The episode “What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life?” has just been released and is available on the Freakonomics website here, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and other podcast sites.
Since 2017, a member of the Honors Program faculty or staff is awarded the distinction and recognition for outstanding advising. This honor is determined by nominations submitted by Honors students, providing them the opportunity to share their experience and the positive impact of the faculty or staff member they have nominated.
This award recognizes outstanding contributions to undergraduate advising by faculty or staff members to Honors Program students. Nominees for this distinction have significantly exceeded expectations by providing exceptional undergraduate advising experiences to Honors students. This fund was established by Dr. Lynn Goodstein and Dr. Peter Langer, who both have strong ties to UConn Honors. The late Lynn Goodstein served as the Associate Vice Provost and Director from 2002 to 2012, and her husband, Peter Langer is a graduate of the inaugural Honors Program Class of 1968.
Professor Lanza contributed expert commentary to the recent WalletHub.com study entitled “2023’s Most and Least Independent States.” WalletHub.com is a leading outlet covering the personal finance industry and its studies appear in their consumer education section.
A review of Professor Langlois’s recent book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise was featured in the July 1st edition of The Wall Street Journal. Reviewer Dan Akst describes Professor Langlois’s book as “…a remarkable achievement, not least for its detailed case studies of firms and whole industries that instantiate the author’s points.”
Professor Langlois’s book The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, a “definitive reframing of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era,” has been published and is available through Princeton University Press:
The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism, brought forth what became a dominant narrative: that administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential to the efficient running of organizations both public and private. And yet if managerialism was the apotheosis of administrative efficiency, why did both its practice and the accompanying narrative lie in ruins by the end of the century? In The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, Richard Langlois offers an alternative version: a comprehensive and nuanced reframing and reassessment of the the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era.
Langlois argues that managerialism rose to prominence not because of its inherent superiority but because of its contingent value in a young and rapidly developing American economy. The structures of managerialism solidified their dominance only because the century’s great catastrophes of war, depression, and war again superseded markets, scrambled relative prices, and weakened market-supporting institutions. By the end of the twentieth century, Langlois writes, these market-supporting institutions had reemerged to shift advantage toward entrepreneurial and market-driven modes of organization.
This magisterial new account of the rise and fall of managerialism holds significant implications for contemporary debates about industrial and antitrust policies and the role of the corporation in the twenty-first century.
“Sharp analysis. . . . Chock -full of sophisticated economic theory rendered in lucid prose, this adds up to a bracing evaluation of a consequential and once dominant commercial entity.”—Publishers Weekly
“A new and even better Alf Chandler has arisen, a Chandler who does not believe that the visible hand is always and everywhere the way to wealth. Langlois does the scientific job brilliantly, and does wisely, too, the political job of seeing the lessons for our collective lives.”—Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Richard Langlois’sThe Corporation and the Twentieth Centuryis a major achievement and stands as the best and most important work on the history of the modern American business corporation.” —Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
“Langlois provides an erudite and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the rise and subsequent decline of large managerial corporations in American business history. His emphasis on the political economy context and contingency is important.”—Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School
“Langlois offers a profound, accessible, and essential revision of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era. His book is a magisterial, lively, provocative, and timely read.” —Amar Bhide, author ofThe Venturesome Economy
