Review by Choice Review
Those who believe that market competition is the dominant benchmark for allocating productive resources and aligning with people's definition of economic welfare have been keeping a suspicious eye on the structure of industries for several years. Key sectors of the economy--from banking to mining to air transport--have drifted toward oligopoly market structures that give an edge to rent-seeking (redistribution via market power) against income and wealth creation--reslicing the pie instead of baking a bigger pie. Technology has turbocharged this pattern, with tech firms themselves evolving into networks with great monopoly power operating platforms that others can use in their own search for "manufactured" competitive advantage. In the process, old metrics of economic structure have been supplanted by new tech-driven metrics that nobody is yet sure how to define. This has made procompetitive public policy far more difficult. The US is among the laggards in defending the broad public interest; the Europeans are evidently much more awake to the key threats. This readable volume--along with others such as Thomas Philippon's The Great Reversal (CH, Apr'20, 57-2644)--represents a new wave of thinking about these issues, a wave that may eventually lead to a revival of procompetitive public policies, just as noteworthy waves of competition enforcement have done in the past. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers. --Ingo Walter, emeritus, New York University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
