Attention Economy


Saturday, January 12, 2019

Rise of Monopolies/Oligopolies and Growing Market Concentration

Economists Get Serious About the Harm from Monopolies

The Economist Special Report - The Next Capitalist Revolution
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/11/15/the-next-capitalist-revolution

Columbia University’s Tim Wu notes:
Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’
“From a political perspective, we have recklessly chosen to tolerate global monopolies and oligopolies in finance, media, airlines, telecommunications and elsewhere, to say nothing of the growing size and power of the major technology platforms. In doing so, we have cast aside the safeguards that were supposed to protect democracy against a dangerous marriage of private and public power.”

Are markets Too Concentrated? - FRB Richmond
https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2018/q1/pdf/cover_story.pdf

The Costs of Monopoly: A New View

A thought-provoking piece from Derek Thompson: America’s Monopoly Problem: How big business jammed the wheels of innovation
“In the past few decades, however, the economy has come to resemble something more like a stagnant pool. Entrepreneurship, as measured by the rate of new-business formation, has declined in each decade since the 1970s, and adults under 35 (a k a Millennials) are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation on record.
This decline in dynamism has coincided with the rise of extraordinarily large and profitable firms that look discomfortingly like the monopolies and oligopolies of the 19th century. American strip malls and yellow pages used to brim with new small businesses. But today, in a lot where several mom-and-pop shops might once have opened, Walmart spawns another superstore. In almost every sector of the economy—including manufacturing, construction, retail, and the entire service sector—the big companies are getting bigger.”