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Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power
From the airlines we fly to the food we eat, how a tiny group of corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives--by one of our most intrepid and accomplished journalists
If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights--add this one to your list. --Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title
Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.
This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers.
Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony.
Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.
If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights--add this one to your list. --Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title
Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market.
This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers.
Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony.
Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement.
420 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2020
78 people are currently reading
2766 people want to read
About the author
David Dayen
5 books226 followersDavid Dayen is a journalist who writes about economics and finance. He is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud, winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award. He is a contributing writer to Salon.com and The Intercept, and a weekly columnist for The Fiscal Times and The New Republic. He also writes for The American Prospect, Vice, The Huffington Post, In These Times, Naked Capitalism, and more. He has been a guest on MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Current TV, Russia Today, NPR, Pacifica Radio and Air America Radio. He lives in Los Angeles, where prior to writing about politics he had a 15-year career as a television producer and editor.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
August 5, 2020
This is excellent and it will make your blood boil. After each chapter, I was more enraged than the last, but the prison monopolization chapter really put me over the edge. This is not capitalism. It is just raw power and corruption. Break them up
May 15, 2022
I knew about some of these monopolies but didn't realize how many there are that impact every facet of our lives. The greed, manipulation, and ruin of people's livelihoods is disgusting! For years I have tried to buy services and goods from local businesses but it is getter harder. But this makes me even more determined. I can proudly say that I have never been an Amazon Prime subscriber. Full review to come.
March 16, 2020
The Illusion of Choice in America
Americans think they live in a land of unbelievable choice, the rich fruit of capitalism. The truth is they are totally manipulated and trapped. For example, with all the choices of beer the consumer has, the truth is they are all owned by just two companies now. The same is true of consumer packaged goods, medicines, air travel, ship travel – just about anything. The monopolists have bought up every product from every viable brand, often lowering the quality and raising the price, notably in drugs. The only real choice is to buy or not to buy. Tech startups have become pointless, because monopolies like Google, Cisco or Facebook just buy them out before they get too far along. Innovation is actually down as a result. Once bought out, progress screeches to a halt. And if the monopolies can’t buy the company, they kill it with unfair competition, keeping it hidden from consumers and/or undercutting it until it caves, as Amazon likes to do.
Americans don't understand how much they're being hurt by monopolies in virtually every sector of the economy. David Dayen attempts to fill that knowledge gap with Monopolized. He does it far too well. On the other hand, the data is endless.
Dayen says there are already laws on the books to stop all of these diseases and all the others he examines in Monopolized. But the federal government doesn't investigate, prosecute or forbid anything any more. For one thing, corporate chieftains and their lobbyists now sit on regulating bodies and commissions, even at the UN. Donations to candidates and parties speak far louder than mere laws. And monopolist billionaires head government departments throughout the Trump administration.
The creep of monopolies is insidious. They attack local community efforts as well as any legal attempt to rein them in. Towns started providing internet service when the big four monopolists refused to service less populated areas in their exclusive jurisdictions. To fight off popular efforts like this, the big four lobby the states to forbid towns from doing that, or burden the towns with outsized regulations, or limit them to the town line so they aren’t economical. In addition, in the 25 years since internet service has been offered by towns, companies have spent $25 million harassing the towns with frivolous lawsuits.
This is standard procedure, happening all over the country in all kinds of sectors. Monopolists have the power and the cash, so they buy their way into oppressive legislation that benefits only them, at the expense of everyone else. Lawmakers go along, ignoring who they supposedly represent. And if all else fails, lawsuits can tie up anyone foolish enough to compete with the powerful. Whether they win or lose the case means nothing. It’s the delay and the cash burn that count.
One name crops up far more than any other in this book, that of Warren Buffet. Buffet is all about "pricing power" and by close extension, monopoly. He is cited as a shareholder in numerous examples of aggressive monopoly. When asked about the dubious corporate actions of these firms, he replies that he is merely an investor, and not the decisionmaker. But he clearly loves and seeks monopoly situations. He told the Crisis Inquiry Commission 2010 "If you've got a good enough business, if you have monopoly newspaper, or you have a network television station, your idiot nephew could run it." The avuncular billionaire next door is a dead-serious monopolist.
Every chapter of the book takes on a different sector of the economy. The ugliness is plentiful, but let me note some topline examples from some of the topics Dayen covers:
-The USA threatened Ecuador with economic sanctions if it proposed a motion at the UN recommending breastfeeding over infant formula (to help save 800,000 lives lost to malnutrition from infant formula).
-Suicide among farmers is twice the rate of veterans.
-Farm equipment, despite being sold at huge debt expense to the farmer, forbids repairs by the owner. They now say they only "license" the use of their equipment. Farmers have to wait (sometimes weeks) for and pay the rates of official company technicians.
-Farmers who finance their equipment through the food monopolists soon find their produce prices being lowered, with no choice but to accept or be bankrupted by their loans.
-The FAA outsources inspections to the manufacturers it is supposed to regulate. This saves money, and costs lives, as seen in the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, self-approved in advance by Boeing itself. This was not the FAA's idea. It was a breakthrough for monopolists.
-The entire state of Ohio has not one airline hub, forcing some to drive to Pittsburgh to take a direct flight.
-Airline hubs also limit competition as one airline dominates the gate slots, and provides limited choice of destination because there is essentially no other choice available.
-Drug makers sue generics makers. Doesn't matter if they lose; they tie up production for years. Or they bribe generics not to produce for several more years while they milk the consumer.
-"Defense contractor gouging of the government has been a dedicated American tradition for at least a century. Today it is the only thing the industry has the capacity to pull off," Dayen says.
-Amazon, unlike any normal firm, sells CRAP (Can’t Realize A Profit) products, driving small manufacturers and distributors out of business.
-Drugs are in short supply because the monopoly buying groups demand high payments to play, and older and more ordinary drugs like saline solution in IV drip bags, don’t provide enough profit. The result is massive shortages throughout the country, and imports from overseas at far higher prices. The same story occurs in vaccines.
-If the drug sector were actually operating in a capitalist system, there would be no shortages. Monopolies create shortages for their own benefit.
-There are stunningly many ways the two prison monopolists extort money from prisoners’ families. Dayen says “In America, the best way to get away with stealing is to run a prison.”
For all the angst this book generates in the reader, it ends totally unexpectedly on a remarkably high note. There are observable stirrings in the antitrust/antimonopoly community. Dayen says the Democratic presidential candidates are actually talking about it publicly. Recent court decisions have finally begun going against the monoliths. Employees, such as Google’s, are suddenly demanding their employer be respectful. Protest movements are taking shape. States are suing to overturn federal decisions to allow obviously monopolistic mergers.
There is new hope. All it needs is momentum, which means everyone pushing in the same direction, vocally, loudly, and consistently. It is more than time for the pendulum to swing back. As Dayen points out right off the top, sufficiently powerful laws have been on the books for over a hundred years. If Americans can stop electing billionaire monopolists, maybe the laws can be enforced once again.
David Wineberg
Americans think they live in a land of unbelievable choice, the rich fruit of capitalism. The truth is they are totally manipulated and trapped. For example, with all the choices of beer the consumer has, the truth is they are all owned by just two companies now. The same is true of consumer packaged goods, medicines, air travel, ship travel – just about anything. The monopolists have bought up every product from every viable brand, often lowering the quality and raising the price, notably in drugs. The only real choice is to buy or not to buy. Tech startups have become pointless, because monopolies like Google, Cisco or Facebook just buy them out before they get too far along. Innovation is actually down as a result. Once bought out, progress screeches to a halt. And if the monopolies can’t buy the company, they kill it with unfair competition, keeping it hidden from consumers and/or undercutting it until it caves, as Amazon likes to do.
Americans don't understand how much they're being hurt by monopolies in virtually every sector of the economy. David Dayen attempts to fill that knowledge gap with Monopolized. He does it far too well. On the other hand, the data is endless.
Dayen says there are already laws on the books to stop all of these diseases and all the others he examines in Monopolized. But the federal government doesn't investigate, prosecute or forbid anything any more. For one thing, corporate chieftains and their lobbyists now sit on regulating bodies and commissions, even at the UN. Donations to candidates and parties speak far louder than mere laws. And monopolist billionaires head government departments throughout the Trump administration.
The creep of monopolies is insidious. They attack local community efforts as well as any legal attempt to rein them in. Towns started providing internet service when the big four monopolists refused to service less populated areas in their exclusive jurisdictions. To fight off popular efforts like this, the big four lobby the states to forbid towns from doing that, or burden the towns with outsized regulations, or limit them to the town line so they aren’t economical. In addition, in the 25 years since internet service has been offered by towns, companies have spent $25 million harassing the towns with frivolous lawsuits.
This is standard procedure, happening all over the country in all kinds of sectors. Monopolists have the power and the cash, so they buy their way into oppressive legislation that benefits only them, at the expense of everyone else. Lawmakers go along, ignoring who they supposedly represent. And if all else fails, lawsuits can tie up anyone foolish enough to compete with the powerful. Whether they win or lose the case means nothing. It’s the delay and the cash burn that count.
One name crops up far more than any other in this book, that of Warren Buffet. Buffet is all about "pricing power" and by close extension, monopoly. He is cited as a shareholder in numerous examples of aggressive monopoly. When asked about the dubious corporate actions of these firms, he replies that he is merely an investor, and not the decisionmaker. But he clearly loves and seeks monopoly situations. He told the Crisis Inquiry Commission 2010 "If you've got a good enough business, if you have monopoly newspaper, or you have a network television station, your idiot nephew could run it." The avuncular billionaire next door is a dead-serious monopolist.
Every chapter of the book takes on a different sector of the economy. The ugliness is plentiful, but let me note some topline examples from some of the topics Dayen covers:
-The USA threatened Ecuador with economic sanctions if it proposed a motion at the UN recommending breastfeeding over infant formula (to help save 800,000 lives lost to malnutrition from infant formula).
-Suicide among farmers is twice the rate of veterans.
-Farm equipment, despite being sold at huge debt expense to the farmer, forbids repairs by the owner. They now say they only "license" the use of their equipment. Farmers have to wait (sometimes weeks) for and pay the rates of official company technicians.
-Farmers who finance their equipment through the food monopolists soon find their produce prices being lowered, with no choice but to accept or be bankrupted by their loans.
-The FAA outsources inspections to the manufacturers it is supposed to regulate. This saves money, and costs lives, as seen in the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, self-approved in advance by Boeing itself. This was not the FAA's idea. It was a breakthrough for monopolists.
-The entire state of Ohio has not one airline hub, forcing some to drive to Pittsburgh to take a direct flight.
