Else what's a heaven for?

My favorite economic historian mocked me, loudly, when he heard I was reading The Company. "I can tell you the history of the corporation in one paragraph. It starts with the East India Company..." He was right of course and a chunk of the book was devoted to the East India Company. The book starts with info about Roman-era commerce, the development of the idea of a corpus comprised of capital and individuals during the medieval monastery years, through the Internet boom. I've never studied post-WW2 history - I think I know more about the first decade of the nineteenth century than the one in which I was born - so it was fascinating to learn about the development of management science and Sloan's contributions. I'd heard references to company man before, but never understood everything that phrase meant; if nothing else, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying is funnier now.

It was a complete accident I was reading The Great Inflation almost immediately after The Company but it worked out well. The aforementioned economic historian has made comments in the past about the Nixon wage controls and I've been known to point out in debates the health insurance only developed during that period bc companies had to find a way to pay employees more than competitors without using cash.

Samuelson, who alas is NOT the one who teaches/taught at MIT, argues that the inflation of the 70's came to pass bc of the misguided idealism of the 50's but most especially the can-do attitude of the JFK's brainiacs. He claims inflation was the number one fear during the Carter administration, but then he would, wouldn't he. I found him surprisingly non-partisan: while he's pro-Regan/Volcker (of course), he argues that Regan's great contribution was giving Volcker the political backing during the recession so that he didn't have to lower rates prematurely. In other words, he argues that Regan didn't reduce the size of government or lower taxes all that much.

I was supposed to read Manias, Panics, and Crashes next and I started reading it on my way to Florida, but even though it's supposed to be written for the layperson, I'm finding it impenetrably dense. I'm worried that it's me, not the book *sighs*