Millionaires and Managers

In the autumn of 1962 a Soviet economist in his mid-thirties spent four months travelling the United States on a scientific exchange programme, and was received by Henry Ford II, Henry S. Morgan, David Rockefeller and Cyrus Eaton. He sat down with the chairmen and presidents of dozens of corporations and with thirteen of the twenty-five American commercial banks then holding assets above a billion dollars. Then he went to the library of the New York Stock Exchange and spent, in his own words, "many days" going over proxy statements.

The book that came out of it is one of the few titles Progress Publishers ever issued in English that a working economist could still cite without embarrassment.

That is not a courtesy. Millionaires and Managers is a serious empirical study of who actually controlled American big business, built out of American sources, arguing a case that was live and contested in Western economics at the time. The question was whether ownership had genuinely separated from control - whether the great corporations had passed from their founding families to a salaried managerial class, as Berle and Means had argued and as most American economists then accepted. Menshikov went and looked at the shareholdings, the interlocking directorates and the bank relationships, and concluded that it had not. On that central question he has been vindicated.

Stanislav Mikhailovich Menshikov (1927-2014) was a Doctor of Economic Sciences and, later, a professor at MGIMO; this book was his doctoral dissertation on the structure of the American financial oligarchy, which Progress issued in Russian, English and Spanish.

Translated by Leo Lempert. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.