-Airline hubs also limit competition as one airline dominates the gate slots, and provides limited choice of destination because there is essentially no other choice available.
-Drug makers sue generics makers. Doesn't matter if they lose; they tie up production for years. Or they bribe generics not to produce for several more years while they milk the consumer.
-"Defense contractor gouging of the government has been a dedicated American tradition for at least a century. Today it is the only thing the industry has the capacity to pull off," Dayen says.
-Amazon, unlike any normal firm, sells CRAP (Can’t Realize A Profit) products, driving small manufacturers and distributors out of business.
-Drugs are in short supply because the monopoly buying groups demand high payments to play, and older and more ordinary drugs like saline solution in IV drip bags, don’t provide enough profit. The result is massive shortages throughout the country, and imports from overseas at far higher prices. The same story occurs in vaccines.
-If the drug sector were actually operating in a capitalist system, there would be no shortages. Monopolies create shortages for their own benefit.
-There are stunningly many ways the two prison monopolists extort money from prisoners’ families. Dayen says “In America, the best way to get away with stealing is to run a prison.”
For all the angst this book generates in the reader, it ends totally unexpectedly on a remarkably high note. There are observable stirrings in the antitrust/antimonopoly community. Dayen says the Democratic presidential candidates are actually talking about it publicly. Recent court decisions have finally begun going against the monoliths. Employees, such as Google’s, are suddenly demanding their employer be respectful. Protest movements are taking shape. States are suing to overturn federal decisions to allow obviously monopolistic mergers.
There is new hope. All it needs is momentum, which means everyone pushing in the same direction, vocally, loudly, and consistently. It is more than time for the pendulum to swing back. As Dayen points out right off the top, sufficiently powerful laws have been on the books for over a hundred years. If Americans can stop electing billionaire monopolists, maybe the laws can be enforced once again.
David Wineberg
November 28, 2020
Corporate monopolies are the current structure of power and governance.
The United States is not a democracy. It's not a democratic republic. It's not a legislative body that is dictated by elected officials. The current power structure of the United States is a corporate plutocracy that has been placed on the throne slowly through mass privatization, deregulation and the complete dismantling of anti-trust laws that began in the 1980s and has been supported by every administration since. Corporate corruption is not partisan. We live in a monopolized state and with that monopolization comes wealth concentration, racial wealth disparities, poor distribution of healthcare, average income stagnation and decrease quality of commodities and service.
Dayen does an excellent and updated job of outlining the vast monopolization that has occurred throughout pretty much every private sector that exists. With an infectious narrative voice you will take a grand tour through every industry and see the same pattern: unfettered merging, private equity take overs, leveraged buyouts, broad financialization and the consolidation of wealth and power. It is happening EVERYWHERE.
Dayen covers the vertical integration of agriculture and the serfdoms that have been created of American farmers. You'll learn about the corrosion of journalism caused by the shunting of advertising revenue directly to Facebook, a company that has no liability about the content it shovels into our brains. Imperative are the regional monopolies over broadband service that prohibit the very vulnerable from having internet access. Glass-Steagall is reviewed and the corruption of commerce banking with investment banking. Dayen gives us a scathing analysis of Amazon and how it pulls the levers on its own market, sacrificing profit to completely crush any real competitors so that it maintains its power. You'll delve into the healthcare sector and the reasons why there are shortages of bags of salt for patients. The private equity takeover of the rental market was particularly egregious. Airlines, car rentals... privatized prisons. The list goes on and on of unregulated monopolies destroying and dominating in every market.
The message is clear: we do not live in a free market. Trusting in the neoliberal principles of laissez faire is naïve, foolhardy and destructive. We have become an anti-capitalistic economy akin to what proponents of the free markets fear most: a state controlled economy. A plutocracy is bad, doesn't matter from which wing of the political spectrum it emanates.
Monopolization is destroying the US. We must stop large mergers and break up the controlled markets. Business-as-usual politics will do nothing.
The United States is not a democracy. It's not a democratic republic. It's not a legislative body that is dictated by elected officials. The current power structure of the United States is a corporate plutocracy that has been placed on the throne slowly through mass privatization, deregulation and the complete dismantling of anti-trust laws that began in the 1980s and has been supported by every administration since. Corporate corruption is not partisan. We live in a monopolized state and with that monopolization comes wealth concentration, racial wealth disparities, poor distribution of healthcare, average income stagnation and decrease quality of commodities and service.
Dayen does an excellent and updated job of outlining the vast monopolization that has occurred throughout pretty much every private sector that exists. With an infectious narrative voice you will take a grand tour through every industry and see the same pattern: unfettered merging, private equity take overs, leveraged buyouts, broad financialization and the consolidation of wealth and power. It is happening EVERYWHERE.
Dayen covers the vertical integration of agriculture and the serfdoms that have been created of American farmers. You'll learn about the corrosion of journalism caused by the shunting of advertising revenue directly to Facebook, a company that has no liability about the content it shovels into our brains. Imperative are the regional monopolies over broadband service that prohibit the very vulnerable from having internet access. Glass-Steagall is reviewed and the corruption of commerce banking with investment banking. Dayen gives us a scathing analysis of Amazon and how it pulls the levers on its own market, sacrificing profit to completely crush any real competitors so that it maintains its power. You'll delve into the healthcare sector and the reasons why there are shortages of bags of salt for patients. The private equity takeover of the rental market was particularly egregious. Airlines, car rentals... privatized prisons. The list goes on and on of unregulated monopolies destroying and dominating in every market.
The message is clear: we do not live in a free market. Trusting in the neoliberal principles of laissez faire is naïve, foolhardy and destructive. We have become an anti-capitalistic economy akin to what proponents of the free markets fear most: a state controlled economy. A plutocracy is bad, doesn't matter from which wing of the political spectrum it emanates.
Monopolization is destroying the US. We must stop large mergers and break up the controlled markets. Business-as-usual politics will do nothing.
September 3, 2020
There's nothing to disagree with here but it does little else beyond listing all the monopolies we live under and why it's bad. Not that interesting turns out. Also disappointed that it's not fully honest with a topic that doesn't really need any underhand techniques, you really don't need to paint capitalists as worse than they are. If anything it weakens the message. It's nothing overt but clear bias and lies of omission go a long way.
May 10, 2021
BLUF: We're doomed. And this book was written in 2019, before covid and the whole situation got much much worse, where small businesses were either starved or swallowed. The only hope (and I feel grim after reading this) is for groups like the FTC, SEC, Congress, and the Justice Department to get off PornHub (also a monopoly!*) long enough to block some mergers, break apart some of this collusion and apply anti-trust laws to a lot of current industries.
He uses the term "monopoly" when 90% of the time he means "oligopoly" or "duopoly," which is annoying, not only because "oligopoly" is a more fun word to say, but because it undermines the argument that increasing competition is possible and good when the are already two competitors (ie, Pepsico/CocaCola/KeurigDrPepper, Colgate-Palmolive/Proctor&Gamble, Apple&Android, etc). His political position is also quite clear from the outset of the book (more on that later).
This book demonstrates why I am a political orphan, a non-plutocratic libertarian with no political home. The Republicans structure the tax system to benefit the too-big-to-fail business schemes while allowing them to self-regulate (no way that could go terribly wrong, eh, Boeing?), while the Democrats promote excessive bureaucracy to oversee operations, but not often with regard to the scale of operations (a small-scale poultry processor is far less likely to seed a multi-state recall of contaminated products and should not be held to identical standards as a processor running 8000 birds per hour, day and night), or government seizure of the operations altogether. I am a capitalist, but don't agree that our current system vaguely resembles capitalism. Competition is good, and there should be no barriers to entry in a capitalist system, but within many industries, companies are reducing competition by consolidating or squashing upstarts and would-be competitors. The idea is that this increases "efficiency" but it often doesn't lead to lower prices for consumers, just more lucre for executives and owners (he evokes Warren Buffett in almost every chapter).
The chapter on pharmaceutical companies was infuriating (especially in light of racing towards covid vaccines with questionable effectiveness and INDEMNIFIED MANUFACTURERS... but the book predates covid), but it didn't hold a candle to the chapter on banks and how killing Glass-Stegall has caused so many of our recent financial crises. He does actually point a finger at Bill Clinton on this one, surprisingly (and refreshingly). Discusses how tight supply lines in medical supplies are deliberate in order to try and force costs up (see also: lumber these days, and how companies like Kimberly Clark are issuing press releases about how they *need* to jack up prices. At least they're being honest about their intentions, if not their motivation).
He writes about how military technology and raw materials production has almost entirely been offshored to China (to save money and increase profit) and how that puts the US at risk if there is ever any tension with China. Again, pre-covid, but reading it reminded me of the extreme concern last year when people started realizing that nearly all medications and pharmaceuticals consumed in the US are manufactured in places like China and India and that there is no capacity (or domestic expertise) to quickly move manufacturing back into the US. And how everything is overpriced shit, which reminds me of clothing, where everything is the same, it's all manufactured overseas, and none of it, regardless of price, is good quality.
There's a big chapter on financialization of retail and leveraged buyouts and private equity buying foreclosed properties, but he does not explain how this comes to pass or what the ostensible purpose of this is, or if companies can avoid buyouts, etc, along with who oversees or approves these actions. The consequences are severe, but the mechanism/process isn't well-explained by the author.
The author is politically very hard left, to the point that he appears unaware of his own viewpoint and how clear the bias is in his writing. For one single example, he points out every right-leaning news source or distributor (like Fox News or Sinclair Media), but completely ignores that almost every other "news" source is heavily leftward-biased (The Atlantic, WaPo, etc) if not outright propaganda and opinion masquerading as journalism. Decries the failure of Air America as a consequence of Reagan's repealing The Fairness Doctrine, and not because there was no audience for the content, or that the organization was wildly mismanaged from the get-go, (though he does allude to this). Anyway, his political position in those (and other) cases came off as digressive and distracting. If you're trying to frame an argument and really people to your cause, leave the identity politics and partisan blaming out of it. This issue of centralized power affects *everyone,* and is caused and exacerbated by *both* political parties, so don't turn off your audience by making ad hominem attacks against conservatives or dismissing them out of hand. Happily, by the end of the book he seems to recognize (perhaps in the chapter where a pro-life Trump supporter is harassed and evicted by a predatory corporate landlord) that overlooking partisanship to try and rein in this insanity is good policy. He does point out that a lot of the top executives and board members bounce from large companies to various administrations and cabinet departments and then back to the companies when the administration changes, and that this is a bipartisan problem.
In the end of the book he illustrates how Israel broke apart some of their trusts and industry concentration which has helped lower prices and spur innovation and competition. Is hopeful that the US can eventually do the same. As am I.
