2025

One of the privileges of working in a business school is that you occasionally get to meet/have a meal with really remarkable and impressive business leaders. One of the advantages of being a business historian is that you get to learn about similarly remarkable business leaders who lived ago. Let me tell you about Robert Wood Johnson II, a business visionary, patriot, and, in my view, war hero.  If you’re trying to understand how ideational commitments can persist inside firms for generations, Robert Wood Johnson II is a useful figure to consider. He didn’t found Johnson & Johnson, but he arguably left a deeper and more enduring imprint on the organization than its original founders. Thinking about Johnson’s impact is useful because management academics who use the theory of organizational imprinting focus on firm founders—the leaders who control companies during their infancies. The underlying idea is that for an individual to leave a lasting impact on a company, they have to be there at the earliest stage. (Check out this new paper in ASQ that applies and develops imprinting theory). I suppose that this management theory is analogous to the personality theory that says that high quality parenting matters the most when the child is under five—the child’s destiny is basically set up the lessons they absorb from their parents before they go to school. Well the case of Johnson is a bit of a problem for imprinting theory as it currently exists because he wasn’t a firm founder—he sort of inherited a rather unremarkable company and turned into something very distinctive whose distinctive features endure to this day. Johnson became president of J&J in 1932 and led it until the early 1960s. Over those three decades, he embedded a managerial philosophy that combined decentralised authority with superior organisational performance by the main metrics. What Johnson did was a sort of second founding—he wasn’t the George Washington of this company, he was its Abraham Lincoln.

Johnson (1883 to 1968) spent nearly his entire adult life inside Johnson & Johnson. He joined the company as a young man, having grown up in the orbit of its founders, and was steeped early in both its operational details and its moral rhetoric. By the time he became president, he was already well-versed in the business and carried the authority of both experience and lineage. He was also a reservist in the U.S. Army before joining the federal wartime administration, where he took on a prominent role overseeing small manufacturers who were contributing the war effort and protecting these SMEs from an unholy alliance of bureaucrats, Big Business, and Big Government. His career blended private enterprise with public service, and that dual exposure shaped many of his views on decentralisation, corporate legitimacy, and leadership.

Image from J&J Corporate History Website.

Johnson took control during the Great Depression. He didn’t cut jobs. In fact, in 1933 he gave everyone a 5% raise and opened a new factory. While other firms were retrenching, he was arguing publicly for higher wages, shorter hours, and corporate social responsibility, voicing ideas similar to those articulated by Herbert Hoover. “It is in the interest of modern industry,” he wrote, “that service to customers comes first; service to its employees and management second, and service to its stockholders last.” He outlined these views in a short pamphlet he distributed to other industrialists, called Try Reality.

What made Johnson interesting was not just that he held these views about putting the stockholders last, which were pretty widespread among American executives in the era of total war, but that he institutionalised them. His most famous contribution was the writing of Our Credo in 1943. This document lays out J&J’s responsibilities in a strict moral order: customers first, then employees, then communities, then shareholders. He had the text literally carved in stone in the company headquarters. It remains there today. Unlike many corporate value statements, the Credo wasn’t a marketing exercise for the website. J&J leaders were expected to take it seriously. In 1982, for example, the Credo was explicitly invoked by CEO James Burke as the basis for recalling Tylenol nationwide in response to the poisoning crisis.

The middle years of the twentieth century were the peak of the high modernist belief in centralisation. Sadly, even the Western democracies were affected by this worldwide trend: in federal nations, central governments sucked power in from state/provincial governments and some analogous happened in many companies, notwithstanding the popularity in other companies of the M-Form discussed by Al Chandler. Johnson believed in decentralisation, not just as an efficiency measure but as a philosophy of life. He turned J&J into what he called a “family of companies”: a group of semi-autonomous business units, each with its own leadership, decision rights, and accountability. He thought mistakes were inevitable, and that decentralised firms made them smaller and less systemic. He believed in developing leaders by giving them room to run their own operations. He once said that in a centralised firm, “one big mistake can cripple the whole organization.”

The model wasn’t imposed arbitrarily. Johnson had seen decentralisation work in practice. His early experiments with overseas subsidiaries gave local managers a high degree of autonomy, and he was impressed with the results. During WWII, when he ran the Smaller War Plants Corporation, he also saw that distributed production by smaller firms could outperform centralised control. These experiences reinforced his conviction that responsiveness, not control, was the key to both efficiency and resilience.

While the mid-century Johnson & Johnson is sometimes cited as an exemplar of the M-form structure, its approach between the 1930s and the 1960s diverged in important respects from the canonical model articulated by Alfred Chandler. Structurally, the firm did resemble the archetypical M-form: it was organised into semi-autonomous operating units, each focused on distinct product categories or geographic markets. In a classic M-form, the divisions have responsibility for their own manufacturing and marketing, but not strategic decisions, which are made at the headquarters. From a purely formal standpoint, this places J&J within the broad tent of M-form adopters.

However, at J&J strategic decisions were also downloaded to the divisions. Functionally—and philosophically—it operated according to a radically different logic than in the classic M-form. Whereas Chandler’s M-form emphasized strategic centralization at headquarters, J&J espoused what might be called a doctrine of principled decentralization. Influenced by the managerial philosophy of Robert Wood Johnson, the company saw local autonomy not just as an efficiency mechanism but as a moral imperative. Decision rights were not merely delegated—they were embedded in the very design of the enterprise. The corporate center was relatively passive, providing capital and articulating broad values, but largely refraining from strategic coordination or intervention.

In this sense, J&J’s model was less a hierarchical allocator and more a federated network of entrepreneurial units. Where General Motors centralized planning functions and optimized across business lines, J&J tolerated—indeed, cultivated—a more pluralistic and loosely coupled structure. It is perhaps more accurate to think of J&J in this era not as a typical M-form firm but as an early prototype of post-M-form decentralization: structurally divisional, but governed through norms, local accountability, and minimal central orchestration.

