I’m watching a fascinating episode of Book TV on C-Span that features Barry C. Lynn of the New America Foundation discussing his new book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction
Have any of you read this? I highly recommend watching this, which was part of the Annapolis Book Festival:
Worth your time.
Additionally, if, like me, you are stuck to the desk working and would like something interesting to listen to, this TNC/David Remnick conversation at the NYPL is pretty worthwhile.
Dave Herman
Hey, that’s my high school!
cleek
how can people work while listening to conversation ?
i listen to music all day long, at work. but conversation completely destroys my concentration.
batgirl
Got to be better than what I’m listening to: Dana Milbank crying about how President Obama kicked the press out of the nuclear summit meetings and went to his daughter’s soccer game with the WH press.
rootless-e
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a52BBUru4.hM
Goldman is going down.
Every lawyer in NYC must be drafting lawsuits.
Riggsveda
I have read it–actually bought it so I could mark it up with notes. If it were required reading in every history class in every high school in America, it would bring down the whole damn country. In a good way.
Linda Featheringill
@cleek: I agree. I transcribe medical reports and anything with words [other than work] really throws me off.
Music is nice, though. Pandora has been a life saver for me.
Violet
I can only listen to music without words, symphonies, jazz, that kind of thing, while I work. Anything with words wrecks my concentration. Even stuff like opera where I don’t know what they’re saying disrupts my thought process. I still struggle to concentrate while music without words is playing. I start humming along or tapping my toe or something, and there goes my concentration. But words make it impossible.
Bnut
Perfect thing to play in the background as I clean the kitchen. C-SPAN and NPR. What would my weekend be without thee?
slag
@cleek: Depends on the work you’re doing at the time. Certain types of data entry work can be vastly improved by simultaneously processing more intellectually challenging kinds of information.
slag
So far I find myself wishing that this guy’s audience were much larger.
I haven’t read his book yet, but I will. It would be cool if Powell’s offered a way to buy books through blogs in the same way Amazon does. There are very few things I can force myself to purchase through Amazon. This book is not one of them.
Beej
OT, but I just finished The Bridge. Well worth the time and money. This is the most complete and nuanced examination of Obama I have seen. Excellent piece of writing.
racrecir
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?
Less well established is what role concentration plays in suppressing new business formation and the expansion of existing businesses, along with the jobs and innovation that go with such growth. Evidence is growing, however, that the radical, wide-ranging consolidation of recent years has reduced job creation at both big and small firms simultaneously. At one extreme, ever more dominant Goliaths increasingly lack any real incentive to create new jobs; after all, many can increase their earnings merely by using their power to charge customers more or pay suppliers less. At the other extreme, the people who run our small enterprises enjoy fewer opportunities than in the past to grow their businesses. The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit.
DavidG
I started the book yesterday. I can’t remember any other recent book that focuses on monopoly exclusively as a cause of our troubles–outside of the financial sector, of course. His first book on the fragility of the global manufacturing supply chain, was good but not as radical in its thesis.
It’s very fact-packed so far, and is a good history of 80s-90s antitrust dismantling. It also is going after the Clintons very hard, for Glass-Steagal, trade law, etc.
monkeyboy
I bet right now that a good case can be made right now that Walmart and Home Depot are too big to fail.
Dave Herman
Just finished the whole thing. Thanks for sharing that, John, it was excellent.
Off to foment a revolution now.
Dave
hilzoy
I’ve read the book. It’s good, and good to have a book that focusses on this. That said, There were a number of points where I really wanted him to support his arguments more — to drill down and explain exactly how various claims he made were supposed to work — and he didn’t.
Fair Economist
I’m reading it now and it’s jaw-dropping. I expected that stocks should drop because there was no way major companies could continue to get such massive profits in a recession/depression. But now I realize I was wrong, because most industries/markets in America are oligopolies or monopolies. They can squeeze us without mercy, and are.
I also didn’t realize how American entrepreneurial culture is a myth of the past, largely because of these conglomerations. We have dropped from near the top of the major industrial countries in business formation to near the bottom. The teapartiers don’t seem to realize the society they idealize is already dying, and the murderer is the large corps funding their rallies and their candidates.