In 2001, the Food and Drug Administration required Purdue to change OxyContin’s patient package inserts to make addiction risks more evident. The company altered the label to make it appear as though illegal use and abuse were the only addiction-related problems associated with OxyContin. Eventually, Purdue hired the FDA’s medical reviewer for OxyContin.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Goliath author Matt Stoller discusses the political choices that led to the downfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the “addiction to powerlessness” that threatens to undermine its rebirth.
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In an extensive interview with the Swiss news website TheMarket.ch, Luigi Zingales discusses ways to deal with Big Tech and the impact of the antitrust debate on the 2020 presidential election and on consumer welfare. “The digital economy is substantially different from a traditional textbook economy.”
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ProMarket’s picks for the best podcasts covering economics, finance, and political economy.
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As 2019 draws to a close, we look back at ProMarket’s most-read and most-widely shared stories of the past year.
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A conversation with Nobel Prize laureate Robert Shiller on his new book, Narrative Economics: “Economists do not study narratives systematically, but they shape the public debate and actually change as Ronald Reagan and Mario Draghi did with their narrative approach to deregulation and the Euro crisis.”
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Disney is not a corporation that pushes the bounds of artistic and technological possibility but a corporation that pushes the bounds of legal possibility under a radical pro-consolidation framework that has existed since the 1990s. Its new streaming service Disney Plus proves that the company is willing to lose money in order to generate market power that Disney can later use, often against consumers.
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A history of American antimonopoly, the case against Big Tech, and how Europe got better than the US at free markets: here are (in no particular order) some of the best books published during the past year.
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Purdue Pharmaceuticals used to cite three major studies to argue that in prescribing OxyContin, addiction-risk was not significant. The most influential of those studies did not even mention OxyContin, because it was completed twenty-five years before OxyContin was sold. After more than a decade, the company had to admit that “data are not available to establish the true incidence of addiction.”
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In 2013, one of the largest factories in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 workers. Many multinationals committed to improving safety standards. A new study shows that Western corporations can improve labor standards in developing countries, without harming their competitiveness. The result is even more compelling because the study is co-funded by multinationals.
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Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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The average share of votes in favor of proposals that require corporate executives to disclose political and lobbying spending is trending up. But a new SEC regulation will make it harder to resubmit blocked proposals.
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