Big Business Is Too Big

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The big airlines. The hospital systems that dominate many metro areas. Gigantic retailers like Walmart and Amazon. And, increasingly, technology companies like Facebook and Google.

The United States has an oligopoly problem — a concentration of corporate power that has been building for years but is only now starting to receive serious attention from policymakers, think tanks and journalists. (Mea culpa: I’m one of the journalists who was too slow to focus on the problem.)

“In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago,” Barry Lynn and Phillip Longman wrote in Washington Monthly, back in 2010. This consolidation has helped hold down wages, raise prices and reduce job growth — while lifting corporate profits.

My colleagues on the news side of The Times had a good exposé yesterday on another example of oligopoly: the music business. Live Nation appears to be using its power to hurt both consumers and other industry players. And it’s able to do so partly because the Obama administration allowed the company to merge with TicketMaster in 2010.

Washington’s lenient approach to corporate power in recent decades — from both parties — has aggravated inequality, and it’s time for that approach to change. Fortunately, there are some early, if still tentative, signs that this may be changing. The Democrats have put antitrust policy at the center of their economic agenda. And the Trump administration actually has a more nuanced stance on antitrust than it does in many other areas, even if that stance is sometimes for the wrong reasons.

If you want to learn more about the issue, you can start with some of the pieces that Washington Monthly — a pioneer on this subject — has published. The Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Roosevelt Institute have also done good work.

Podcast recommendation. Robert Mueller’s investigation has reportedly widened to include efforts to influence American policy on behalf of the Saudi and Emirati governments. If you’re trying to make sense of it all, I recommend Terry Gross’s recent “Fresh Air” interview with The Times’s David Kirkpatrick, who helped break several of the stories.

Vehicle deaths. American society is far too willing to accept avoidable driving deaths, as I’ve written before. In the new issue of The New Yorker, the writer John Seabrook has a haunting personal essay about his own near-death experience, which he blames partly on overconfidence.

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