*I don't know if PornHub is a monopoly, and I don't care to research it, but given what I've learned from this book, I wouldn't be surprised.
He uses the term "monopoly" when 90% of the time he means "oligopoly" or "duopoly," which is annoying, not only because "oligopoly" is a more fun word to say, but because it undermines the argument that increasing competition is possible and good when the are already two competitors (ie, Pepsico/CocaCola/KeurigDrPepper, Colgate-Palmolive/Proctor&Gamble, Apple&Android, etc). His political position is also quite clear from the outset of the book (more on that later).
This book demonstrates why I am a political orphan, a non-plutocratic libertarian with no political home. The Republicans structure the tax system to benefit the too-big-to-fail business schemes while allowing them to self-regulate (no way that could go terribly wrong, eh, Boeing?), while the Democrats promote excessive bureaucracy to oversee operations, but not often with regard to the scale of operations (a small-scale poultry processor is far less likely to seed a multi-state recall of contaminated products and should not be held to identical standards as a processor running 8000 birds per hour, day and night), or government seizure of the operations altogether. I am a capitalist, but don't agree that our current system vaguely resembles capitalism. Competition is good, and there should be no barriers to entry in a capitalist system, but within many industries, companies are reducing competition by consolidating or squashing upstarts and would-be competitors. The idea is that this increases "efficiency" but it often doesn't lead to lower prices for consumers, just more lucre for executives and owners (he evokes Warren Buffett in almost every chapter).
The chapter on pharmaceutical companies was infuriating (especially in light of racing towards covid vaccines with questionable effectiveness and INDEMNIFIED MANUFACTURERS... but the book predates covid), but it didn't hold a candle to the chapter on banks and how killing Glass-Stegall has caused so many of our recent financial crises. He does actually point a finger at Bill Clinton on this one, surprisingly (and refreshingly). Discusses how tight supply lines in medical supplies are deliberate in order to try and force costs up (see also: lumber these days, and how companies like Kimberly Clark are issuing press releases about how they *need* to jack up prices. At least they're being honest about their intentions, if not their motivation).
He writes about how military technology and raw materials production has almost entirely been offshored to China (to save money and increase profit) and how that puts the US at risk if there is ever any tension with China. Again, pre-covid, but reading it reminded me of the extreme concern last year when people started realizing that nearly all medications and pharmaceuticals consumed in the US are manufactured in places like China and India and that there is no capacity (or domestic expertise) to quickly move manufacturing back into the US. And how everything is overpriced shit, which reminds me of clothing, where everything is the same, it's all manufactured overseas, and none of it, regardless of price, is good quality.
There's a big chapter on financialization of retail and leveraged buyouts and private equity buying foreclosed properties, but he does not explain how this comes to pass or what the ostensible purpose of this is, or if companies can avoid buyouts, etc, along with who oversees or approves these actions. The consequences are severe, but the mechanism/process isn't well-explained by the author.
The author is politically very hard left, to the point that he appears unaware of his own viewpoint and how clear the bias is in his writing. For one single example, he points out every right-leaning news source or distributor (like Fox News or Sinclair Media), but completely ignores that almost every other "news" source is heavily leftward-biased (The Atlantic, WaPo, etc) if not outright propaganda and opinion masquerading as journalism. Decries the failure of Air America as a consequence of Reagan's repealing The Fairness Doctrine, and not because there was no audience for the content, or that the organization was wildly mismanaged from the get-go, (though he does allude to this). Anyway, his political position in those (and other) cases came off as digressive and distracting. If you're trying to frame an argument and really people to your cause, leave the identity politics and partisan blaming out of it. This issue of centralized power affects *everyone,* and is caused and exacerbated by *both* political parties, so don't turn off your audience by making ad hominem attacks against conservatives or dismissing them out of hand. Happily, by the end of the book he seems to recognize (perhaps in the chapter where a pro-life Trump supporter is harassed and evicted by a predatory corporate landlord) that overlooking partisanship to try and rein in this insanity is good policy. He does point out that a lot of the top executives and board members bounce from large companies to various administrations and cabinet departments and then back to the companies when the administration changes, and that this is a bipartisan problem.
In the end of the book he illustrates how Israel broke apart some of their trusts and industry concentration which has helped lower prices and spur innovation and competition. Is hopeful that the US can eventually do the same. As am I.
*I don't know if PornHub is a monopoly, and I don't care to research it, but given what I've learned from this book, I wouldn't be surprised.
July 2, 2020
This book is my favorite book of the year so far. Here is my review that I first published in my weekly newsletter, Catalog of Curiosities. Please sign up if you find the review insightful and/or if you are curious like me.
Here is link: https://catalogofcuriosities.substack...
Here is the review:
Hello, friends,
I’m extremely interested in megatrends, sometimes a fuzzily defined term with disparate definitions, but I think of them as macro-level structural forces that shape and construct reality and future pathways. Megatrends are drivers. Some well-known megatrends are things like demographics, climate change, world orders whether apolar, unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, decentralization or centralization, COVID-19, etc. Megatrends are patterns; megatrends, when real and not merely hypothesized, shape our world; they tilt and weight what is possible and probable.
This brings me to this week’s curiosity: a book review of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020), by David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect.
Book Review - Monopolized
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020) should be thought of as a “People’s History of Monopoly” companion to Matt Stoller’s historical work Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019). Both books focus on the monopoly (one or a few sellers, many buyers) and monopsony (one buyer, more sellers) problems in America. Stoller looks at the history of the battle between monopoly and democracy; Dayen chapter after chapter chillingly describes industry after industry that has been swallowed whole by private equity, global behemoth corporations, and, in doing so, truly created a market power problem that is anathema to the smooth flow of markets.
Daniel Dayen defines monopoly less stringent than one might want, writing that he is referring to large companies with significant market shares in increasingly concentrated industries. It is likely that after reading this book, Dayen’s definition will not be at the front of your mind. The megatrend he highlights is happening and it’s wrecking our lives. I repeat: all of our lives are worse off because of the political-economy (and thus: society) that we are living in. Our democracy is at stake. Our health is at stake. Our futures are wound up in this in a way that most people don’t realize. This book is a must-read.
~~~
The introduction is worth the price alone (well…I received an advanced NetGalley copy of the book; but you know what I mean. I do plan on buying a copy. This is my favorite read of the year so far, well worth the shelf space) because in a handful of pages Dayen describes his thesis and reveals the magnitude of the problem. We know about Big Oil and Big Pharma, but did you know that office retail supply is dominated by two companies (Staples and Essendant)? Did you know that the eyewear industry is dominated by one company, the Italian Luxocitta? Dayen points to research that shows that 75% of all industries have experienced increases in concentration. All of this is in the introduction mind you. The consequences are immense:
Monopoly steals wages
Dayen supports this with academic research. A paper from Harvard’s Nathan Wilmers finds that approximately 10 percent of wage stagnation since the 1970s can be attributed to buyers (that is you) having diminished market power.
Monopoly weakens economies
A book from a few years ago called The Captured Economy (2017) by a libertarian (Brink Lindsey) and a liberal political scientist (Steven M. Teles) is the best book on this side of the problem that I’ve read. Start-up activity is down; rent-seeking is increasing; and entrenched interest groups hire lobbyists to all but guarantee that the status-quo is rigged. This is a political problem, not merely economic. The economist Mancur Olson wrote about this decades ago, in his book The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
Monopoly degrades quality, heightens disaster, and supercharges inequality
Monopoly hollows out communities and screws up politics
Examples abound throughout the book. Concentrated industries and contracts that are impossible to get out of caused hospital bag IV shortages long before Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean. (Yes, a few companies have cornered the salt-saline IV bag market, too.) When workers have fewer choices to go to, dynamism declines, and communities become victims of “market” forces. As Lindsey and Teles write, “upward redistribution is not an accident” (2017, 153). You think people are in the streets now? If they only knew.
~~~
Dayen is well-known to the left blogosphere, he started in 2004, and he has written for every single freakin’ publication you can think of. Now he is the executive editor at The American Prospect. His last book Chain of Title (2017) covered the foreclosure fraud perpetrated by big banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns. Dayen is indefatigable, pumping out more words daily, and certainly monthly, then most writers that I read.
The reason why this is a “people’s history” is because he saves the technical and legal analyses to books that came before him (he points to Stoller and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Business). In chapter after chapter Dayen brings to the reader how flesh and blood people (remember those things?) are impacted by mergers, monopolies, and monopsonies every day, in every way imaginable. Stoller (2019, 441) shows how “we have concentrated markets in everything from airlines to coffins to candy to hospitals.” Dayen, in this book, makes you feel how intolerable, unfair, and morally and ethically grotesque our political-economy is.
Dayen (2020, 295) convincingly shows that monopoly power increases inequality; decreases wages and weakens workers’ capacity to fight for a better life; turns politics into two parties groveling at the feet of big business; and convincingly argues that this is the “ur-problem,” or the “problem of power, and solving it will allow us to solve everything else.” This reality is why I support politicians who want to reform capitalism and who want to reform the Democratic process. The first bill the House passed in 2019 was truly good. Here is copy from the Brennan Center: “the House of Representatives voted 234-193 in favor of a sweeping democracy reform bill on Friday. The measure, known as H.R. 1 or the For the People Act of 2019, was introduced by House Democrats in January and marks the first time in decades Congress has made comprehensive democracy reform a central priority.” Of course, the grim reaper Mitch McConnell found the bill dead on arrival; Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the bill in the Senate, but the body never voted on it.
The industries that Dayen covers are myriad: the airline industry, which is shot through with dozens of monopolies or near-monopolies. Boeing is the only U.S. airplane manufacturer; car rental companies inside airports are dominated by Hertz (which runs Thrifty and Dollar) and Enterprise (which also owns National, Alamo, and Zimride). Big animal agriculture is dominated by Chinese and Brazilian companies. The author shows that the only thing worse than the “military-industrial complex” might be well…that the “industry” part of the equation has more leverage over the Pentagon than one would imagine—small and large monopolies within the private-sector side of this relationship engage in price-gouging and contribute to outsourcing and putting factories inside China that build parts that the U.S. might need….in a war….against China. Things are bad, folks. (Read that in the Obama “we tortured some folks” cadence, pitch, and tone.)
But there is more. Dayen discusses Big Tech (the Amazon chapter is so egregious that I paused from writing this to read it out loud with my girlfriend), the prison industry, retail, hotel chains, publishers, the medical industry (from individual product monopolies including IV-saline-bags to health insurance to hospital networks and outpatient facilities, most bought up by private-equity firms), banks, how private-equity itself is concentrated, website domains, the defense industry, and the list truly goes on and on. It’s truly remarkable.
