Workers in emerging economies benefitted from globalization and workers in rich countries, on balance, did not. Overturning globalization, however, will neither work nor bring a real improvement to the Western middle classes.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (December 2-9)
Documents released by British Parliament show Facebook’s attempts to stifle competition; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau no longer protects consumers; provider consolidation is driving up US health care costs; and how big really is America’s digital divide?
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“US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jonathan Tepper talks about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and how a passionate fan of free markets came to write a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism.”
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Mercenary Science: How Corporate Partnerships Can Corrupt Public Universities
UC Berkeley’s disastrous partnerships with Novartis and BP are cautionary examples of all that could go wrong when public universities allow private interests to lease vast swaths of their campus for years at a time.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 18-December 2)
New report reveals America’s “concentration crisis”; antitrust enforcers and regulators in Europe are going after Amazon, Facebook and Google; Facebook’s ongoing Soros debacle; and why is US life expectancy in decline?
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Antitrust in a Changing Economy and Changing Economics
Jason Furman, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers: We will likely need to update our competition policies to promote competition if we want to have more investment, more dynamism, more productivity growth, less inequality and lower prices for consumers.
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If You Don’t Think Today’s Tech Giants Are Vicious, Just Ask Venture Capitalists
Silicon Valley today resembles the deepest part of the jungle known as the triple canopy, where tall trees block out all the light and nothing can grow on the ground. Who knows how many good businesses are not funded because of the fear of the tech monopolies?
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Inside Tech’s “Kill Zone”: How to Deal With the Threat to Edge Innovation Posed by Multi-Sided Platforms
Dominant tech platforms can exploit the vast amounts of user data available only to them to squash startups and independent providers. Hal Singer offers ways to protect against this threat to edge innovation.
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How the FTC Protects Strong Employers and Targets Weak Workers
Since the 1970s, the US has seen a growing power imbalance between workers and employers. This story was not inevitable, but the product of conscious legal and political choices.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)
Facebook’s latest scandal leads lawmakers to proclaim: “Big tech can no longer be trusted”; New Yorkers vow to resist Amazon’s HQ2 deal; monopolization is undermining public faith in capitalism; and why are US drug prices so high?
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Subsidies to Amazon Are Uneconomical, Un-American, and Unconstitutional
Corporate subsidies are a negative-sum game. They foster crony capitalism, hurt productivity growth and inflict great harm on product market competition.
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Obesity and Globalization: Evidence from Mexico
Has Mexico imported its obesity epidemic from the United States? A new study suggests that the answer to this question is “yes.”
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