Tag Archives: TIrole

By William K. BlackFebruary 18, 2017     Roma, Italia (5th in my series on Jean Tirole) When in Rome, trot out a venerable Latin quotation from Juvenal: “Who will guard the guards?”  I have “buried the lead” in this series of article about Jean Tirole by relegating my discussion of his proposal for fixing the problem of the criminal CEO – appoint a criminal “monitor” – to the fifth article in this series.  His proposal is in his 2001 article titled “Corporate Governance.” Tirole’s...

By William K. BlackFebruary 14, 2017     Bloomington, MN (4th in a series on Jean Tirole) In my second article in this series I began to discuss Tirole’s 2001 article (“Corporate Governance”), which contains this remarkable admission about orthodox economists’ ‘group faith’ (no thinking involved) that results in the “implicit assumption” that some unexplained force “perfectly” protects employees, creditors, and the public from predation by firms. The economists’ implicit assumption is...

By William K. BlackFebruary 12, 2017     Bloomington, MN (Part 3 in my Tirole series) I discussed Jean Tirole’s 2001 article (“Corporate Governance”) and this remarkable admission about orthodox economists in my second article in this series. The economists’ implicit assumption is that employees, suppliers, customers, and other natural stakeholders are protected by very powerful contracts or laws that force controlling investors to perfectly internalize their welfare…. [The] details of...

By William K. BlackFebruary 11, 2017     Bloomington, MN (Part 2 in my Tirole series) In his letter to the French education minister denouncing French heterodox economists as a “motley crew” of academic failures, Jean Tirole, the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Economics, stated his test for the standard for an economist to be a scientist. Secondly, like the other great scientific disciplines, modern economic science relies on the continuous questioning of its hypotheses, testing its models...