Some of the specific numbers in the book are worth mentioning:
By the end of the 1980s, 51 airlines had merged. And by publication date for this book, 80 percent of all flights are controlled by 4 airliners: Delta, United, American, and Southwest.
According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of U.S. counties have 2 or fewer health insurance companies to choose from. There have been nearly 1,700 hospital mergers since 1998.
Ticketmaster and LiveNation are the same company and have over 80 percent share in the concert/entertainment industry ticket market.
GateHouse Media merged with Gannett: the 2 largest newspaper chains are now 1. In total, private equity firms own about 1,500 newspapers.
Like Frank Portnoy wrote in his review of Dayen’s previous book, “prepare to be surprised, and angry.” This book is surprising—even to the reader who pays attention to this stuff will assuredly be surprised; this book will make you thoroughly and righteously angry. I haven’t felt this viscerally angry and upset while reading a book in a long time.
I compiled a list of deadly serious problems that arise from market concentration and market power. These include price-fixing (market power plus collusion), information asymmetries, “rent-seeking” corporations preventing entry. Jonah Goldberg is fond of saying that “complexity is a subsidy,” and I totally agree. Status-quo behemoths make it so hard to enter their markets that it becomes cost-prohibitive (another failure of monopoly). More: underinvestment, “sticky-prices,” plausible deniability (well…those aren’t my suppliers, we outsource so the slavery isn’t our problem. We will work on it. Thank you.) Market concentration is such a problem that the Federal Reserve System recently held a symposium on it.
Where do we go from here? A preview of part two.
Monopoly is a problem that shouldn't be partisan. Russel Kirk, an influential conservative of the mid-20th century, stressed about the dangers of “private collectivism” ([2019] 1957, 60% epub). Republican President Taft was a trustbuster; and socialists and liberals care deeply about the inequality, privacy concerns, and rupture of community that monopolies produce. Socialists call for “nationalization” while liberals call for regulation, oversight, labor rights, worker equity inside businesses (socialists like this stuff as well; some conservatives, too, including Oren Cass.)
Part two of this review will wrestle with solutions proposed, by Dayen and some of his fellow neo-Brandeisian anti-trusters such as Tim Wu and Matt Stoller, whose works I am now reading. I will not promise when part two will be published, as I have other newsletters I am working on and a lot of other work I am engaged with outside the newsletter as well. But it will come; it deserves its own space.
Here is link: https://catalogofcuriosities.substack...
Here is the review:
Hello, friends,
I’m extremely interested in megatrends, sometimes a fuzzily defined term with disparate definitions, but I think of them as macro-level structural forces that shape and construct reality and future pathways. Megatrends are drivers. Some well-known megatrends are things like demographics, climate change, world orders whether apolar, unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, decentralization or centralization, COVID-19, etc. Megatrends are patterns; megatrends, when real and not merely hypothesized, shape our world; they tilt and weight what is possible and probable.
This brings me to this week’s curiosity: a book review of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020), by David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect.
Book Review - Monopolized
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020) should be thought of as a “People’s History of Monopoly” companion to Matt Stoller’s historical work Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019). Both books focus on the monopoly (one or a few sellers, many buyers) and monopsony (one buyer, more sellers) problems in America. Stoller looks at the history of the battle between monopoly and democracy; Dayen chapter after chapter chillingly describes industry after industry that has been swallowed whole by private equity, global behemoth corporations, and, in doing so, truly created a market power problem that is anathema to the smooth flow of markets.
Daniel Dayen defines monopoly less stringent than one might want, writing that he is referring to large companies with significant market shares in increasingly concentrated industries. It is likely that after reading this book, Dayen’s definition will not be at the front of your mind. The megatrend he highlights is happening and it’s wrecking our lives. I repeat: all of our lives are worse off because of the political-economy (and thus: society) that we are living in. Our democracy is at stake. Our health is at stake. Our futures are wound up in this in a way that most people don’t realize. This book is a must-read.
~~~
The introduction is worth the price alone (well…I received an advanced NetGalley copy of the book; but you know what I mean. I do plan on buying a copy. This is my favorite read of the year so far, well worth the shelf space) because in a handful of pages Dayen describes his thesis and reveals the magnitude of the problem. We know about Big Oil and Big Pharma, but did you know that office retail supply is dominated by two companies (Staples and Essendant)? Did you know that the eyewear industry is dominated by one company, the Italian Luxocitta? Dayen points to research that shows that 75% of all industries have experienced increases in concentration. All of this is in the introduction mind you. The consequences are immense:
Monopoly steals wages
Dayen supports this with academic research. A paper from Harvard’s Nathan Wilmers finds that approximately 10 percent of wage stagnation since the 1970s can be attributed to buyers (that is you) having diminished market power.
Monopoly weakens economies
A book from a few years ago called The Captured Economy (2017) by a libertarian (Brink Lindsey) and a liberal political scientist (Steven M. Teles) is the best book on this side of the problem that I’ve read. Start-up activity is down; rent-seeking is increasing; and entrenched interest groups hire lobbyists to all but guarantee that the status-quo is rigged. This is a political problem, not merely economic. The economist Mancur Olson wrote about this decades ago, in his book The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
Monopoly degrades quality, heightens disaster, and supercharges inequality
Monopoly hollows out communities and screws up politics
Examples abound throughout the book. Concentrated industries and contracts that are impossible to get out of caused hospital bag IV shortages long before Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean. (Yes, a few companies have cornered the salt-saline IV bag market, too.) When workers have fewer choices to go to, dynamism declines, and communities become victims of “market” forces. As Lindsey and Teles write, “upward redistribution is not an accident” (2017, 153). You think people are in the streets now? If they only knew.
~~~
Dayen is well-known to the left blogosphere, he started in 2004, and he has written for every single freakin’ publication you can think of. Now he is the executive editor at The American Prospect. His last book Chain of Title (2017) covered the foreclosure fraud perpetrated by big banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns. Dayen is indefatigable, pumping out more words daily, and certainly monthly, then most writers that I read.
The reason why this is a “people’s history” is because he saves the technical and legal analyses to books that came before him (he points to Stoller and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Business). In chapter after chapter Dayen brings to the reader how flesh and blood people (remember those things?) are impacted by mergers, monopolies, and monopsonies every day, in every way imaginable. Stoller (2019, 441) shows how “we have concentrated markets in everything from airlines to coffins to candy to hospitals.” Dayen, in this book, makes you feel how intolerable, unfair, and morally and ethically grotesque our political-economy is.
Dayen (2020, 295) convincingly shows that monopoly power increases inequality; decreases wages and weakens workers’ capacity to fight for a better life; turns politics into two parties groveling at the feet of big business; and convincingly argues that this is the “ur-problem,” or the “problem of power, and solving it will allow us to solve everything else.” This reality is why I support politicians who want to reform capitalism and who want to reform the Democratic process. The first bill the House passed in 2019 was truly good. Here is copy from the Brennan Center: “the House of Representatives voted 234-193 in favor of a sweeping democracy reform bill on Friday. The measure, known as H.R. 1 or the For the People Act of 2019, was introduced by House Democrats in January and marks the first time in decades Congress has made comprehensive democracy reform a central priority.” Of course, the grim reaper Mitch McConnell found the bill dead on arrival; Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the bill in the Senate, but the body never voted on it.
The industries that Dayen covers are myriad: the airline industry, which is shot through with dozens of monopolies or near-monopolies. Boeing is the only U.S. airplane manufacturer; car rental companies inside airports are dominated by Hertz (which runs Thrifty and Dollar) and Enterprise (which also owns National, Alamo, and Zimride). Big animal agriculture is dominated by Chinese and Brazilian companies. The author shows that the only thing worse than the “military-industrial complex” might be well…that the “industry” part of the equation has more leverage over the Pentagon than one would imagine—small and large monopolies within the private-sector side of this relationship engage in price-gouging and contribute to outsourcing and putting factories inside China that build parts that the U.S. might need….in a war….against China. Things are bad, folks. (Read that in the Obama “we tortured some folks” cadence, pitch, and tone.)
But there is more. Dayen discusses Big Tech (the Amazon chapter is so egregious that I paused from writing this to read it out loud with my girlfriend), the prison industry, retail, hotel chains, publishers, the medical industry (from individual product monopolies including IV-saline-bags to health insurance to hospital networks and outpatient facilities, most bought up by private-equity firms), banks, how private-equity itself is concentrated, website domains, the defense industry, and the list truly goes on and on. It’s truly remarkable.
Some of the specific numbers in the book are worth mentioning:
By the end of the 1980s, 51 airlines had merged. And by publication date for this book, 80 percent of all flights are controlled by 4 airliners: Delta, United, American, and Southwest.
According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of U.S. counties have 2 or fewer health insurance companies to choose from. There have been nearly 1,700 hospital mergers since 1998.
Ticketmaster and LiveNation are the same company and have over 80 percent share in the concert/entertainment industry ticket market.
GateHouse Media merged with Gannett: the 2 largest newspaper chains are now 1. In total, private equity firms own about 1,500 newspapers.
Like Frank Portnoy wrote in his review of Dayen’s previous book, “prepare to be surprised, and angry.” This book is surprising—even to the reader who pays attention to this stuff will assuredly be surprised; this book will make you thoroughly and righteously angry. I haven’t felt this viscerally angry and upset while reading a book in a long time.
I compiled a list of deadly serious problems that arise from market concentration and market power. These include price-fixing (market power plus collusion), information asymmetries, “rent-seeking” corporations preventing entry. Jonah Goldberg is fond of saying that “complexity is a subsidy,” and I totally agree. Status-quo behemoths make it so hard to enter their markets that it becomes cost-prohibitive (another failure of monopoly). More: underinvestment, “sticky-prices,” plausible deniability (well…those aren’t my suppliers, we outsource so the slavery isn’t our problem. We will work on it. Thank you.) Market concentration is such a problem that the Federal Reserve System recently held a symposium on it.
Where do we go from here? A preview of part two.
Monopoly is a problem that shouldn't be partisan. Russel Kirk, an influential conservative of the mid-20th century, stressed about the dangers of “private collectivism” ([2019] 1957, 60% epub). Republican President Taft was a trustbuster; and socialists and liberals care deeply about the inequality, privacy concerns, and rupture of community that monopolies produce. Socialists call for “nationalization” while liberals call for regulation, oversight, labor rights, worker equity inside businesses (socialists like this stuff as well; some conservatives, too, including Oren Cass.)