Johnson viewed corporate power as a form of stewardship. He believed businesses needed to earn their legitimacy by serving others. He was also, in some sense, a Cold War liberal: convinced that capitalism needed to reform itself in order to survive the ideological battles of the mid-20th century. Corporate paternalism, in his hands, was not just a managerial strategy; it was a political response to the threat of social unrest and citizens drifting into supporting the totalitarian ideologies at the two ends of the political spectrum.

What makes Johnson’s case instructive is not just what he did, but how successfully it endured. By the time he retired in the 1960s, J&J was a global company, operating with over 100 semi-autonomous subsidiaries. That structure remains intact today. The Credo is still cited in internal deliberations. And the basic logic of his stakeholder-first philosophy continues to shape the firm’s governance. It is difficult to find many examples where the imprint of a mid-century CEO has lasted this long, especially when it runs so visibly counter to the shareholder primacy model that dominated American business thought in the decades after his retirement.

Robert Wood Johnson II was not flawless. He could be paternalistic, and his approach to moral authority might grate in a different institutional context. But in an era dominated by central planners and consolidators, he was making a different bet: that legitimacy and longevity come not from tight control, but from principled decentralisation. And eight decades on, his wager still looks pretty sound.

In some respects, Johnson and his ideas were totally representative of his generation. He was influenced by the ideas of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, whose 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property helped shift elite thinking away from the idea that corporations should be run primarily for the benefit of shareholders. Berle and Means argued that large corporations had come to dominate American economic life and should be seen as social institutions. Their work was widely read and debated among business and policy elites in the interwar years, and Johnson’s rejection of shareholder primacy placed him firmly within that intellectual milieu.

But in other ways, Johnson was quite unrepresentative of his time. In an era increasingly captivated by high modernist visions of centralised planning and control (whether in government agencies, conglomerates, or business schools) he was actively decentralising power inside his firm. While many of his contemporaries were building central headquarters stuffed with analysts and long-range planners intent on micromanaging distant managers, Johnson was pushing authority outwards. He did this not out of ideological contrarianism, but because he believed decentralisation made firms more responsive, more resilient, and more moral.

This commitment to decentralisation is especially striking given Johnson’s own background in the U.S. military. He served in a leadership role during World War II and was socialised in a system that, at that time, embraced centralised command and rigid hierarchy. The modern doctrine of mission command, which means delegating authority and empowering subordinates, was decades away from being adopted by the U.S. armed forces. In fact, during the Second World War the U.S. military practiced the polar opposite of mission command, as their German opponents noted.

The concept of mission command has its origins in 19th-century Prussia, where military thinkers developed the idea of Auftragstaktik. This doctrine was built around giving subordinates clear objectives but leaving the means of execution to their discretion. The idea was to encourage flexibility, speed, and initiative at the tactical level while still maintaining coherence at the strategic level. Although it had long been admired by a few dissenting voices within the U.S. military, the U.S. military did not embrace mission command until the soul searching in the post-Vietnam period. The failures of top-down military, Robert McNamara-style planning in Southeast Asia, combined with a changing operational environment and the professionalisation of the officer corps, pushed U.S. military doctrine toward greater decentralisation. By the late 20th century, mission command had become a core principle in U.S. Army leadership manuals—a sharp departure from the centralised command culture that had prevailed during Johnson’s own time in uniform.

 That Johnson, a mid-20th century military man, ended up building one of the most decentralised corporate structures in postwar America is testament to how deeply he believed in pushing decision-making down to those closest to the action.


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Should Universities Compete Like Corporations? Rethinking Competition Policy in UK Higher Education

8 05 2025

What happens when British charitable institutions designed to serve the public good are treated like market actors and then a policy regime imported from the United States gets imposed on them? In the case of UK universities, the consequences have become increasingly difficult to ignore. The financial instability now threatening dozens of higher education institutions (HEIs)—a category of entity that is still formally classed being in the charitable sector (albeit as “exempt charities”)–is forcing a critical reconsideration of whether applying commercial competition policy to universities has gone too far. If the principles underpinning anti-trust law (particularly those ultimately derived from the Sherman Act in the United States) are unsuitable for cultural institutions such as museums, churches, or libraries, one might reasonably ask: why are universities—whose remit is arguably broader and more clearly charitable—subjected to the same regulatory logic?

The Competition Act 1998, the key legislative instrument shaping the UK’s competition framework, prohibits anti-competitive agreements and abuse of dominant positions. In doing so, it seeks to protect consumers from monopolistic behaviour and ensure market fairness. However, its extension to universities has had unintended consequences. Universities are not merely providers of services in a neutral market; they are mission-driven institutions, historically embedded within local and national contexts. The framing of students as consumers and universities as competitors—solidified in policy from the 2010 Coalition  onward—has encouraged duplication rather than cooperation, shared infrastructure, or regional mission cohesion. Of course, there isn’t a real market here: the prices (tuition fees) are set by the government and students are allocated to universities through a public sector body called UCAS.

This problem is no longer theoretical. Financial strain is now systemic across the sector. In early February, Wendy Larner, Cardiff University’s Vice Chancellor, publicly stated the strictures of competition law are actively inhibiting cost-saving collaboration between geographically proximate institutions. For the benefit of international readers, I should explain that in the UK, it is not unusual to find universities whose buildings sit cheek by jowl next to the buildings of other universities, an arrangement that appears to scream out for a merger to achieve economies of scale. Cardiff University, which is in serious financial difficulties and is talking about closing its nursing college (!!) is an example of a university that shares a city with other universities whose campuses are also scattered across town.

Mergers, similar to the one undertaken by the universities in Manchester in 2004, and collaborations short of a merger, such as the collective provision of janitorial services, seem to be inhibited because they might now be construed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as cartel-like behaviour under the Act. Universities that once shared specialist staff, jointly invested in laboratory facilities, or coordinated postgraduate research training now find themselves navigating a thicket of legal ambiguities. My impression is that the CMA is run by people who read Adam Smith’s famous book and are now inappropriately applying it to universities. In a great sentence, Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That may well be true of car dealers hanging out at the country club– they might well agree to fix prices somewhere around the ninth hole of the golf course. But universities are different because they are charities. When people from different universities re-unite at conferences, they are producing a public good rather than trying to find a backdoor route to the creation of a cartel.

