Your Antimonopoly Summer Reading List
In light of Lina Khan’s surprise bipartisan appointment as chair of the FTC a couple weeks back, and the fact that it’s summer and summer reading lists are a thing, I thought it would be fun to put out a non-exhaustive antimonopoly reading list. These are all books I read in the past year and found immensely useful in terms of actually understanding how our economy functions.
Honestly, up until the pandemic revealed the fragility of our highly concentrated economy, I didn’t realize how dysfunctional our country had become. And I certainly didn’t understand what was actually driving the dysfunction or how massive the downstream effect of that dysfunction really was.
I also didn’t make any real distinction between multinational corporations and local businesses. To me, it was all just “capitalism.” Sure, I preferred local businesses, but I only had vague reasons for that preference.
It wasn’t until I began reading about monopoly power that I realized that the dominance of multinational corporations (and the government deference that makes it possible) isn’t just a different way of doing business. Rather, it’s a different political system altogether, one that’s incompatible with a truly functioning democracy.
What I found in the following books felt to me like the missing link I’d been after for over 20 years. The link that could connect my vague misgivings about our economic structure with actual policies—policies that have worked in the past and have the power to make concrete improvements in the way our society functions. Beyond that, I felt these policies could appeal to Americans from all walks of life and across the political spectrum. Which makes sense, as these policies once formed the bedrock of what we still refer to as “the American way.”
I could write much more about this, and probably will at some point, but I don’t want to get in the way of the excellent books below, which I strongly encourage you to buy from your local bookstore or bookshop.org. Or just get them from the library!
This book is a masterpiece and should be required reading, as Lynn shows quite clearly how our markets—which were at one point intentionally decentralized and structured to ensure ordinary citizens could access their power—are now largely controlled by a few dominant companies. Of course, these same dominant companies also hide their dominance via subsidiaries, offering consumers the illusion of choice.
Lynn makes it quite clear that the subversion of local economic control (and its corresponding stripping of local political power) by mega-corporations was anything but a natural “evolution” of our economy. Whether you identify as a Democrat or Republican, progressive or populist, this book is for you. In fact, if you read only one thing about monopolies for the rest of your life, let it be Cornered.
Quote from the book: “[Milton] Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom deserves to be recognized for what it is: the most effective profeudal manifesto in the English language since the restoration of monarchy in Britain more than three hundred years ago.”
I started reading Stoller’s excellent antimonopoly newsletter a few months into the pandemic, though I’m not sure how I found out about it. At the time, I was thinking a lot about corporate dominance in light of lockdown shortages and small businesses shuttering by the thousands, so my discovery of it came at a good time. If you’re not subscribed, I highly recommend it.
After reading the newsletter for a few months, I decided to grab his book. It’s an excellent read. He charts a course of antimonopoly thinking in America from Thomas Jefferson to Louis Brandeis to Wright Patman and onto the present day. He also does a masterful job showing how the Chicago School of economists succeeded in pushing their radical libertarian economic “science” from the fringes into the mainstream, leading to acceptance by both political parties and driving the “neoliberal” revolution of the last forty years.
Quote from the book: “Take a look around. You probably have a phone made by one of two companies. You likely bank at one of four giant banks, and use one of three streaming services. You connect with friends with either Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram, all of which are owned by one company. You get your internet through Comcast or AT&T. Data about your thoughts goes into a database owned by Google, what you buy into Amazon or Walmart, and what you owe into Experian or Equifax. You live in a world structured by concentrated corporate power.”
3. Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use it, by Louis Brandeis
This is a collection of essays, first published in 1914, by “the people’s lawyer” Louis Brandeis, who would go on to become a powerful antimonopoly and anti-corporate figure, eventually ending up on the Supreme Court.
His influence on the present antimonopoly movement is so great that today’s antimonopoly advocates (of which current-FTC Chair Lina Khan is a “member”) are referred to as neo-Brandeisians. On account of the fact that this book was first published over a hundred years ago, the language and subject matter make it a bit more challenging to follow than the other two, but Brandeis does an excellent job of showing how financial trusts, Wall Street, and predatory monopolies collude to dominate economic markets and oppress ordinary citizens, using the very deposits and savings those same citizens have entrusted them with.