Part two of this review will wrestle with solutions proposed, by Dayen and some of his fellow neo-Brandeisian anti-trusters such as Tim Wu and Matt Stoller, whose works I am now reading. I will not promise when part two will be published, as I have other newsletters I am working on and a lot of other work I am engaged with outside the newsletter as well. But it will come; it deserves its own space.
October 7, 2022
An eye-opening book for sure, the author looked at monopolies and corporate power from the angle of ordinary people, revealing the damages to people’s livelihood that we don’t see. To be honest, I feel like some of the things in the book are a little bit inaccurate or one-sided. But a good book triggers your thoughts and opens your mind, which I believe this book does just these.
• The variety of “choices” we have in grocery stories are actually from a few companies disguised under different brand names. This is something new I learnt.
• Do different brand names under the same corporation have no competition among each other? It’s a point implied by the author which I doubt.
• The greatest investor Warren Buffett was mentioned in almost every chapter. An alternative name I propose to this book would be “Warren Buffett and the evil monopolies he invested”
• You typically don’t see how people’s lives were hurt by monopolies. The stories of the people in this book are heart rendering and make you feel hopeless fighting against large corporations.
• Chapter 6 was shocking to me. The example of how M&A team at GS ripped off their client felt like pre-2008, so I was shocked to see it was not many years ago.
• I was told Private Equity are creating values and making improvements to the wellbeing of the people and society during my career. Chapter 10 slapped my face. Maybe that’s another reason PE managers selection important.
• I cannot agree with some points the author mentioned. For example, Chapter 6 mentioned the P2P lending the big banks are doing doesn’t connect borrowers to peer lender but are asset managers. The author seems to imply it’s a bad outcome. However, it could be worse if the lenders are actually peer given the lack of risk management of normal people.
• Through out the book, the main message is that monopolization is hurting the society and the economy in every sector, so regularization and anti-trust are needed. I partially agree, as I’m not sure if this “cure” will actually work better than the “disease”. Does breaking up monopolization trigger innovation and improvement? Or does the incentive of being monopolized gives more incentives to innovate? I don’t think it’s an easier question to answer. The answer is probably like the answer to every hard questions: it depends…
• The variety of “choices” we have in grocery stories are actually from a few companies disguised under different brand names. This is something new I learnt.
• Do different brand names under the same corporation have no competition among each other? It’s a point implied by the author which I doubt.
• The greatest investor Warren Buffett was mentioned in almost every chapter. An alternative name I propose to this book would be “Warren Buffett and the evil monopolies he invested”
• You typically don’t see how people’s lives were hurt by monopolies. The stories of the people in this book are heart rendering and make you feel hopeless fighting against large corporations.
• Chapter 6 was shocking to me. The example of how M&A team at GS ripped off their client felt like pre-2008, so I was shocked to see it was not many years ago.
• I was told Private Equity are creating values and making improvements to the wellbeing of the people and society during my career. Chapter 10 slapped my face. Maybe that’s another reason PE managers selection important.
• I cannot agree with some points the author mentioned. For example, Chapter 6 mentioned the P2P lending the big banks are doing doesn’t connect borrowers to peer lender but are asset managers. The author seems to imply it’s a bad outcome. However, it could be worse if the lenders are actually peer given the lack of risk management of normal people.
• Through out the book, the main message is that monopolization is hurting the society and the economy in every sector, so regularization and anti-trust are needed. I partially agree, as I’m not sure if this “cure” will actually work better than the “disease”. Does breaking up monopolization trigger innovation and improvement? Or does the incentive of being monopolized gives more incentives to innovate? I don’t think it’s an easier question to answer. The answer is probably like the answer to every hard questions: it depends…
August 20, 2022
An excellent tour of several sectors of the economy where consumers are essentially at the mercy of big business. In some cases it's a single company, a true monopoly, while in others it's a handful of companies that operate more like a cartel to fix prices than as true competitors. David Dayen has a conversational written style, which I feel makes the book accessible to a wide audience; an academic economist, an anti-trust lawyer, or a social activist could make the same points, but Dayen has a knack for putting this in terms of how it affects everyday people. This is largely because he roots each chapter in personal experiences of people affected. Honestly, we're all affected. It's not just the people that lose their jobs, lose their homes, face a crisis that was largely due to supply chain failures. There's plenty of that. But it's also the cable companies that suppress options affordable high-speed internet in rural areas. It's our dependence on China to produce military weapons. It's the fact that the majority of options on the shelf (even store brands) are owned by the same company; you can stop buying something but you can't take your business elsewhere.
Books on economic reform often have a reactionary tone, which plays well for a certain audience but can also turn off a lot people. Dayen has crafted a readable, relatable book to raise awareness of how deeply monopolies have solidified themselves in the present economy.
Books on economic reform often have a reactionary tone, which plays well for a certain audience but can also turn off a lot people. Dayen has crafted a readable, relatable book to raise awareness of how deeply monopolies have solidified themselves in the present economy.
August 30, 2020
Many of the recent works on the problem of Monopolization tackle the subject from the historical and at a high level whereas Dayan in Monopolized looks at the issue at this from a personal and micro level bringing a host of regular people and small businesses that have suffered from the negative side effects of the issue. He does start out with some background on how we got here but then gives us individual accounts ranging from suffering at the whims of the airline industry, small farmers that are all but being slowly wiped out, to endangered journalists, to health care to banking to jails and personal finance and several more. All of these stories illustrate how we’re all worse off in this state of affairs. As Dayan closes he points out obvious remedies but as with the latest Zephyr Teachout book on the same topic, it’s not likely that any will be implemented in the near term, unfortunately.
April 22, 2021
This book is good book. Or maybe I should write its a bad book about bad things...Monopolies. A better title would have been "Everything you wanted to know about Monopolies but were afraid to ask". The good -the bad- and the downright ugly.It is a highly readable book that is dizzying in breadth and scope. Just when you begin to get bored with what your reading he drops an informational nugget which impels you to read on super-charged with interest. The development of small stores big stores
no stores....Dollar Savers, Dollar, grocery deserts, food deserts, employment deserts, on and on and on. I do recommend that you read this book. The takeaway on this....the catch phrase....is GREED and MONEY and NO CONSCIENCE. Please note how many times you take a deep breath as you read this book. I got this book via Leominster Public Library which I am indebted to.
no stores....Dollar Savers, Dollar, grocery deserts, food deserts, employment deserts, on and on and on. I do recommend that you read this book. The takeaway on this....the catch phrase....is GREED and MONEY and NO CONSCIENCE. Please note how many times you take a deep breath as you read this book. I got this book via Leominster Public Library which I am indebted to.
June 29, 2020
Hello, friends,
I’m extremely interested in megatrends, sometimes a fuzzily defined term with disparate definitions, but I think of them as macro-level structural forces that shape and construct reality and future pathways. Megatrends are drivers. Some well-known megatrends are things like demographics, climate change, world orders whether apolar, unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, decentralization or centralization, COVID-19, etc. Megatrends are patterns; megatrends, when real and not merely hypothesized, shape our world; they tilt and weight what is possible and probable.
This brings me to this week’s curiosity: a book review of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020), by David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect.
Book Review - Monopolized
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020) should be thought of as a “People’s History of Monopoly” companion to Matt Stoller’s historical work Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019). Both books focus on the monopoly (one or a few sellers, many buyers) and monopsony (one buyer, more sellers) problems in America. Stoller looks at the history of the battle between monopoly and democracy; Dayen chapter after chapter chillingly describes industry after industry that has been swallowed whole by private equity, global behemoth corporations, and, in doing so, truly created a market power problem that is anathema to the smooth flow of markets.
Daniel Dayen defines monopoly less stringent than one might want, writing that he is referring to large companies with significant market shares in increasingly concentrated industries. It is likely that after reading this book, Dayen’s definition will not be at the front of your mind. The megatrend he highlights is happening and it’s wrecking our lives. I repeat: all of our lives are worse off because of the political-economy (and thus: society) that we are living in. Our democracy is at stake. Our health is at stake. Our futures are wound up in this in a way that most people don’t realize. This book is a must-read.
~~~
The introduction is worth the price alone (well…I received an advanced NetGalley copy of the book; but you know what I mean. I do plan on buying a copy. This is my favorite read of the year so far, well worth the shelf space) because in a handful of pages Dayen describes his thesis and reveals the magnitude of the problem. We know about Big Oil and Big Pharma, but did you know that office retail supply is dominated by two companies (Staples and Essendant)? Did you know that the eyewear industry is dominated by one company, the Italian Luxocitta? Dayen points to research that shows that 75% of all industries have experienced increases in concentration. All of this is in the introduction mind you. The consequences are immense:
Monopoly steals wages
Dayen supports this with academic research. A paper from Harvard’s Nathan Wilmers finds that approximately 10 percent of wage stagnation since the 1970s can be attributed to buyers (that is you) having diminished market power.
Monopoly weakens economies
A book from a few years ago called The Captured Economy (2017) by a libertarian (Brink Lindsey) and a liberal political scientist (Steven M. Teles) is the best book on this side of the problem that I’ve read. Start-up activity is down; rent-seeking is increasing; and entrenched interest groups hire lobbyists to all but guarantee that the status-quo is rigged. This is a political problem, not merely economic. The economist Mancur Olson wrote about this decades ago, in his book The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
Monopoly degrades quality, heightens disaster, and supercharges inequality
Monopoly hollows out communities and screws up politics
Examples abound throughout the book. Concentrated industries and contracts that are impossible to get out of caused hospital bag IV shortages long before Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean. (Yes, a few companies have cornered the salt-saline IV bag market, too.) When workers have fewer choices to go to, dynamism declines, and communities become victims of “market” forces. As Lindsey and Teles write, “upward redistribution is not an accident” (2017, 153). You think people are in the streets now? If they only knew.
~~~
Dayen is well-known to the left blogosphere, he started in 2004, and he has written for every single freakin’ publication you can think of. Now he is the executive editor at The American Prospect. His last book Chain of Title (2017) covered the foreclosure fraud perpetrated by big banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns. Dayen is indefatigable, pumping out more words daily, and certainly monthly, then most writers that I read.
The reason why this is a “people’s history” is because he saves the technical and legal analyses to books that came before him (he points to Stoller and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Business). In chapter after chapter Dayen brings to the reader how flesh and blood people (remember those things?) are impacted by mergers, monopolies, and monopsonies every day, in every way imaginable. Stoller (2019, 441) shows how “we have concentrated markets in everything from airlines to coffins to candy to hospitals.” Dayen, in this book, makes you feel how intolerable, unfair, and morally and ethically grotesque our political-economy is.