“In the last half century American high-tech firms and overseas new entrants have eclipsed classic twentieth-century Chandlerian corporations like General Motors and Du Pont. Richard Langlois’s masterpiece—long trailed in thoughtful articles and here distilled and rectified into fine whiskey—pulls no punches where they are necessary for his clinical deconstruction of the Chandlerian paradigm, but is properly respectful of its strengths, carefully weighing the merits of all sides of the argument.”—Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics
“This is a magnificent book. Drawing upon Coase, Williamson, Demsetz, Schumpeter, Hofstadter, and others, Langlois provides an analytical narrative of the development and adaptability of business organizations, their challenges, and responses from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. To present this important and complex story of institutional innovation, Langlois combines economic, business, political, and legal history. Langlois’s important analysis of the past 100 years provides optimism for continuation of business enterprise adjustments to promote economic growth and the quality of life.”—Gary D. Libecap, University of California, Santa Barbara, and National Bureau of Economic Research
“Richard Langlois challenges Alfred Chander’s claim that new technologies led large firms inevitably to substitute for markets: the visible hand. Langlois argues that as markets developed more sophistication in the twentieth century, the internal structure of firms changed: the vanishing hand. A combination of markets, firms, and governments explains the rise, decline, and transformation of the corporation in the twentieth-century United States. The book is a rich economic history of the twentieth century from the corporate perspective.”—John Joseph Wallis, University of Maryland and University of Cambridge
“Richard Langlois has written a history of the corporation with three main threads. First, he offers a critique of the Chandler tradition arguing that the Chandler model becomes less applicable after 1972 or so. Second, he offers a critique of U.S. antitrust policy that highlights its liabilities. Third, he offers his own view of the evolution of the corporation, which is a major contribution to understanding the evolution of the corporation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”—Louis P. Cain, Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago
Professor Natalia Smirnova’s reflections on being the inaugural Faculty Fellow through the Center for Career Development in Spring 2023 have been posted by the Center for Career Development
In May, Abdulmohsen Almuhaisen presented his paper, “Immigration Enforcement and the Institutionalization of Elderly Americans ,” coauthored with Professor Delia Furtado and Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes from UC-Merced, at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) in Philadelphia. He will return to Saudi Arabia to work at the Saudi Central Bank in the late summer.
Both were hooded at this year’s Commencement Ceremonies by advisor, Professor Delia Furtado.
Congratulations and good luck, Treena and Abdulmohsen!
On a picture perfect Spring evening, several doctoral students participated in the University’s Commencement exercises. Major advisors hooded their students while friends and family members watched either in person from the Jorgenson or online from thousands of miles away at very inconvenient times given different time zones.
The joyous occasion was at times quite somber given the recent passing of Professor Jorge Agüero. As Professor Agüero’s student, Miranda Mendiola Valdez, crossed the stage, special recognition was given to honor the moment. The entire Jorgensen clapped as Professor Delia Furtado hooded Miranda. Miranda will begin a tenure track position at North Central College in the fall.
On April 13, the department convened for an awards banquet that recognized the best among undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty. This year’s award recipients are:
Undergraduate Awards
Economics Department General Scholarship
Pin Lyu
Justin Wu
Kathryn A. Cassidy Economics Scholarship
Solaiman Chowdhury
Annaliesa Wood
Rockwood Q. P. Chin Scholarship
Lila Pickerign
Stratton Stave
Ruoqi Wang
Qiaozhi Zhou
Ziyun Zhou
Louis D. Traurig Scholarship
Aidan Adams
Erik Choi
Ian Ferguson
Nadine Fernando
Sophia Lemirei
Paul N. Taylor Memorial Prize
Colman Tokar
Julia & Harold Fenton and Yolanda & Augustine Sineti Scholarship
Annelise Montuori
Charles Triano Scholarship
Summer Beebe
John Doran
Dr. Joseph W. McAnneny Jr. Scholarship
Adem Aksoy
Dylan Champagne
Keven Coşgel
Eleanor Gross
Anthony Ho
Shuhan Jiang
Isabella McClure
Ross Mayer Scholarship
Jackson Bright
Virag Korniss
Graduate Awards
Albert E. Waugh Scholarship
Miranda Mendiola Valdez
W. Harrison Carter Award
Matthew Brown
Victor Volkman
Abraham Ribicoff Graduate Fellowship
Abdulmoshen Almuhaisen
Timothy A. and Beverly C. Holt Economics Fellowship
Satadru Bhattacharyya
Xiaofeng Gong
Phillip Hwang
Shangyue Jiang
Meng Song
Feifan Wang
Xinrui Wang