To its credit, the CMA responded by Wendy Larner’s comments by saying that it is willing to have conversation with universities and to be flexible about the rules (see here and here). While the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has issued some clarifications by suggesting that collaboration is not necessarily impermissible the climate of legal caution remains pervasive. The chilling effects are real, even if not always explicitly codified. I’m not speaking here based on anything I have personally observed but I am basing my comments on what I have read online.

From a historical perspective, this represents a profound shift. British universities have long been seen as charities. Originally, they were closely tied to the established Churches (Church of England in this country) and then in the nineteenth century we had non-denominational civic universities. In the twentieth century, their funding, legitimacy, and purpose entangled with state agendas (think of Cold War science policies). Their institutional success has often depended on collaboration rather than competition. The Robbins Report of 1963, for example, imagined an expanding and coordinated system of higher education, with universities working together to meet national needs. The author that report was certainly a supporter of competition in commercial markets—he was a classical liberal friend of F.A. Hayek. It was not until the market-oriented reforms—accelerated in the New Labour and post-2010 periods—that universities began to be reconceptualised as companies.

I’m not even going to get into the issue here of whether anti-trust law is a good thing or whether the world would have become a better place had the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which has now been emulated in every country influenced by American soft power, had never been created. (I’m sympathetic to that counterfactual but will leave that to another blog post). I’ll simply point out that many scholars, particular in my home field of business history, have long been sceptical of both the early, path-setting anti-trust laws and the motives of their creators (see this paper). My main argument here is that we shouldn’t apply competition laws to universities because they are charities, not companies!

Theoretically speaking, the case for viewing universities as companies rests on shaky ground. While classical economic theory correctly champions competition as a driver of innovation and efficiency, the university sector defies many of the assumptions necessary for those outcomes to materialise. Information asymmetry is profound—students cannot fully evaluate the “product” they are purchasing until years after the fact—and the “goods” on offer (teaching, research, cultural engagement) are not easily interchangeable. Moreover, duplicating niche programmes or competing for the same shrinking pool of students (think of how the post-2008 fertility crisis is about to hit universities) does not lead to efficiency; it results in waste. This problem is particularly acute in regions with multiple institutions serving overlapping communities. In such cases, the inability to merge departments, co-deliver teaching, or rationalise real estate due to fear of breaching competition law borders is unhelpful.

The analogy with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, as applied in the United States, is instructive. That legislation was justified on the grounds it was necessary to prevent industrial monopolies from exploiting consumers. But when applied to universities—which do not exist to maximise shareholder value—it risks misdiagnosing the problem entirely. Indeed, the collapse of several for-profit universities in the US should serve as a cautionary tale: market logic, when applied too uncritically, can hollow out the very institutions it purports to reform.

If we do have to think of universities as companies, a more appropriate model might be drawn from the regulated public utility sector (think of electricity and natural gas pipeline companies), where certain forms of collaboration are not only permitted but required to ensure service continuity and universal access. Alternatively, one might revisit the statutory exemptions available to public broadcasters or national cultural bodies, which recognise that competition law should not be enforced uniformly across all sectors of national life. If universities are to survive and thrive they must be permitted to act like charities.

Perhaps a wholesale exemption from competition policy may not be necessary but clearer “safe-harbours” for collaboration and pre-authorisation for all mergers could make a substantial difference. But continuing to treat universities as if they are indistinguishable from mobile phone providers or supermarket chains is intellectually indefensible and practically damaging. Don’t get me wrong– I love that the UK has so many competiting mobile phone providers. It’s just the universities are different. It has taken centuries to build a higher education system with global reputation and local relevance. Let us not dismantle it through policy frameworks designed for a fundamentally different domain of human effort.

Is it time, then, to reconsider not just the letter of the law, but the philosophy behind it? The financial crisis in UK universities is not solely a consequence of external shocks or demographic decline—it is also the product of a misalignment between institutional purpose and regulation. If collaboration is what the moment demands, then regulation must follow suit. Perhaps the UK needs to declare independence from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the philosophy behind it.


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Some Thoughts On Trump, Tariffs, and the Canadian Constitution

4 02 2025

I’m feeling a little bit guilty, albeit only a little bit. Canada is in a really difficult situation right now thanks to Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on its exports to the US. I think that if I had been more proactive back in 2015-2017, Canada might be in slightly stronger bargaining position today. That sounds very arrogant and conceited but please hear me out.

Here’s the background as to why I feel a bit guilty. I’m a dual citizen of Canada and the UK and I feel a strong sense of loyalty to both countries. I feel a greater sense of debt to Canada because that’s where I grew up. My formative experiences there included a tremendous sense of material abundance that just wouldn’t be paralleled here in the UK. I doubt that I would have had the luxury of becoming an academic had I grown up in Britian. Canada invested in me (I’m thinking of various scholarships funded by private donors and taxpayers, research fellowships, nice juicy research contracts, etc) so I feel a sense that I should pay it back.

In 2015, I had the opportunity to do precisely that. I was the star expert witness in a Canadian constitutional court case that had the potential to reverse a historical miscarriage of justice in a way that would resulted in the dismantling of internal trade barriers and a boost to Canada’s economic output. Had my side in the court case prevailed, I think that Canada would today have interprovincial free trade, a higher standard of living, and greater bargaining power in the face of Donald Trump’s threats.  Many observers, including the OECD and the IMF have said that Canada’s internal trade barriers are dragging down productivity and living standards. Getting rid of them could boost GDP per capita by up to 4%.