Dayen (2020, 295) convincingly shows that monopoly power increases inequality; decreases wages and weakens workers’ capacity to fight for a better life; turns politics into two parties groveling at the feet of big business; and convincingly argues that this is the “ur-problem,” or the “problem of power, and solving it will allow us to solve everything else.” This reality is why I support politicians who want to reform capitalism and who want to reform the Democratic process. The first bill the House passed in 2019 was truly good. Here is copy from the Brennan Center: “the House of Representatives voted 234-193 in favor of a sweeping democracy reform bill on Friday. The measure, known as H.R. 1 or the For the People Act of 2019, was introduced by House Democrats in January and marks the first time in decades Congress has made comprehensive democracy reform a central priority.” Of course, the grim reaper Mitch McConnell found the bill dead on arrival; Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the bill in the Senate, but the body never voted on it.
The industries that Dayen covers are myriad: the airline industry, which is shot through with dozens of monopolies or near-monopolies. Boeing is the only U.S. airplane manufacturer; car rental companies inside airports are dominated by Hertz (which runs Thrifty and Dollar) and Enterprise (which also owns National, Alamo, and Zimride). Big animal agriculture is dominated by Chinese and Brazilian companies. The author shows that the only thing worse than the “military-industrial complex” might be well…that the “industry” part of the equation has more leverage over the Pentagon than one would imagine—small and large monopolies within the private-sector side of this relationship engage in price-gouging and contribute to outsourcing and putting factories inside China that build parts that the U.S. might need….in a war….against China. Things are bad, folks. (Read that in the Obama “we tortured some folks” cadence, pitch, and tone.)
But there is more. Dayen discusses Big Tech (the Amazon chapter is so egregious that I paused from writing this to read it out loud with my girlfriend), the prison industry, retail, hotel chains, publishers, the medical industry (from individual product monopolies including IV-saline-bags to health insurance to hospital networks and outpatient facilities, most bought up by private-equity firms), banks, how private-equity itself is concentrated, website domains, the defense industry, and the list truly goes on and on. It’s truly remarkable.
Some of the specific numbers in the book are worth mentioning:
By the end of the 1980s, 51 airlines had merged. And by publication date for this book, 80 percent of all flights are controlled by 4 airliners: Delta, United, American, and Southwest.
According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of U.S. counties have 2 or fewer health insurance companies to choose from. There have been nearly 1,700 hospital mergers since 1998.
Ticketmaster and LiveNation are the same company and have over 80 percent share in the concert/entertainment industry ticket market.
GateHouse Media merged with Gannett: the 2 largest newspaper chains are now 1. In total, private equity firms own about 1,500 newspapers.
Like Frank Portnoy wrote in his review of Dayen’s previous book, “prepare to be surprised, and angry.” This book is surprising—even to the reader who pays attention to this stuff will assuredly be surprised; this book will make you thoroughly and righteously angry. I haven’t felt this viscerally angry and upset while reading a book in a long time.
I compiled a list of deadly serious problems that arise from market concentration and market power. These include price-fixing (market power plus collusion), information asymmetries, “rent-seeking” corporations preventing entry. Jonah Goldberg is fond of saying that “complexity is a subsidy,” and I totally agree. Status-quo behemoths make it so hard to enter their markets that it becomes cost-prohibitive (another failure of monopoly). More: underinvestment, “sticky-prices,” plausible deniability (well…those aren’t my suppliers, we outsource so the slavery isn’t our problem. We will work on it. Thank you.) Market concentration is such a problem that the Federal Reserve System recently held a symposium on it.
Where do we go from here? A preview of part two.
Monopoly is a problem that shouldn't be partisan. Russel Kirk, an influential conservative of the mid-20th century, stressed about the dangers of “private collectivism” ([2019] 1957, 60% epub). Republican President Taft was a trustbuster; and socialists and liberals care deeply about the inequality, privacy concerns, and rupture of community that monopolies produce. Socialists call for “nationalization” while liberals call for regulation, oversight, labor rights, worker equity inside businesses (socialists like this stuff as well; some conservatives, too, including Oren Cass.)
Part two of this review will wrestle with solutions proposed, by Dayen and some of his fellow neo-Brandeisian anti-trusters such as Tim Wu and Matt Stoller, whose works I am now reading. I will not promise when part two will be published, as I have other newsletters I am working on and a lot of other work I am engaged with outside the newsletter as well. But it will come; it deserves its own space.
Here is link to my newsletter where I published this:
https://catalogofcuriosities.substack...
I’m extremely interested in megatrends, sometimes a fuzzily defined term with disparate definitions, but I think of them as macro-level structural forces that shape and construct reality and future pathways. Megatrends are drivers. Some well-known megatrends are things like demographics, climate change, world orders whether apolar, unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, decentralization or centralization, COVID-19, etc. Megatrends are patterns; megatrends, when real and not merely hypothesized, shape our world; they tilt and weight what is possible and probable.
This brings me to this week’s curiosity: a book review of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020), by David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect.
Book Review - Monopolized
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020) should be thought of as a “People’s History of Monopoly” companion to Matt Stoller’s historical work Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019). Both books focus on the monopoly (one or a few sellers, many buyers) and monopsony (one buyer, more sellers) problems in America. Stoller looks at the history of the battle between monopoly and democracy; Dayen chapter after chapter chillingly describes industry after industry that has been swallowed whole by private equity, global behemoth corporations, and, in doing so, truly created a market power problem that is anathema to the smooth flow of markets.
Daniel Dayen defines monopoly less stringent than one might want, writing that he is referring to large companies with significant market shares in increasingly concentrated industries. It is likely that after reading this book, Dayen’s definition will not be at the front of your mind. The megatrend he highlights is happening and it’s wrecking our lives. I repeat: all of our lives are worse off because of the political-economy (and thus: society) that we are living in. Our democracy is at stake. Our health is at stake. Our futures are wound up in this in a way that most people don’t realize. This book is a must-read.
~~~
The introduction is worth the price alone (well…I received an advanced NetGalley copy of the book; but you know what I mean. I do plan on buying a copy. This is my favorite read of the year so far, well worth the shelf space) because in a handful of pages Dayen describes his thesis and reveals the magnitude of the problem. We know about Big Oil and Big Pharma, but did you know that office retail supply is dominated by two companies (Staples and Essendant)? Did you know that the eyewear industry is dominated by one company, the Italian Luxocitta? Dayen points to research that shows that 75% of all industries have experienced increases in concentration. All of this is in the introduction mind you. The consequences are immense:
Monopoly steals wages
Dayen supports this with academic research. A paper from Harvard’s Nathan Wilmers finds that approximately 10 percent of wage stagnation since the 1970s can be attributed to buyers (that is you) having diminished market power.
Monopoly weakens economies
A book from a few years ago called The Captured Economy (2017) by a libertarian (Brink Lindsey) and a liberal political scientist (Steven M. Teles) is the best book on this side of the problem that I’ve read. Start-up activity is down; rent-seeking is increasing; and entrenched interest groups hire lobbyists to all but guarantee that the status-quo is rigged. This is a political problem, not merely economic. The economist Mancur Olson wrote about this decades ago, in his book The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
Monopoly degrades quality, heightens disaster, and supercharges inequality
Monopoly hollows out communities and screws up politics
Examples abound throughout the book. Concentrated industries and contracts that are impossible to get out of caused hospital bag IV shortages long before Hurricane Maria devastated the Caribbean. (Yes, a few companies have cornered the salt-saline IV bag market, too.) When workers have fewer choices to go to, dynamism declines, and communities become victims of “market” forces. As Lindsey and Teles write, “upward redistribution is not an accident” (2017, 153). You think people are in the streets now? If they only knew.
~~~
Dayen is well-known to the left blogosphere, he started in 2004, and he has written for every single freakin’ publication you can think of. Now he is the executive editor at The American Prospect. His last book Chain of Title (2017) covered the foreclosure fraud perpetrated by big banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns. Dayen is indefatigable, pumping out more words daily, and certainly monthly, then most writers that I read.
The reason why this is a “people’s history” is because he saves the technical and legal analyses to books that came before him (he points to Stoller and Tim Wu’s The Curse of Business). In chapter after chapter Dayen brings to the reader how flesh and blood people (remember those things?) are impacted by mergers, monopolies, and monopsonies every day, in every way imaginable. Stoller (2019, 441) shows how “we have concentrated markets in everything from airlines to coffins to candy to hospitals.” Dayen, in this book, makes you feel how intolerable, unfair, and morally and ethically grotesque our political-economy is.
Dayen (2020, 295) convincingly shows that monopoly power increases inequality; decreases wages and weakens workers’ capacity to fight for a better life; turns politics into two parties groveling at the feet of big business; and convincingly argues that this is the “ur-problem,” or the “problem of power, and solving it will allow us to solve everything else.” This reality is why I support politicians who want to reform capitalism and who want to reform the Democratic process. The first bill the House passed in 2019 was truly good. Here is copy from the Brennan Center: “the House of Representatives voted 234-193 in favor of a sweeping democracy reform bill on Friday. The measure, known as H.R. 1 or the For the People Act of 2019, was introduced by House Democrats in January and marks the first time in decades Congress has made comprehensive democracy reform a central priority.” Of course, the grim reaper Mitch McConnell found the bill dead on arrival; Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the bill in the Senate, but the body never voted on it.
The industries that Dayen covers are myriad: the airline industry, which is shot through with dozens of monopolies or near-monopolies. Boeing is the only U.S. airplane manufacturer; car rental companies inside airports are dominated by Hertz (which runs Thrifty and Dollar) and Enterprise (which also owns National, Alamo, and Zimride). Big animal agriculture is dominated by Chinese and Brazilian companies. The author shows that the only thing worse than the “military-industrial complex” might be well…that the “industry” part of the equation has more leverage over the Pentagon than one would imagine—small and large monopolies within the private-sector side of this relationship engage in price-gouging and contribute to outsourcing and putting factories inside China that build parts that the U.S. might need….in a war….against China. Things are bad, folks. (Read that in the Obama “we tortured some folks” cadence, pitch, and tone.)
But there is more. Dayen discusses Big Tech (the Amazon chapter is so egregious that I paused from writing this to read it out loud with my girlfriend), the prison industry, retail, hotel chains, publishers, the medical industry (from individual product monopolies including IV-saline-bags to health insurance to hospital networks and outpatient facilities, most bought up by private-equity firms), banks, how private-equity itself is concentrated, website domains, the defense industry, and the list truly goes on and on. It’s truly remarkable.
Some of the specific numbers in the book are worth mentioning:
By the end of the 1980s, 51 airlines had merged. And by publication date for this book, 80 percent of all flights are controlled by 4 airliners: Delta, United, American, and Southwest.
