John Blair and Monopoly

• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X8503000408
• Date: 01 December 1985
• Author: Howard N. Ross
• Published date: 01 December 1985
• Subject Matter: Article

The Antitrust Bulletin/Winter

1985

John Blair and monopoly

BY HOWARD N. ROSS·

997

John M. Blair died December 21,

1976,

virtually days before his

last book, The Control

of

Oil, was published. He was 62 years

old, born in Illinois, reared and educated in New Orleans. He

received a B.A. from Tulane University in 1936, and a Ph.D.

from American University in

1941.

His social and cultural in-

clinations were by self-admission those of a son of the South.

However, his political and economic ideas were distilled from the

intellectual currents

of

the New Deal. In 1938, he began a 32-year

career in civil service, initiated with the Temporary National

Economic Committee, then as Assistant Chief Economist

of

the

Federal Trade Commission, and, finally, a 14-year tenure as

Chief Economist of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and

Monopoly. He retired from the subcommittee involuntarily in

1970, and became Professor of Economics at the University

of

South Florida. With prodigious energy in the last six years

of

his

life, he wrote two

books-Economic

Concentration, a work of

enormous scholarship that is most representative of his views on

industrial organization, and The Control

of

Oil, hailed as

"the

definitive book on oil"

-and

conceived and edited a third, The

Roots

of

Inflation. I

Baruch College, The City University

of

New York.

1John M. Blair, Economic Concentration: Structure, Behavior

and Public Policy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), xvii

+742 pp., out of print; The Roots

of

Inflation: The International

Crisis (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975), x +315 pp., out of print; The

Control

of

Oil (New York: Pantheon, 1976), xxii +

441

pp., reprinted

in softcover by Vintage Books. The quotation is from the lead review in

©1985by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.