Here is a summary of the court case and my role in it. R v Comeau was a fascinating case about beer, borders, and the Canadian Constitution. It started when when Gerard Comeau, a New Brunswick resident, was stopped by police immediately after crossing an interprovincial border. He was charged with buying cheap beer and liquor in Quebec and bringing it home, thus violating a New Brunswick statute that severely limits on how much alcohol residents can import from other Canadian provinces. Comeau’s lawyers, who were supported by a non-profit foundation, argued that this violated section 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which says that goods should be “admitted free” across provincial lines. I testified about the historical context and motivations for section 121 in the summer of 2015. (You can read my expert witness report here). The case was widely covered in the Canadian media and, because it coincided with a federal general election, was commented on by all but one of the party leaders. (see media coverage here, here, and here). In 2016, a trial judge delivered his verdict and agreed with our side, ruling that provincial trade barriers were unconstitutional. However, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned this decision in April 2018, ruling that provinces have the right to regulate goods crossing their borders, as long as the primary purpose isn’t to block trade.

At the heart of the case were competing views of section 121. Comeau’s legal team, and I, argued for a broad interpretation—that the section bans any provincial law that impedes free trade between provinces. That’s the interpretation of the section that is most consistent with the values of the free trading Victorian lawyers and politicians who created it. (See analysis of my arguments here, here, and here). On the other hand, the New Brunswick government and Canada’s top court leaned on a narrower reading, arguing that section 121 only prohibits outright tariffs on interprovincial trade, not non-tariff trade restrictions, such as sending the police out to arrest people who import beer from the next province.

You can read about my involvement in the case in this academic article and in a McGill-Queen’s University Press book that won a number of awards.

My involvement in the court case was primarily at the initial trial stage, when it was being litigated in New Brunswick. I flew to New Brunswick from Paris where I was then living with my family (LONG STORY), testified for several days, came back to Europe, and was then gratified to read the news that judge had found my interpretation of the Canadian constitution to be persuasive. Having discharged my contractual obligations, I then basically stopped doing any work related to the case, aside from penning a short opinion piece in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Perhaps I should have invested more time in the trying to create awareness in Canada in the constitutional issues at stake, for instance by writing more about it or speaking about in the Canadian media. However, I had other fish to fry. My employer, a UK university, wouldn’t have been that pleased had a spent a significant amount of time on doing media work that wasn’t connected to a REF Impact Case. (For various bureaucratic reasons, my expert witness work couldn’t be classified as Impact work for the purposes of the REF. The REF is the system by which research performance, including societal impact, is measured and incentivized in UK universities). So, I didn’t do much with respect to the Comeau case after the week I spend in New Brunswick. In invested my research time in other projects, including the production of articles to be published in journals in the famous FT50 journal list. Basically I did the rational thing and focused my research time on the activities that are rewarded the most in the UK academic labour market. I said above that I feel only a little bit guilty, not really guilty. That’s because it was necessary for me to focus on my own career. I’m now working on other REF Impact Case projects that are unrelated to Canada and which focus on disseminating knowledge to non-academic research stakeholders here in the UK.

I suspect that if I had done more to educate the Canadian public about the original intent for section 121 of the Canadian constitution, the Canadian Supreme Court might have ruled differently. Judges are socially situated and they can’t ignore the prevailing climate of thought in their society as they interpret the evidence presented in court. Its ruling, which was delivered unanimously and was apparently written by the Chief Justice, quoted extensively from my expert witness report but ultimately sided against my interpretation. Had the Supreme Court sided with me, the interprovincial trade barriers would have been declared unconstitutional—after further litigation and transition costs as inefficient producers went out of business, GDP in per capita would almost certainly have been higher. And Canada would have been in a stronger position to deal with Trump.

The US, Canada’s adversary in the current struggle over tariffs, does not hobble itself with internal trade barriers: over the last two centuries, state politicians have tried to create internally protectionist barriers (it’s a perennial temptation) but because their Supreme Court has consistently upheld the original intent behind the Commerce Clause, the unity of the American internal market has been largely maintained.  In the U.S., free trade between states is guaranteed by the Commerce Clause or Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. It gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce… among the several States,” which has been interpreted to prevent individual states from restricting trade or discriminating against out-of-state goods and businesses. Over the years, the Supreme Court has reinforced this principle through the “Dormant Commerce Clause” doctrine, which basically means that even when Congress isn’t actively legislating on interstate trade, states still can’t pass laws that unfairly burden commerce between them. This clause has had a huge economic and social impact—it helped create a truly national market, allowing businesses to grow beyond state borders and preventing economic fragmentation like we see in Canada with cases like R v Comeau. So, while provinces in Canada still fight over interprovincial trade barriers, the U.S. system—thanks to the Commerce Clause—has largely prevented that kind of economic balkanization.

In recent weeks, the threat of US tariffs has caused Canadians to discuss the subject of internal free trade with renewed vigour. There has been a lot of talk about eliminating these trade barriers through the expansion of existing interprovincial compacts (see here, here, here, and here), such as the New West Partnership. In my view, these initiatives are nice but their potential benefits are small relative to those that would come from a clear reversal of the position the SCC adopted in interpreting s. 121 in the Gold Seal case.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many other things that Canada had done to put itself in a weak bargaining position. For instance, it failed to follow up the splendid Canada-EU trade agreement it negotiated by building the east-west infrastructure (what I called Laurentian infrastructure in a nod to the Laurentian thesis associated with the late Donald Creighton) that would have allowed it to really take advantage of this paper agreement. I’m thinking in particular of the unbuilt pipelines to bring natural gas to Canada’s Atlantic ports, where it could have been liquified and sent to Europe. However, failure to bring about internal free trade has made a bad situation worse.

Perhaps a future Canadian government will have a policy of only appointing Supreme Court justices who agree with the view that Section 121 should be interpreted broadly rather than narrowly.   


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Some Thoughts On Trump and Annexationism

13 12 2024

In late 2024, President-elect Donald Trump reignited diplomatic tensions with Canada by making provocative remarks about the country’s sovereignty. Trump referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the “Governor of the State of Canada,” adding with a smirk that Canada might as well join the United States if it wished to avoid the heavy tariffs on its exports. Trump took to his preferred platform, Truth Social, to repeat these sentiments. Over the following days, Trump’s posts escalated in tone, suggesting that Canada’s economy relied heavily on U.S. trade and that tariffs were inevitable unless it reconsidered its status. By mid-December, Trump’s comments had sparked widespread media attention, with some analysts unsure whether his statements were intended as serious policy proposals or simply political theatre or were simply a joke.

