Aaron Director was one of the first contributors to the area of law and economics. I defended him here from a scurrilous attack on him by Matt Stoller. If you click on the first link mentioned in the previous sentence, you’ll also see Stoller’s response.
When I linked to my EconLog post on Wikipedia on Facebook earlier this week, someone pointed to a good example of Wikipedia’s treatment of free-market types: Wikipedia’s entry on Aaron Director. Here’s the line that particularly caught my attention:
At the University of Chicago, Director completed his transition to conservative corporatist.
Check out the whole write-up and see if you think it’s fair.
Someone on Facebook suggested that some of the content came from Stoller. That’s plausible.
READER COMMENTS
Steve S.
Sep 22 2022 at 11:07am
This is where the history section of Wikipedia can be quite useful. It would appear an editor by the name of “Medium Dan” has quite the axe to grind against Director; and these are said individual’s only Wikipedia contributions. Make of it what you will.
TGGP
Sep 22 2022 at 11:24pm
I was surprised by Stoller’s claim that Simons killed himself in 1946. I tried to look up details of his death and found this:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/148203981/henry-calvert-simons
It could be that the obituary was unreliable due to concerns about publicizing suicide, but to me it’s better than nothing on the subject of his death. Doing more searching, I found that there was controversy over just how he died and the obituary appeared to be inaccurate. Still, to state as a fact that Simons killed himself Stoller should have given a citation.
Daniel Kuehn
Sep 22 2022 at 11:30pm
My understanding is that that has always been widely suspected but never confirmed. I’m not sure how you cite that sort of thing but I definitely don’t think it originated with Stoller. It’s the sort of thing that will always just be suspected. It’s tough. When I noted his death in a paper of mine I think I said something like premature or untimely.
Mark Brady
Sep 26 2022 at 12:48am
See Robert Van Horn’s “Henry Simons’s Death” in History of Political Economy, 46, 3 (Fall 2024): 525–535.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/46/3/525/12627/Henry-Simons-s-Death?
Alexandre Padilla
Sep 23 2022 at 11:00am
Aaron Director like most economists at University of Chicago was concerned about excessive market power and monopolies regardless of whether it was producer’s monopoly power or labor unions’ monopoly power.
As it has been documented over and over again and you can see in the recently published Mont Pelerin 1947, following Hayek’s presentation of his paper “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competition,” Director during that evening session spent a lot of time discussing the dangers of market power and reduced competition and to be clear he did not just talk about labor unions, he also talked about monopolies and the dangers of companies dominating some markets. Truly, most of the people who attended the founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society saw that there was a role for the government in protecting competition. And, in my reading (so I could be completely wrong) of his discussion of monopoly power, I do not see evidence that’s true that he believed that the source of monopoly power was only the result of government intervention. To be sure, there was a discussion of the legal and institutional environment under which such market power can arise and certainly there was a discussion that government intervention can lead to monopoly power, but the talk that Director gave was standard ECO 101 textbook.
Jeremy N
Oct 12 2022 at 7:00am
David, if you’d like to change anything in the wikipedia article, I’d be happy to help. I’ve done it before. There are several sentences in that entry which I think need to be removed or better supported. You may contact me via e-mail.
Comments are closed.