The rise of giants like Amazon and Facebook proves the long-lasting influence of Director’s approach. His intellectual and political legacy is the transition of legitimacy from democratic institutions as the locus of governing power to private monopolies.
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Ahead of our fourth annual Theory of the Firm conference, we are soliciting papers dedicated to the topic of academic lobbying.
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Much like in the first Gilded Age, antitrust enforcers today are hitting labor, not capital. This is thanks to Robert Bork’s radical and influential reinterpretation of antitrust law. In helping successfully rewrite antitrust, Bork left a legacy of corporate supremacy and individual powerlessness.
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The two big ideas that animated American public policy since the end of World War II, employer-sponsored social benefits and neoliberalism, are failures. We need better options.
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Amazon’s price matching policies, which were meant to ensure its dominant position, diminished the ability of brands to control how their products are distributed and the prices at which these products are sold, writes Shaoul Sussman.
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In his review of Paul Collier’s recent book The Future of Capitalism, Branko Milanovic discusses ideology, social democracy, and the “ethical world.”
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Economists and policy elites love carbon taxes, but voters dislike them. A new study suggests that ideology has a lot to do with it.
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In thirteen years of hostile decisions, the Roberts Supreme Court has done all it can to legalize corruption. With the Bridgegate case, it gets a chance to wreak even more havoc and possibly end the use of the term “corruption” as a useful legal concept.
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For decades, competition in America has been on the wane, leading to slower economic growth and a gaping chasm of inequality. Antitrust can help reverse the trend, but antitrust doctrines and enforcement actions once thought adequate are proving insufficient. Fixing the problem is urgent.
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In this third and final part of his three-part series on the resurgence of antimonopoly, Matt Stoller explains how the election of Donald Trump helped bring antimonopoly thinking back to the forefront of the political discourse.
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In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection, Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
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In the first part of a three-part series, Matt Stoller explains why antimonopoly politics is experiencing a resurgence.
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