Here is some media coverage from India of the issue.

My educated guess is that they may be serious. There are certainly people around Trump who are concerned about the “browning of America” and who have, in the past, mused that incorporating Canadian provinces as states of the union would raise the Caucasian share of the US population (sorry I can’t find the link but they did say that). The same people seem to be fiercely opposed to Puerto Rican statehood). I don’t think that Trump is a racist ideologue, but I do think that he is interested in building a legacy and there would be no greater legacy than permanently expanding the United States. Changing the map of your country is a way to get your face on Mount Rushmore. That’s even better than being happy about Trump Tower becoming the tallest building in New York.  When I first heard the slogan “Make America Great Again” I noted that it didn’t specify when exactly American greatness had peaked. Like many, I had assumed that the imagined Good Old Days in this slogan were either some nostalgic version of the 1950s or the 1980s, a period when Trump was in his prime. But it could be the vaguely defined period of greatness underpinning the slogan is the nineteenth century, the period of manifest destiny.

Perhaps I am personally biased in thinking that Trump is serious about offering statehood to some or part of Canada because my PhD thesis looked at the 1860s, a period when that option was very much on the table. Maybe my background is skewing my analysis of what is going on right now.

In any event, Canadian popular reaction to Trump’s remarks was swift and defiant. Prominent politicians across the Canadian political spectrum rejected any notion of annexation, although I did notice the Premier of Ontario took the precaution of placing a US flag next to a Canadian and provincial one during a press conference. Polling data showed that Canadians overwhelmingly opposed closer political integration with the United States, with support for national sovereignty apparently at record highs. Only 1 in 8 Canadians are open to the idea of Canada, or their Canadian province, joining the United States. Even in the more politically conservative Prairie provinces, that number isn’t much higher than 20%.

Trump’s 2024 comments about Canada echoed his earlier proposal in 2019 that the United States should acquire Greenland, then an autonomous territory of Denmark. In August 2019, news broke that Trump had floated the idea during meetings with aides, reportedly framing the acquisition as a strategic move to gain access to Greenland’s natural resources and enhance the U.S. military presence in the Arctic. Trump later confirmed the proposal on Twitter, which is now called X. The proposal drew immediate backlash from Denmark, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen describing it as “absurd” and anachronistic. Her view was that while Tsarist Russia might once have been able to sell Alaska to the US, this isn’t 1867 anymore and we don’t do things that way. Trump retaliated by cancelling a state visit to Denmark, claiming Frederiksen’s response was disrespectful.

The idea of the United States annexing Canada has deep roots. During the early 1800s, tensions between the United States and British North America culminated in the War of 1812, during which some American leaders saw the conflict as an opportunity to annex Canadian territories and to liberate their inhabitants, many of whom were Anglo-Saxons culturally indistinguishable from people in neighbouring states, from British misrule. While the war failed to achieve this goal, the idea persisted among American expansionists. The Annexation Movement gained momentum in the 1840s, spurred by Manifest Destiny and economic pressures. In 1849, a group of Montreal merchants published the “Annexation Manifesto,” calling for Canada to join the United States to escape economic stagnation and benefit from free trade.

William Henry Seward, U.S. Secretary of State during the 1860s, was a vocal proponent of territorial expansion and believed that Canada would eventually be absorbed by the United States. In the 1850s Seward, who was an ardent abolitionist from New York State, said it was more logical for Canada to be part of the United States than it was for the slave states.  Seward was confident that economic integration and demographic trends would lead to Canadian annexation without military force. However, these ambitions, along with garden variety interest group politics in the US congress, resulted in the cancellation of the Reciprocity Agreement in 1866, which had established free trade between the U.S. and British North America since 1854. This Free Trade agreement’s termination was partly driven by American resentment toward British support for the Confederacy during the Civil War, as well as lingering annexationist sentiment. The cancellation intensified Canadian fears of U.S. expansionism and reinforced support for Confederation as a means of unifying and protecting Canada against American ambitions.

A paper I wrote long ago, “Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Chose a Unique Model of Sovereignty in the 1860s,” sheds light on why Canada ultimately resisted annexationist pressures. I wrote this paper because in part because I was sympathetic to the 1860s Canadians who favoured Annexationism, some of whom had arguments that were based on economic logic. (Annexationism was very strong in communities in which the border was an annoyance that complicated everyday life.) Once the US passed a constitutional amendment ending slavery, many Canadians, particularly farmers in the area west of Toronto, concluded that they could now safely join the Union. The paper argues that, unlike the United States and many Latin American nations, Canada adopted a model of sovereignty that preserved close ties to the British Empire while granting autonomy through Confederation. I argued that Canadian Confederation as a deliberate rejection of U.S.-style republicanism, emphasizing the desire to strengthen ties with the British Empire. Another reason the Annexation movement of the 1860s failed was the fact that Anglo-Saxon Americans were aware that Canada was home to a very large number of non-Protestants). Whether those ties were ultimately good for subsequent Canadian living standards is something we can discuss—as I argued in the final chapter of book published in 2008, post-Confederation Canada’s economy really fell behind the US. I speculated that the Canadian constitution designed in London in 1866-1867, which provided for an excessively centralized and not very democratic political system, had something to do with it. In the generation after 1867, vast numbers of Canadians voted with their feet in favour of the US and moved there, settling in places such as Ontario California.

My own personal view is that while I don’t like Trump, I think there is a strong logic in favour of continent-sized economic units, particularly those that resist the tendency to become protectionist blocks. I was totally opposed to Brexit and think that Britain would have been better off had it remained in the EU. (I’m agnostic about whether the UK should have adopted the Euro as its currency, as was once proposed by Tony Blair). By the same token, I think that Canadians and Americans would be better off if they combined their two countries at least in the form of an EU-style customs union with a common currency. The devil is obviously in the details. However, I think that we need to be able to separate the issue of which constitutional arrangement is economically superior from the political personalities of the day. When Clinton and Obama were presidents, support for greater integration in Canada was higher than it currently is. Whenever some particularly objectionable Republican gets in the White House, be it Richard Nixon or the like, we tend to see a nationalist reaction in Canada.  I bet that if the annexation of Canada were proposed by the likes of a Clinton or an Obama, the Canadian reaction would be different. I also bet that if the prospect of Canada’s ten provinces getting votes in the electoral college became a realistic one, many Republicans would become strongly opposed to the concept because at least nine of those provinces would be staunchly blue states.