According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 percent of U.S. counties have 2 or fewer health insurance companies to choose from. There have been nearly 1,700 hospital mergers since 1998.
Ticketmaster and LiveNation are the same company and have over 80 percent share in the concert/entertainment industry ticket market.
GateHouse Media merged with Gannett: the 2 largest newspaper chains are now 1. In total, private equity firms own about 1,500 newspapers.
Like Frank Portnoy wrote in his review of Dayen’s previous book, “prepare to be surprised, and angry.” This book is surprising—even to the reader who pays attention to this stuff will assuredly be surprised; this book will make you thoroughly and righteously angry. I haven’t felt this viscerally angry and upset while reading a book in a long time.
I compiled a list of deadly serious problems that arise from market concentration and market power. These include price-fixing (market power plus collusion), information asymmetries, “rent-seeking” corporations preventing entry. Jonah Goldberg is fond of saying that “complexity is a subsidy,” and I totally agree. Status-quo behemoths make it so hard to enter their markets that it becomes cost-prohibitive (another failure of monopoly). More: underinvestment, “sticky-prices,” plausible deniability (well…those aren’t my suppliers, we outsource so the slavery isn’t our problem. We will work on it. Thank you.) Market concentration is such a problem that the Federal Reserve System recently held a symposium on it.
Where do we go from here? A preview of part two.
Monopoly is a problem that shouldn't be partisan. Russel Kirk, an influential conservative of the mid-20th century, stressed about the dangers of “private collectivism” ([2019] 1957, 60% epub). Republican President Taft was a trustbuster; and socialists and liberals care deeply about the inequality, privacy concerns, and rupture of community that monopolies produce. Socialists call for “nationalization” while liberals call for regulation, oversight, labor rights, worker equity inside businesses (socialists like this stuff as well; some conservatives, too, including Oren Cass.)
Part two of this review will wrestle with solutions proposed, by Dayen and some of his fellow neo-Brandeisian anti-trusters such as Tim Wu and Matt Stoller, whose works I am now reading. I will not promise when part two will be published, as I have other newsletters I am working on and a lot of other work I am engaged with outside the newsletter as well. But it will come; it deserves its own space.
Here is link to my newsletter where I published this:
https://catalogofcuriosities.substack...
August 14, 2020
written by a journalist in a very accessible style (which is something that can leads to disaster.. thinking of the malcolm gladwell genre) but actually very very good! also it is very depressing tbh
July 3, 2023
Some compelling points to made about oligopolies with pricing power being bad for people, but this book is often incomplete - seems to blame capitalism and free markets for this problem. Corporatism is a result of many things, but naive interventionism is rarely referenced or blamed for the current conditions we live in. There's a sleight of hand here, conflating modern day corporatism/cronyism with laissez faire economics and capitalism.* This is one of the most common and significant errors in modern politics/economics discourse and it's why we will get more naive intervionism indefinitely.
With that said, many of the things pointed out as bad in this book are bad (the caveat, not all things the author points to are actually bad). So he is mostly correct in identifying and documenting a problem.
*The infamous George Soros has written thought provoking criticisms of heterodox economic/financial thinking - specifically his emphasis on reflexivity. I'd summarize reflexivity as a self-reinforcing cycle that moves the value of something away from an assumed equilibrium. This is a loose definition, he writes about 30-40 pages in each of his short books about reflexivity. Monopolized would be interesting through the lens of asking "what reflexive cycles and processes caused these powerful oligopolies to form?" and then it would be more clear when this the nature of profit motives existing or the long term, overlooked consequences of interventionism. That would be insightful and useful.
With that said, many of the things pointed out as bad in this book are bad (the caveat, not all things the author points to are actually bad). So he is mostly correct in identifying and documenting a problem.
*The infamous George Soros has written thought provoking criticisms of heterodox economic/financial thinking - specifically his emphasis on reflexivity. I'd summarize reflexivity as a self-reinforcing cycle that moves the value of something away from an assumed equilibrium. This is a loose definition, he writes about 30-40 pages in each of his short books about reflexivity. Monopolized would be interesting through the lens of asking "what reflexive cycles and processes caused these powerful oligopolies to form?" and then it would be more clear when this the nature of profit motives existing or the long term, overlooked consequences of interventionism. That would be insightful and useful.
August 28, 2020
2020 offers a range of books about this problem of our monopolized economy and I've enjoyed the ones I've read for different reasons. David Dayen offers just an overwhelming look at how much monopoly is a problem and the real world impact from so much concentration in the economy. How it makes us less free and at greater risk of harm.
The book is light at times, wryly offering commentary and deadly serious at other times. The stories he has collected helped to introduce the different chapters and resonate in ways that are important if we are going to fix this (again).
It is among the few books that really digs into the various reasons behind these mergers and why they often don't even end well for the merged companies. But certain groups of Wall Street bankers sure make out well regardless of what happens to anyone else. Understanding this dynamic is essential to really understanding just how dangerous and counterproductive these massive corporations have become.
The book is light at times, wryly offering commentary and deadly serious at other times. The stories he has collected helped to introduce the different chapters and resonate in ways that are important if we are going to fix this (again).
It is among the few books that really digs into the various reasons behind these mergers and why they often don't even end well for the merged companies. But certain groups of Wall Street bankers sure make out well regardless of what happens to anyone else. Understanding this dynamic is essential to really understanding just how dangerous and counterproductive these massive corporations have become.
September 13, 2020
If you think about a monopoly you might think about one party controlling one facet of business. But what if two or three parties control that particular facet? Is there really a market? Why would you compete if there's little competition? Why lower prices or provide better service when the scarce competition ain't much better?
This book is full with examples of how many aspects in, predominantly American, life are controlled by just a few corporations leaving consumers with the illusion of choice but a reality of de facto monopolies. It's quite infuriating.
Buy local.
This book is full with examples of how many aspects in, predominantly American, life are controlled by just a few corporations leaving consumers with the illusion of choice but a reality of de facto monopolies. It's quite infuriating.
Buy local.
September 23, 2022
A really infuriating read. The trump supporter who was pissed at her high rent is still somehow able to make excuses for private equity but will blame immigrants. Not sure how you convince some ppl that they have nothing in common with these CEOs who runs these corporations
February 3, 2021
The late Robert Bork is probably best known for being a failed Supreme Court nominee —a rejection so famous that the term "borked" is now synonymous for blocked nominations. But Bork's most lasting legacy is monopolies. In his 1978 book The Anti-Trust Paradox, Bork argued that monopolies did not damage the public interest so long as prices for consumers did not rise. This understanding, which became policy under President Reagan, has fatally weakened anti-trust action in the United States. The consequences for the American economy and society have been enormous.
David Dayen, in this masterly book, presents a series of case studies that articulate our monopoly crisis in great detail. Ever wondered why dollar stores proliferated while old-fashioned downtowns died? Monopolies. Why car rental companies all offer the same, crappy service? Monopolies. Why prisoners are forced into slave labor and pay extortionate prices for food, internet, and telephone service? Again, monopolies. Dayen has a gift for distilling complex subjects into sharp prose, with a focus on the many individual lives ruined by America's turn away from anti-trust. Monopolized is alternatively infuriating, heartbreaking, and, at times, darkly funny. It is an essential work in understanding how things got to be how they are in America.
In the last few years, public opposition to tech companies like Google and Facebook have renewed attention to our anti-trust problem. And there's reason for hope that the new Biden administration takes this problem seriously. But ridding the country of the scourge of Borkism will require far more than just action against the largest tech companies. A whole new way of thinking about society is warranted.
David Dayen, in this masterly book, presents a series of case studies that articulate our monopoly crisis in great detail. Ever wondered why dollar stores proliferated while old-fashioned downtowns died? Monopolies. Why car rental companies all offer the same, crappy service? Monopolies. Why prisoners are forced into slave labor and pay extortionate prices for food, internet, and telephone service? Again, monopolies. Dayen has a gift for distilling complex subjects into sharp prose, with a focus on the many individual lives ruined by America's turn away from anti-trust. Monopolized is alternatively infuriating, heartbreaking, and, at times, darkly funny. It is an essential work in understanding how things got to be how they are in America.
In the last few years, public opposition to tech companies like Google and Facebook have renewed attention to our anti-trust problem. And there's reason for hope that the new Biden administration takes this problem seriously. But ridding the country of the scourge of Borkism will require far more than just action against the largest tech companies. A whole new way of thinking about society is warranted.
January 8, 2025
Dayen's book provides a good inventory of monopolies, monopsonies, and conglomerates, however, beyond cataloging these entities, the book falls short of delivering truly groundbreaking insights.
In my view, the author missed a significant opportunity by allocating too much time to personal stories and to vilifying corporations without sufficiently exploring the political and economic mechanisms that enable and incentivize the creation of such powerful entities, such as:
- Lobbying
- Licensing and regulatory barriers
- Exclusive rights and patents
- Subsidies and tax incentives
- Tariffs and import restrictions
- Nationalization of key industries
- Price controls
- Trade policies
As a result, by the time Dayen addresses these critical factors, the discussion feels relegated to a mere footnote. It's comparable to visiting a doctor who meticulously details all your symptoms but offers only superficial treatments like MRIs and aspirin...
While the personal narratives add depth and relatability, it reeks of populism. Understanding the underlying structures that allow monopolies and conglomerates to thrive is essential for comprehensively addressing the challenges they pose to the economy and society, but you won't find much of that here. However, if you want to learn about the single mom with a recidivist boyfriend in prison who can't get good signal for video calls...
Overall, "Monopolized" serves as a decent overview of powerful market players but falls short of providing the in-depth analysis needed to fully grasp and tackle the complexities of modern economic power dynamics.
In my view, the author missed a significant opportunity by allocating too much time to personal stories and to vilifying corporations without sufficiently exploring the political and economic mechanisms that enable and incentivize the creation of such powerful entities, such as:
- Lobbying
- Licensing and regulatory barriers
- Exclusive rights and patents
- Subsidies and tax incentives
- Tariffs and import restrictions
- Nationalization of key industries
- Price controls
- Trade policies
As a result, by the time Dayen addresses these critical factors, the discussion feels relegated to a mere footnote. It's comparable to visiting a doctor who meticulously details all your symptoms but offers only superficial treatments like MRIs and aspirin...
While the personal narratives add depth and relatability, it reeks of populism. Understanding the underlying structures that allow monopolies and conglomerates to thrive is essential for comprehensively addressing the challenges they pose to the economy and society, but you won't find much of that here. However, if you want to learn about the single mom with a recidivist boyfriend in prison who can't get good signal for video calls...
