Gardiner C. Means' Thesis on Administered Prices Is Louis D. Brandeis' "Curse of Bigness" All Over Again

Gardiner C. Means' Pricing Power and the Public Interest is Louis D. Brandeis' "curse of bigness" of a half-century ago all over again. In a nutshell, the major Means premise is the break-down of effective competition in big business. And so his thesis is: Bigness equals administered prices, administered prices equals administrative inflation, and administrative inflation requires a restructuring of United States manufacturing, beginning with the steel industry.

The literature is already replete with contributions quite damaging to the Means doctrine of administered prices. Dr. Rufus S. Tucker, for example, dealt the doctrine a serious blow in his articles in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Marketing. In his Journal of Marketing article, Dr. Tucker concluded, on the basis of statistics compiled by the National Resources Committee during the 1930's, that there was no association whatever between concentration in the manufacturing industries and the rigidity of prices of manufactured products.

--William H. Peterson, "Steel Price Administration: Myth and Reality," in Central Planning and Neomercantilism, ed. Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, The William Volker Fund Series in the Humane Studies (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1964), 163.