While Trump’s recent statements may have been made in jest, they reflect a pattern of American leaders revisiting old territorial dreams to achieve economic or political goals. Canada’s current response is consistent with a historical commitment to maintain sovereignty in the face of external pressures.


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Thinking Historically About the South Korean Attempted Coup

4 12 2024

Yesterday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, absurdly accusing the centre-left opposition parties of collaborating with North Korea to justify suspending constitutional protections, including the right of the National Assembly to meet and discuss. This move faced immediate backlash: opposition lawmakers defied military barricades to convene in the National Assembly, where they unanimously voted to overturn the decree. Facing mounting pressure, including dissent from his own centre-right political party, President Yoon rescinded the martial law order within hours.  Pro-democracy norms asserted themselves to ensure that there would be no backsliding into the authoritarianism South Korea suffered from pre-1987. The hapless president now faces calls for his impeachment and expulsion from his own political party. For me, the main takeaway from this episode is the resilience of South Korea’s democratic institutions. South Korea has Western-style political institutions that have been grafted onto its Confucian/East Asian culture in the last few decades. All of this makes me think that inherited culture is less important than social-scientific theories might lead one to suggest.  Social scientists, take note!  In fact, I think that maybe we should stop using the term “Western” as a short-hand for “liberal democratic countries.”

Here is another take away from the recent events in South Korea. Maybe cultural inheritance and long-term history going back centuries matter even less that Acemoglu and Robinson have suggested.  Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, the authors of The Narrow Corridor, were big names even before their recent Nobel Prize. Acemoglu is an economics professor at MIT, known for his work on political economy and development economics. Robinson is a political scientist and economist at the University of Chicago, focusing on political and economic development in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. They’ve teamed up before on the bestseller Why Nations Fail, exploring why some countries prosper while others don’t. In The Narrow Corridor, they dive into the delicate balance between state power and societal influence that’s crucial for liberty to flourish. They focus a lot in this book on the Western cultural tradition and, in particular, the Anglo-American/Germanic cultural inheritance. The cover of one version of their book even has images of the ruins of the Parthenon, which communicates that idea that ancient Greeks in the family tree helps to explain why part of the world is democratic while other parts aren’t.

The Narrow Corridor argues that freedom and prosperity thrive when a delicate balance exists between the state and society—a “shackled leviathan.” In these countries (think the UK and the US), strong institutions ensure the state is powerful enough to govern effectively but also constrained by an engaged, organized society that can hold it accountable. In contrast, despotic leviathans have powerful states but weak societies (think China for most of the last thousand years), leading to oppression and authoritarian rule, while absent leviathans suffer from weak states and weak societies, leaving them mired in chaos and lawlessness (think Somalia or most tribal societies). The authors also emphasize that culture plays a huge role—societies don’t just randomly fall into one category or another. Historical events and cultural norms shape their trajectories, creating a kind of “path dependence” that makes it hard to break free from established patterns. That’s sort of true, but that theory makes it harder to explain what recently happened in South Korea. Having lots of Anglo-Saxon “cultural DNA” in a given country seems to matter less to its political institutions than the Narrow Corridor might lead you to believe.

I’m sharing an amusing/thought-provoking image that Pseudoerasmus shared on Twitter/X.  The image is a famous figure from the Narrow Corridor that someone hacked yesterday!


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Brendan Greeley on AJR

23 10 2024

Brendan Greeley’s opinion piece in the Financial Times, “The Nobel for Econsplaining,” has sparked quite a bit of debate. Greeley’s writing is witty and engaging, and he clearly knows his stuff when it comes to econometric research methods, which makes his critique of economists’ work all the more credible.  Here is an example of his prose



Acemoglu and Robinson read a book called American Slavery, American Freedom, used the bits about American freedom and tossed the bits about American slavery. The new economic institutionalists treat work on institutions by a celebrated historian not as a coherent argument, but as a source of anecdotes. If they did this with data, you’d call it p-hacking.

However, I’m not totally convinced by his main argument. He suggests that understanding the history of slavery and race relations within the present-day United States and culturally proximate countries is key to seeing why Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (AJR) have produced an inaccurate theory about the relationship between political institutions and economic growth. The stakes in the debate about the accuracy of the AJR theory are high because it has massive normative implications: if their theory is true, then the case for Western countries promoting Western-style political style institutions around the world and for sending, say, more weapons to Ukraine, will be stronger than it would otherwise be.

Most of Greeley’s piece focuses on events in the British colonies in the New World and the historiographic debates around them. In trying to show what’s wrong with the AJR paradigm, he spends more time discussing a book by an American historian from 1975 than the incredible rise of the Chinese economy since 1978!!!  Greeley, being a US citizen who just happens to live in a region that once had African slavery (New Jersey), might be overestimating the importance of historical phenomena that are geographically close to him when evaluating AJR’s overall theory. I find that Greeley’s piece displays evidence of too many cognitive biases. In particular, the proximity bias is strong here. Maybe I’m guilty of recency bias in wanting us to focus our attention on China since 1978. I suppose we need to proper methodology to counteracting all of these biases so that we don’t end up cherry picking data.

Here is some background. As many readers of this blog will know, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson were awarded the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their research on how political and economic institutions shape national prosperity. Their work, especially their theory of inclusive vs. extractive institutions, helps explain why some nations experience sustained economic growth while others remain poor. The award has been mostly well-received particularly by people in the centre of the Anglo-American political spectrum, highlighting the impact of their research on understanding global inequality, though some critics argue their theories overlook other factors like culture and geography. The critics come from various groups: academics in authoritarian yet economically successful regimes who don’t like the AJR insinuation that you need inclusive political institutions for prosperity, hard core left-wing critics who believe that it has already been proved that the West’s wealth is due to slavery and genocide, and then libertarians who think that AJR’s account is unduly celebratory of the mixed-economy arrangement that centrist academics tend to like.

