Human beings are supposed to be calculating machines pursuing Prudence and Price and Profit and Property and Power—“P variables,” you might call them. P-obsession begins with Machiavelli and Hobbes, is continued by Bernard Mandeville (the early eighteenth-century DutchEnglish spy and pamphleteer), is systematized by Jeremy Bentham (the utilitarian economist flourishing in the early nineteenth century), and is finally perfected by twentieth-century economists, including that same Paul Samuelson, who fully formalized the notion in a curious character known as Max U, and the great Gary Becker, who went about as far as he could go

The nature of the firm and its financing are closely interlinked. To produce significant net present value, an entrepreneur has to transform her enterprise into one that is differentiated from the ordinary. To achieve the control that will allow her to execute this strategy, she needs to have substantial ownership, and thus financing. But it is hard to raise finance against differentiated assets. So an entrepreneur has to commit to undertake a second transformation, standardization, that will make the human capital in the firm, including her own, replaceable, so that outside financiers obtain rights over going-concern surplus. I argue that the availability of a vibrant stock market helps the entrepreneur commit to these two transformations in a way that a debt market would not. This helps explain why the nature of firms and the extent of innovation differ so much in different financing environments.

preso atto che le misure concernenti il servizio farmaceutico inserite nel provvedimento del Governo in materia di liberalizzazioni provocheranno il deterioramento della qualità del servizio offerto, fino al collasso del sistema, proclama lo stato di agitazione sindacale