Quote from the book: “Here and there you will find a hero,—red-blooded, and courageous,—loving manhood more than wealth, place or security,—who dared to fight for independence and won. Here and there you may find the martyr, who resisted in silence and suffered with resignation. But America, which seeks “the greatest good of the greatest number,” cannot be content with conditions that fit only the hero, the martyr or the slave.”
4. Fulfillment, by Alec MacGillis
In Fulfillment, MacGillis looks at the economic growth and decline of a wide range of American cities—from Dayton, Ohio to Seattle, Washington—through the lens of Amazon’s stratospheric rise to dominance over the past three decades.
MacGillis uses the narratives of individuals—whether they’re employees, city council members, or small business owners—to show how Amazon subverts local economies by pulling small businesses onto its platform (where it can control their activity and enact a tax of up to 50% on their sales), while also bilking hard-up cities across the country for lucrative incentives and tax breaks for that privilege.
What I personally found most interesting about the book was how it shows that the winner-take-all economic model of the last thirty-to-forty years has created widespread dysfunction in both losing and winning cities. Losing cities have found their unemployment rates rising, population levels dwindling, and tax base crumbling—while the winning cities have had to contend with massive inequity, skyrocketing rents and home prices, overcrowding, gentrification, and widespread homelessness. This obviously goes far beyond just Amazon, but as a company Amazon provides a useful lens for understanding the underlying structure that’s created these crises.
Quote from the book: “It was no accident that wealth was growing more concentrated in certain places at the same time as whole sectors of the economy—three-quarters of all U.S. industries, by one estimate—were growing more concentrated in certain companies. This trend had been underway for decades as the federal government had relaxed its opposition to corporate consolidation, and it caused regional imbalance in all sorts of ways. Airline mergers led to less service in smaller cities, which made it harder for them to attract businesses. Consolidation in agriculture meant that less of the money spent on food ended up with those who had actually produced it in rural areas and small towns. Mergers in sectors like banking and insurance meant that many small and midsize cities lost corporate headquarters and the economic and civic benefits that came along with them.
Put most simply, business activity that used to be dispersed across hundreds of companies large and small, whether in media or retail or finance, was increasingly dominated by a handful of giant firms. As a result, profits and growth opportunities once spread across the country were increasingly flowing to the places where those dominant companies were based. With a winner-take-all economy came winner-take-all places.”
5. The Curse of Bigness, by Timothy Wu
Wu, who coined the term ‘net neutrality,’ was a professor at Columbia Law School (alongside Khan) before being elevated to President Biden’s National Economic Council, an appointment celebrated by antimonopoly advocates across the country. A smart, concise, and pragmatic handbook on antitrust in America, the title of Wu’s book is actually pulled directly from a chapter title in the Brandeis book above. What I love most about this book is that it gets right to the point, packing a wealth of history and knowledge into a quick read, and points to other texts for further reading as well.
Quote from the book: “This is the curse of bigness illustrated. The point is intuitive to anyone who has actually worked in an enormous organization of some age and wondered where the phrase ‘efficiencies of scale’ could have come from. As business tycoon T. Boone Pickens once put it, ‘It’s unusual to find a large corporation that’s efficient. I know about economies of scale and all the other advantages that are supposed to come with size. But when you get an inside look, it’s easy to see how inefficient big business really is.’
It was these creeping inefficiencies in sprawling firms that Brandeis thought of as comprising part of the curse of bigness. But there is another side to the curse, one associated with growing power. It is this: As a business gets larger, it begins to enjoy a different kind of advantage having less to do with efficiencies of operation, and more to do with its ability to wield economic and political power, by itself or in conjunction with others. In other words, a firm may not actually become more efficient as it gets larger, but may become better at raising prices or keeping out competitors.”
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Like I said before, this is far from an exhaustive list and there are a plenty other antimonopoly books out there that are certainly worth reading. The two that immediately spring to mind are Liberty from All Masters, by Barry Lynn, and Monopolized, by David Dayen. (Also, Dayen is the Executive Editor of the incredible American Prospect, which everyone should read daily). Zephyr Teachout also recently released Break ‘em Up, which I haven’t yet read, but based on her other writings I’m positive the book is smart, well-informed, and fantastic.
Have you read any of these titles? Did I miss anything?