If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- What's the secret to understanding why a few corporate giants dominate entire markets?
- Have you ever wondered how economic concentration affects your daily life and the economy as a whole?
- Are you curious about the hidden dangers of unchecked corporate power and how to mitigate them?
Listen to The Curse of Bigness — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from The Curse of Bigness
- Learn how economic concentration has reemerged as a massive problem today, with over 75 percent of US industries becoming dominated by a few corporate titans since the year 2000.
- Discover the historical roots of corporate consolidation during the Gilded Age, when tycoons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller merged thousands of companies to create industry-controlling trusts.
- Understand the counterintuitive arguments of the pro-monopoly 'trust movement,' which claimed that competition caused economic chaos while monopolies provided market stability and efficiency.
- Explore how early monopolists used social Darwinism to justify their dominance, arguing that a monopoly is simply the natural reward for being the 'fittest' competitor in a market.
- Trace the cyclical history of corporate monopolies from their nineteenth-century rise to their modern resurgence, and uncover the troubling consequences of unchecked corporate power.
The Curse of Bigness — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Economic concentration emerged in the Gilded Age and culminated in the rise of monopolies.
Chapter 3: Monopoly advocates saw them as a more advanced structure for organizing economies.
Chapter 4: Monopoly supporters promoted social Darwinism and strict laissez-faire economics.
Chapter 5: Monopolies may be inefficient, and they weaken workers, consumers, and competition.
Chapter 6: Large firms in noncompetitive markets can strongly influence governments.
Chapter 7: In the early 1900s, the US government began actively resisting growing economic concentration.
Chapter 8: In the mid-twentieth century, the US government kept pushing back hard against monopolies.
Chapter 9: The US government’s trust-busting campaigns culminated in the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s.
Chapter 10: By the late twentieth century, trust-busting stalled.
Chapter 11: By century’s end, economic concentration had surged back in full force across the United States economy again.
Chapter 12: Simple measures can help the US government resume its fight against growing economic concentration effectively.
The Curse of Bigness Summary & Overview
The Curse of Bigness (2018) deals with topics and questions that have become especially pressing in recent times. How and why have markets become dominated by a handful of corporate giants? And what can we do about it? To answer these questions, the author recounts the political, economic and legal history of economic concentration. Along the way, he examines the dangers that come with it, and how they can be mitigated.
Who Should Listen to The Curse of Bigness?
- Citizens worried about unchecked corporate power
- People interested in the intersection between politics, economics and law
- Late-nineteenth and twentieth-century US history buffs
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