Overall, "Monopolized" serves as a decent overview of powerful market players but falls short of providing the in-depth analysis needed to fully grasp and tackle the complexities of modern economic power dynamics.
April 28, 2021
Guy Rolnik, an academic and journalist said, "If you control the banks, or the insurance companies, and you also control the media, you have a lock on democracy". Another book completed on money, finance, economy, monopolies. Bernie Sanders has been right all along. Economic inequality is the destroyer of the middle class and the root of economic inequality is the monopolies, enabled and encouraged by both private and government sectors.
Monopolies now exist across if not all then most of the markets in this country. Airlines, agriculture, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, home rentals, prisons, news media, beer production, fire arms and defense, banks and private equity firms. The destruction these monopolies bring, the control of the markets, the loss of choice, the rising costs, are all predictable as it is what monopolies are about. It's infection into government and the corruption it has brought is part and parcel to the destruction of the way of life I grew up in, and the lack of prosperity I see subsequent generations going through.
I personally hold the Republicans, the right wing far more responsible for this then the Democrats. That being said the Democrats have much responsibility in the creations of this oligarchy to answer for. Clinton and Obama.
Even though laws have been changed and gutted helping the creation of the monopolies there are still many laws on the books that could have stopped it. Administrations (Reagan) and others chose not to enforce the laws and rules.
Great book. Informative and on target.
Monopolies now exist across if not all then most of the markets in this country. Airlines, agriculture, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, home rentals, prisons, news media, beer production, fire arms and defense, banks and private equity firms. The destruction these monopolies bring, the control of the markets, the loss of choice, the rising costs, are all predictable as it is what monopolies are about. It's infection into government and the corruption it has brought is part and parcel to the destruction of the way of life I grew up in, and the lack of prosperity I see subsequent generations going through.
I personally hold the Republicans, the right wing far more responsible for this then the Democrats. That being said the Democrats have much responsibility in the creations of this oligarchy to answer for. Clinton and Obama.
Even though laws have been changed and gutted helping the creation of the monopolies there are still many laws on the books that could have stopped it. Administrations (Reagan) and others chose not to enforce the laws and rules.
Great book. Informative and on target.
January 1, 2021
If anyone still has any fantasies left of the magic of the free market in the US, please read David Dayen's book. Absolutely incredible, how a country that supposedly is the example of free market capitalism is in a deadly stranglehold of monopolies and oligopolies. Oligopolies that are often effectively regional monopolies, where the dominant players divide a country into regions, each with a single monopolist.
A quote I liked is from Peter Thiel: "Competition is for losers", Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. This quote very succinctly and accurately describes the current situation in the US.
I read this book shortly after Break 'em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money and I enjoyed both books very much. There is some overlap, but also a lot of new information.
I did keep me wondering about the situation in Europe, which luckily, so far, is still very different from the situation in the US, but I am wondering for how long? I recently switched from T-mobile as our cell phone network provider to Simpel (https://www.simpel.nl/), which came out as the number one provider in terms of value for money, only to find out after a month that Simpel had been bought by T-mobile!
A quote I liked is from Peter Thiel: "Competition is for losers", Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. This quote very succinctly and accurately describes the current situation in the US.
I read this book shortly after Break 'em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money and I enjoyed both books very much. There is some overlap, but also a lot of new information.
I did keep me wondering about the situation in Europe, which luckily, so far, is still very different from the situation in the US, but I am wondering for how long? I recently switched from T-mobile as our cell phone network provider to Simpel (https://www.simpel.nl/), which came out as the number one provider in terms of value for money, only to find out after a month that Simpel had been bought by T-mobile!
January 12, 2021
In "Monopolized", David Dayen shows readers how corporate power impacts so many facets of modern life. Airlines, IVs, department stores, banks, drug companies--corporate concentration is all around us and Dayen potently points out the downsides of such an arrangement. A neo-Brandesian like Matt Stoller, Dayen clearly supports a more expansive evaluation of corporate power than the consumer welfare Chicago School approach engages in.
While Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy does the best job exploring the history of antitrust enforcement in America and The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age provides a broad overview of the current situation, Dayen goes the extra mile to show how antitrust policy has ramifications for everyday life. I don't have a particularly long review to write on this book, but it was stellar. Food for thought whether you agree with the current direction of antitrust policy or not!
While Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy does the best job exploring the history of antitrust enforcement in America and The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age provides a broad overview of the current situation, Dayen goes the extra mile to show how antitrust policy has ramifications for everyday life. I don't have a particularly long review to write on this book, but it was stellar. Food for thought whether you agree with the current direction of antitrust policy or not!
April 6, 2021
Monopoly started becoming a hot issue during the 2020 cycle, and it's no surprise why. As David Dayen shows in Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, monopolistic or oligipolistic market control affects every aspect of American life today, to severely detrimental effect. It's bad for consumers, bad for workers, bad for small businesses, bad for farmers, bad for patients, bad for democracy itself, and the list goes on. In each chapter, Dayen manages to weave individual stories into an analysis of the larger trend of monopolization in a sector, giving a human touch to the deep research.
The book shows what an illusion "choice" is in American capitalism. Sometimes, this lack of choice is obvious (if there's one provider in town), but in many sectors, many of the competing "brands" you see are all owned by the same parent company. "Choose" what you want, but the money goes to the same place.
The book is consistently enraging, but one thing that is hopeful is the simple fact that we already know how to solve the problem -- and indeed, the laws to do so are often already on the books. We just need politicians with the backbone to enforce them.
The book shows what an illusion "choice" is in American capitalism. Sometimes, this lack of choice is obvious (if there's one provider in town), but in many sectors, many of the competing "brands" you see are all owned by the same parent company. "Choose" what you want, but the money goes to the same place.
The book is consistently enraging, but one thing that is hopeful is the simple fact that we already know how to solve the problem -- and indeed, the laws to do so are often already on the books. We just need politicians with the backbone to enforce them.
August 1, 2020
A very good tour, industry by industry, of how the economy has become monopolized and what it means. Through people's stories and a detailed understanding of how each industry functions, Dayen paints a compelling picture of how monopolies hurt people, weaken innovation, concentrate income and wealth and corrupt politics. A great addition to the growing New Brandeis movement literature especially in how it communicates the implications of monopolization for everyday life, from the punishing experience of modern plane travel to the crushing of family farmers to the exploitation of imprisoned people and their families through monopolized video and phone access. The failures of the Robert Bork-led intellectual turning point and consensus--which said monopolies are fine as long as prices don't go up--are made clear, as is the need to restore the aggressive anti-monopoly legal and regulatory actions of yesteryear.
January 21, 2021
1. Accessible. Analyzing each sector of economic concentration with an anecdote showing a real life impact. It demonstrated very well, and sometimes poignantly, how economic concentration / monopoly affects us even when we don't realize it.
2. The book did an excellent job of showing how pervasive the economic concentration is. I was aware of the power of tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, etc., as well as the limited choices for cell phones and cable, but the concentration is everywhere, affecting food supply, clothing, medical supplies, pretty much every facet of the modern economy and modern life.
3. The book does a great job showing the problem, that said there's not a lot hope to take from the book, particularly with the many conservative justices appointed to the federal bench recently.
2. The book did an excellent job of showing how pervasive the economic concentration is. I was aware of the power of tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, etc., as well as the limited choices for cell phones and cable, but the concentration is everywhere, affecting food supply, clothing, medical supplies, pretty much every facet of the modern economy and modern life.
3. The book does a great job showing the problem, that said there's not a lot hope to take from the book, particularly with the many conservative justices appointed to the federal bench recently.
July 16, 2020
Eye-opening, entertaining, terrifying, energizing - "Monopolized" is all of those things. Dayen takes us on a detailed tour of concentration in almost every aspect of our economy, showing how monopolies contribute to much of our inequality, political corruption, and social dysfunction.
He writes about complicated subjects with a light touch, expressing his outrage without going over the top and without getting bogged down in jargon or minutiae. The chapters on venture capitalism and banking could easily have become labyrinthine, but Dayen lays them out as clearly as I've ever seen.
The subject matter is of vital importance to our country's future - I am not being hyperbolic - and I would recommend this book to any American worker or consumer.
He writes about complicated subjects with a light touch, expressing his outrage without going over the top and without getting bogged down in jargon or minutiae. The chapters on venture capitalism and banking could easily have become labyrinthine, but Dayen lays them out as clearly as I've ever seen.
The subject matter is of vital importance to our country's future - I am not being hyperbolic - and I would recommend this book to any American worker or consumer.
April 21, 2021
so basically the economy is full of CHEATERS
This was an engaging introduction to the issues with market concentration; each chapter focuses on a different monopolized industry. I do think this book claims to be a bit more of a narrative nonfiction work than it actually is, but it does its stated job of connecting large historical economic trends to everyday American life. Two biggest takeaways for me were 1) many accepted contemporary business practices would have been prosecuted during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents and 2) this is all theoretically regulated, so who is actually staffing the DOJ and FTC is hugely consequential for this stuff.
This was an engaging introduction to the issues with market concentration; each chapter focuses on a different monopolized industry. I do think this book claims to be a bit more of a narrative nonfiction work than it actually is, but it does its stated job of connecting large historical economic trends to everyday American life. Two biggest takeaways for me were 1) many accepted contemporary business practices would have been prosecuted during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents and 2) this is all theoretically regulated, so who is actually staffing the DOJ and FTC is hugely consequential for this stuff.
May 26, 2025
Great journalistic overview of the ways in which monopolies are destroying nearly every aspect of our society. Starts to feel repetitive by the end, but I can't even be upset about that, because it's just that there's so much market concentration and the patterns are so self-similar between one industry and the next. David Dayen does an amazing job interviewing people on the front lines, collating information, keeping track of company names, subsidiaries and owners, and the ways in which concentration has crept in over the decades. A book everyone should read, even if you have to skim some of the denser bits because the company names start to run together.
August 10, 2020
Fantastic read, I highly recommend adding to your collection! This book does a great job in humanizing the unfavorable effects of capitalism as it has evolved over the past few decades. There is so much poorly placed faith in the benefits of capitalism (which can be still be realized in a sustainable re-invention) that so many have overlooked the exponential growth of societal ills it has produced. Hopefully this book plays a part in expanding the conversation and subsequent action to pave a new path where our economy and society succeed together instead of competing with one another.
July 27, 2020
So many of us think that because we live in a free Country that we have complete freedom to make choices about every aspect of our lives. However, there are a select group of corporations that control our money and products that we buy. Monopolies are considered to be taboo and illegal, but somehow these big corporations manage to have a big chunk of power. This book is really eye-opening and truly shows the impact these corporations have on our daily lives.
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