Marshall Steinbaum is a Senior Economist and Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he researches market power and inequality. He works on tax policy, antitrust & competition policy, and the labor market, in particular declining entrepreneurship and labor mobility as well as credentialization and its result: the student debt crisis. He is a co-editor of After Piketty: the Agenda for Economics and Inequality (Harvard University Press 2017), and his work has appeared in Democracy, Boston Review, the New Republic, the American Prospect, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and ProMarket.
Redirecting antitrust enforcement to confront monopsony power would be a substantial departure from the way it has been conducted in recent decades, but just because a policy has been in place for a long time does not mean it is a success, and recent evidence implies a significant policy change is necessary and justified.
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Bringing the powerful weapons the federal competition authorities have to bear on the problem of monopsony would be a substantial, but necessary departure from recent practice.
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Rich people are much richer than they used to be in large part because they pay much less tax than they used to. This—not technological change, trade, “superstar effects,” “skills gaps,” or “decaying family structure”—explains rising inequality, and it is central to what it means to be rich in the 21st century.
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Concentration of power in supply chains is a prime mechanism by which dominant companies consolidate power and profits.
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