Newspaper Article

THE GENESIS OF FACE CARDS

Warsh, David

2001

Overview

`AT LEAST YOU SPELLED MY NAME RIGHT,\" SHERWIN ROSEN WROTE ME, MOCK- CRANKY, AFTER I DESCRIBED HIM A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO AS \"THE LAST CHICAGOAN.\" IT WAS CLEAR THAT HE WAS SECRETLY PLEASED. \"BY THE WAY, WHAT I'M `BEST-KNOWN' FOR IN PROFESSIONAL CIRCLES IS RATHER DIFFERENT THAN THE ONE PIECE I WROTE ABOUT POP CULTURE THAT SOME PEOPLE TALK ABOUT IN THE NEWSPAPERS.\" Last month I remembered the note - at his memorial service, of all places. Earlier this year, on St. Valentine's Day in fact, Rosen was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died five weeks later, at the age of 62. He had been serving as president of the American Economic Association. The answer, Rosen argued, had to to with the premium that accrued to those who became known as \"the best.\" The size of the reward depended on the extent of the market, and the market for the \"best tenor\" could be quite large - worldwide, in fact, thanks to changing technology. The recognition of such \"winner-take-all\" markets has become quite widespread, thanks partly to \"The Winner-Take-All Society,\" a 1995 book by Robert Frank and Philip Cook - and, of course, to regular magazine surveys of the best-paid corporate executives, engineers, and sports stars. But 20 years ago, the phenomenon was so little-noted that Rosen felt compelled to begin by noting that his topic was something other than conventional inflation.

• Publisher: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC
• Subject: Human capital / Organization theory / Personal profiles / Rosen, Sherwin