AJR have faced heavy criticism from scholars who believe their work oversimplifies complex historical and economic processes, particularly in East Asia’s development and historical exploitation, such as slavery and colonialism. Austrian economists, people Pete Boettke and his colleagues at GMU, are also sceptical of their focus on state capacity, preferring more purely market-based explanations for economic development. The economists who were really vigorous critics of Covid lockdowns, US membership of NATO, and state intervention more generally tend to be the most sceptical of the AJR claim that England industrialized because it has the optimum blend of state and market. Seen from a sort of an-cap perspective, AJR sound like quasi-socialists.

In China, scholars have pointed out the tension between AJR’s emphasis on democratic governance and China’s authoritarian-led growth model. While their contributions are influential, the debate around their theories is shaped by ideological and geopolitical considerations.

AJR’s theory of inclusive political institutions, as detailed in works like Why Nations Fail (2012) and then their more recent book The Narrow Corridor argues that inclusive institutions—those allowing broad participation in political and economic processes—are key drivers of economic development. They contrast these with extractive institutions, where political power and economic benefits are concentrated in the hands of a few (think of Stalinism, feudalism, or the antebellum American South), which they argue stifle growth and innovation. They present historical evidence from various contexts to support this theory, emphasizing how colonial legacies, institutional arrangements, and power structures shaped different nations’ development trajectories.

Image from The Narrow Corridor

Critics argue that the rapid economic development of East Asian economies, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and above all mainland China, disproves AJR’s claim that you need inclusive institutions (basically democracy) for economic growth. These countries didn’t have fully inclusive political systems during their early development stages. Instead, they relied on strong, centralized, and often authoritarian governments to implement land reforms, industrial policies, and export-oriented strategies. In South Korea, this is more of an academic question, since the country transitioned to democracy around 1988 and has continued to develop since then. Everyone in South Korea now regards democracy there as normative.  In mainland China, however, the claim that you need inclusive political institutions for economic growth is provocative and highly threatening to the existing political system.  I find it strange that Greely says so little about China in his piece, as that’s the real Achilles heel of the AJR theory, not something that happened in Virginia in the 1600s.

Some scholars who fall into the camp of domestic British and American progressives argue that AJR downplay the role of slavery and other forms of coercive labour and land theft in the rise of Western economies. According to these people, we already know that the transatlantic slave trade, colonial resource exploitation, and forced labour were absolutely essential to Western Europe’s wealth accumulation, which fuelled industrialization. (Somehow these critics don’t explain why England and the Netherlands developed at a much faster rate that Portugal and Spain). Anyway, these critics suggest that economic growth can occur in contexts where extractive institutions play a significant role, contradicting the idea that inclusive institutions are always necessary for development.

The debate over AJR’s theory is deeply influenced by political ideology and geopolitics. I wish Brendan had said more about that factor and then about his own ideological commitments.

Here is Brendan’s brief biography:

Brendan comes to Princeton after 20 years as a journalist, covering economic and monetary policy. He was the US economics editor at the Financial Times, and continues to write a regular column there. Before that, he was a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist, as well as an anchor and correspondent for Bloomberg TV. He has also written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal Europe, and received a New York Press Club Award for special event reporting in 2012. Brendan graduated from Tulane University with honors in German in 1997. 

I would note here that Tulane, where Brendan did his undergrad, is in a part of the US where the legacy of slavery is visible all around you. That fact and other autobiographical should perhaps have been disclosed here.

References

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. (2002). Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), 1231-1294.

Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Business.

Boettke, P. J., Coyne, C. J., & Leeson, P. T. (2008). Institutional Stickiness and the New Development Economics. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 67(2), 331-358.

Chang, H.-J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. Anthem Press.

 Inikori, J. E. (2002). Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge University Press.

Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409.

Yao, Y. (2011). The End of the Beijing Consensus. Foreign Affairs, 90(6), 13-18.


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Observations on the 2024 ABH Conference

2 07 2024

I recently got back from attending the 2024 Association of Business Historians (ABH) conference. I’m sharing my observations about this year’s ABH here.  Established in about 1991 or 1992, the ABH conference serves as a platform for business historians to present their work, share ideas, and discuss recent developments in the field. The conference covers a wide range of topics within business history, including corporate governance, entrepreneurship, international business, and the impact of historical events on business practices. In its early days, most of the attendees of the ABH worked in the Economic and Social History Departments. Today, most of the UK-based academics at the ABH are business historians who work within business school.  Each year, the conference attracts participants from around the world, fostering a global dialogue on business history. The ABH is closely associated with the journal Business History. I’ve been going to the ABH for a long time (I think 2008 in York was the first time I went) so I think I can speak with some authority about its evolution.

The ABH appears to be in very good health indeed. I was struck by how many academics from different disciplines and countries were there. The US was very strongly represented at the ABH this year, thanks to the partnership with the Economic and Business History Society, with whom the ABH jointly organized the conferences. In my books, a conference that can attract lots of people who are from far away both geographically and from different disciplines is a strong conference. You want to buy stock in that conference and the associated scholarly community.

The ABH-EBHS doctoral workshops that ran before the main conference attracted, I’m told, about 20 PhD students from various countries and disciplines. I was particularly impressed by the US sociology PhDs who were there. The workshop was funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which apparently sees lots of value in cultivating the next generation of business historians. Readers may recall that INET was founded in October 2009 in response to the global financial crisis of 2007-2012. Its funders, who included George Soros and James Balsillie were really dissatisfied with mainstream neoclassical accounts of how the economy operates and wanted to encourage new approaches, including historical ones.  The fact INET is funding this initiative is another indicator of the robust strength of business history.

I noticed a fair number of Canadians on the conference programme—many of them work at UQAM. At the conference, there was a very good discussion about why so few corporate archives in Canada are open to researchers. That discussion was sparked by a remark I happened to make in the session on corporate archives.

Congratulations to Dr Chris Corker on organizing this conference so well.


