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    The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
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    The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
    Unavailable
    The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

    Written by Tim Wu

    Narrated by Marc Cashman

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    About this audiobook

    From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.

    We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms—big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century.

    In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age—but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9781984843654
    Author

    Tim Wu

    Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. He served as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy under the Biden administration, worked on competition policy in the Obama White House and the Federal Trade Commission, and served as senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General. The author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, he lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Curse of Bigness

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    • 3/5
      Not entirely convincing. Wu should include more on the steady rise of oligopolies in the modern US economy. He needs much more support for the claim that these oligopolies have caused growing inequality, and for their effects on politics. Wu glosses over the links here, and it is pretty weak. He also needs more on European antitrust policy. Still, there is a decent legal history here, and reasonable proposals for improved antitrust enforcement. Most of this would fit in a short magazine article, but the book itself is short. > Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty> Today, as in the 1910s, two essential economic facts characterize the industrialized world. The first is the reemergence of an outrageous divide between the rich and the poor. This trend is most stark in the United States, where the top 1 percent today earn 23.8 percent of the national income and control an astonishing 38.6 percent of national wealth. The second is a return to concentrated economies—that is, industries dominated by fewer and larger companies> It cannot be denied that some of the firms built during this era were impressive creations, and that the American economy, as a whole, experienced impressive if not wholly unprecedented growth.> The language of the law is extremely broad. In section one it bans “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise … in restraint of trade.” In section two it declares that “every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize … any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony.” The language is so strong—its literal text bans so much—that the scholarly debate over the Sherman Act’s meaning and history may never end.> The more concentrated the industry, the fewer who need to coordinate, and the fewer among whom the stakes need be divided. If an industry has sixty or eighty firms in it, they may squabble, be incapable of acting as a group, and also face the problem of collective action. But, after consolidation, we might be speaking of just six firms, and the prospects for political cooperation improve. And after a merger to monopoly, there is no need to cooperate at all. The simplest—if slightly overstated—way to put this is as follows. The more concentrated the industry, the more corrupted we can expect the political process to be.> After pausing briefly to settle the Microsoft case, the Bush Justice Department proceeded to bring a grand total of zero anti-monopoly antitrust cases over a period of eight years, and did not block any major mergers.