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Using History to Think About Generative AI

23 01 2024

Niall G. MacKenzie, Stephanie Decker, Christina Lubinski, three business historians, have published a short but excelent piece in the British Journal of Management that puts Generative AI into some historical context “Contested Imaginaries Through Time: Putting Generative Artificial Intelligence in Context“. Their piece, which uses on the theory of the German sociologist Jens Beckert (see his book Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics) cites a number of historical studies, including works on the Industrial Revolution era by Joel Mokyr and Mary O’Sullivan.


I don’t disagree with anything MacKenzie et al. say in their paper. However, I have parallel set of observations that are about the use of historical analogy in the marketing of OpenAI’s flagship product, ChatGPT. (When I say marketing, I’m talking more about the attempts by the company to secure the support of investors and policymakers than the end consumers). The very term ChatGPT, is an allusion to a term that emerged from the field of economic history in, if memory serves me correctly, the early 1990s. At that time, Joel Mokyr, Nathan Rosenberg, and other who study industrial revolutions past and present, popularized the term General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) to describe any technology that have the potential to significantly impact multiple sectors of the economy, leading to widespread and transformative changes in various industries. [It may be that Robert Solow first introduced the term but in any event it was in common currency in econ history circles by the team I reached university in 1995]. Steam engines and electricity are cannonical examples of GPT. Since the 1990s, generations of students in intro economic history have been taught that the key characteristics of General Purpose Technologies are:

Breadth of Application: GPTs have the capacity to be applied across a wide range of industries and sectors.

Economic Impact: They have the potential to bring about substantial economic growth and TFP improvements. They allow lots of people to produce more GPT per hour worked.

GPTs tend to facilitate and support the development of complementary technologies, further amplifying their impact on the economy.

Long Gestation Periods. The development and diffusion of GPTs often take a considerable amount of time due to their complexity and the need for widespread adoption. It is took a long time for the steam engines invented down in Cornwall to really change the world, but once they did, the social returns on the initial investments on steam engines were just massive.


The long gestation period teaching from economic history stresses the need for patient capital. Telling your investors that your venture is working on a GPT is basically a way of explaining in advance why it is going to take a long time for venture to generate real profits for the investors or society as a whole. I would be fascinated to hear from readers what actual Venture Capitalists think when this historical analogy argument is used on them. (Information in the comments section welcome!).

Now since the 1990s, millions of people throughout the English-speaking world, and probably beyond. have probably been exposed to the concept of the GPT through introductory economic history class or maybe a geography class. (I first encountered the term in a geography course). For years, I delivered a few lectures each semester to business undergraduates that were designed to give them the overview of economic history they needed. So they got some Great Divergence, some new institutionalism, and, yes, some exposure to the concept of the GPT. So have millions of learners around the world– at least judging from the textbooks that are widely used. So by 2022, lots of people were vaguely familiar with the concept of the GPT. They were a small proportion of the human race, sure, but they were disproportionately in positions of power and authority. I bet everyone who did a PPE degree at Oxford or spent a couple of years at Stanford, which is what Sam Altman did, hear about General Purpose Technologies. That gives elites a common vocabulary for thinking about the world.

AI Enterpreneurs Meeting With a Key Stakeholder. Historical analogies can give people a common vocabularly for thinking about the world.

24/05/2023. London, United Kingdom. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets with Demis Hassabis, CEO DeepMind, Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI, in 10 Downing Street. Picture by Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street

What all of that means is that it was a brilliant use of rhetorical history by Sam Altman’s team at OpenAI to label their product ChatGPT. Rhetorical history is when a company, manager, or some other actor in the academy uses a historical argument or allusion to persuade others. As someone who studies how companies use historical ideas to appeal to consumers, investors, and other groups, I am impressed by what a clever move it was to dub OpenAI’s product ChatGPT. I say that as someone who is agnostic about whether generative AI, as opposed to say AGI, truly is a GPT. (The late Nick Crafts had some interesting observations about that).


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University of Essex Webinar: “Slow Memory and Transformative Change: How to Confront the legacy of colonialism in business

18 10 2023

I would encourage anyone interested in the issue of colonialism’s long-term impact on business to attend this upcoming webinar.


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Congratulations to Derek Lidow

28 09 2023

The Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division and Yeshiva University have announced the winner of the Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award for the year 2023. The winner is Derek Lidow of Princeton University’s Keller Center for their course entitled: The Histories of Entrepreneurship. Congratulation Derek! I’m happy that historical approaches are getting increased validation in both entrepreneurship teaching and research. Academic historians in business schools will be able to build on this momentum.

From the press release:

“The History of Entrepreneurship class developed at Princeton University over the past five years fills important gaps in entrepreneurship education (EE). The pedagogical framework of the class rests upon 70+ deeply researched historical examples of entrepreneurs and the impact of their behaviors on society and culture over the past nine-thousand years. The framework enables students to realize and simply understand the underlying reasons why and how entrepreneurs have such oversized impacts, which in turn contextualizes the importance of entrepreneurial ethics. Students love the class for being interesting, engaging, unexpected, accessible, and relevant. A detailed syllabus and abundant documentation make the class easily transferable and configurable for varied undergraduate and graduate school formats.

This class and its supporting materials and pedagogies were developed to deliver the following learning objectives:

Provide context for students to realize the magnitude of the impact of entrepreneurs on surrounding cultures and societies (i.e., its importance),
Understand the nature (i.e., the why and how) of those impacts,
Contemplate the ethical ramifications of entrepreneurial behaviors and the societal expectations they could or should engender.

The class enables students to realize and simply understand the underlying reasons why and how entrepreneurs have such oversized impacts, which in turn contextualizes the importance of entrepreneurial ethics.

The class is structured around more than 70 deeply researched historical examples of entrepreneurs and the impact of their behaviors on society and culture over the past nine-thousand years.” – Derek Lidow

To make The Histories of Entrepreneurship course easy for others to teach, there is an accompanying book, The Entrepreneurs, a detailed syllabus, and abundant documentation, including over 100 slides that are available to anyone interested in the class or subject matter.


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