Framing the Neo-Brandeis argument as a matter of #BossBabe leftism strikes me as an unnecessarily gendered potshot. There's plenty to criticize about girl boss feminism, but it's ancillary at best to the Lynn/Khan antitrust framework.
And Lina Khan campaigned for Zohran (and praised him in the very NYT op-ed that the author selectively quotes from!), so it's just incorrect to claim that they are on different sides of an intraparty battle.
Im glad I wasn’t the only person confused by the this headline. Khan was actually recently on Pablo Torres podcast with Zohran.
I also don’t see the connection between Feminism and the economic rhetoric review that was wound into this essay. Is the whole connection supposed to be about Lina?
The entire antitrust movement as exemplified by Lina Khan is fundamentally wrong. It has nothing to say about lower prices but thinks big is per se bad just because. As we’ve seen and are still seeing people care a lot about prices. Making prices lower should be the goal. Big or small doesn’t inherently matter. I do find it telling that people like Khan have no real world experience and are just ivy league educated scholars. Everything they think of is purely theoretical and devoid of anything concrete.
I also can’t help but notice that many of the new antitrust people hate Obama. Maybe 5% of Democrats feel that way but they all managed to get hired by Biden. Of all the things the next Democratic president should do differently not hiring anyone from that crowd should be high up there. Policymakers should be laser focused on the cost of living and anyone not interested in that should be ignored.
I don’t really disagree with the first three paragraphs. Antitrust has its place. If a merger will make prices higher it should probably be stopped, but that’s not the Khan approach. There’s not really a case to be made that Amazon and Google are ripping us off.
I think viewing everything as being caused by monopolies is not just factually wrong but leads people to do shoddy work. See Derek Thompson’s takedown of that kind of argument in the case of Dallas’ housing market if you haven’t already.
On Obama, nobody’s perfect or above criticism but that’s not what people like Matt Stoller are saying.They think he was the worst president ever. Many from that crowd are also just plain nuts. Just look at anything Stoller puts out or look at the X account of Khan’s chief of staff.
I think you are oversimplifying. There are cases where things being too big is bad and raise prices, and there are cases where things being to small is bad and raise prices. Anti-trust is a tool to be applied where it is needed, there are cases where its not needed, and cases where it is. Saying that it is pointless is saying that a specific type of screw driver head is pointless.
Some things are natural monopolies, these tend to be industries that require extremely large capital investment in physical assets that utilize limited land/resources. Railroads for example, always trend towards a single owner because railroad competition tends to be destruction competition that lowers the quality and reliability of service rather than raising it. Same with providing drinkable water, electricity, etc. That's why the solution to those is not breaking them up, it's bringing them under public ownership.
Other things are not natural monopolies, and more competition isn't destructive in the same way, thus applying anti-trust makes sense and provides benefits.
wrt "hating" obama, I don't think its fair to say that he doesn't deserve critique, even in some places harsh critique, because he's a human and no president ever has a perfect 4-8 years in office. A lot of people in the obama admin had strong critiques of bill clintons presidency (who was also very popular!), it's just one of the generational aspects of politics.
The FTC going after Microsoft for buying Activision and Amazon for looking into buying Roomba left me considering that these aren’t really grounded people.
Was Microsoft going to corner the video games market? Was Amazon going to run over the other makers of autonomous vacuums? Why was this different from Amazon slapping a Basics tag on a Chinese OEM product and calling it their own? Have they cornered the market on AA batteries? Smart home speakers?
“Microsoft makes game consoles and platforms. So they could force Activison to make only games for its platforms. “
Was the FTC going to break up Nintendo and Sony as well - exclusives are standard operating procedure - I’m not sure why organically having an in house studio that provides exclusives, like Nintendo, is somehow better for the consumer than being able to buy a studio?
These selective enforcement when there are other companies sitting around doing the same thing is very odd. I suppose the FTC was going to go after Sears as well because there was a danger of cornering the appliance market with Kenmore? They’re a store, after all, with their own brand of washer dryers! And Wal Mart might corner the cornflakes market with their store brand cereals, they’re the biggest retailer in the world, after all.
The argument is that a practice that’s fine for two major competitors is somehow a problem for the third competitor. It seems more like hamstringing or selective enforcement because you’ve got an axe to grind, rather than anti-trust principles.
In response to this, you'll find many posts bemoaning how poorly Microsoft is doing in its console fight with Sony. So legislating against Microsoft is handicapping the company currently in last place in a market, not something you generally want to do if you're looking to preserve the competitive health of the market.
May have been temporarily bad for consumers but good for competition. Spirit not merging with Jet Blue was supposedly good for consumers until Spirit went bankrupt exited being a low cost carrier.
Is 3 competitors in the console games market better for consumers than 2?
I do find it funny that both abundance and antitrust are fundamentally about evading the difficult question of redistribution (where you need to take stuff from rich people and give it to poors!). That would require raising taxes on rich and upper middle class. It’s easier to instead just to do *growth* or *critique concentration of power* than raising rich people’s taxes lol
I mean what else is there to be said that hasn't before. Society needs to raise taxes on basically everyone and yet it is difficult to do so because it is very politically costly!
Sure but this same matter of fact thing can be said about nimby diagnosis: people don’t like change in their neighborhoods, really what else is there to say? Well, you can make same old moral arguments to convince people it’s good to have a greater good in mind and be a YIMBY, similarly we can make same old moral arguments people should pay taxes for greater good! It’s about agenda space. there’s nothing novel about any of these arguments
I think you’ll find Europe taxes people we’d consider solidly middle class quite heavily.
The issue is that looking at the way US cities govern themselves, cities with big money revenue streams, doesn’t give much confidence in the Democrats ability to do redistribution well.
What effective state capacity needs to be demonstrated to provide free school lunches for example or do simple cash transfers? Common at least part of it is just political will.
It’s more why are the billions and billions of dollars of education spending not already able to fund free school lunch? Why does it cost multiple times the price in Europe to build trains in blue states? Stuff like that.
I’m conceding there is an element to what you are saying (mostly related to production) but the much greater roadblock is literally not wanting to redistribute. That is why Red states don’t expand Medicaid. And there are gaps in the welfare state that can literally be solved through simple cash transfer redistribution to young parents etc. I’m not saying it’s popular among Americans but YIMBY (shaming white moderate suburban types who don’t want their neighborhood to change) is also not popular! But abundists like to make the argument to affect discourse in their direction! Intellectuals can similarly convince Dems that we should do more simple welfare state expansion through redistribution. It doesn’t seem as exciting as antitrust or abundance though
It is interesting how this dream of...perhaps of certain kinds people(?)...being the boss pops up in different places.
I know it best from debates about charter schools in which some policy elites—especially in the first 15 years of this century, when charter schools really took hold—identified with school principals. They demonized central offices and spoke of the importance of principals being able to make their own decisions and of principals knowing the kids and their parents. As though a principal's relationship with a student has anything more to than the smallest fraction of importance, influence and power as the the student's relationship with their teachers(s).
But these policy elites never imagined themselves as the workers who did the core work of these small organizations—no, only as the bosses. And radically inflated the importance of those bosses. (I write this is as someone who believes deeply in the value of leadership and the importance of school principals. But no actual school principals would ever tell you that they are more important to students than the teachers are.) And they never think of the impact of size on teachers. Of course, they certainly never think about the additional burdens on small organization owners vs. branch managers.
As I've seen it, policy proponents of this smallness stuff are (wannabe?) theorists and strategists who can't imagine wanting to give up those roles to others. They are people who might be motivated by working with *people* as their real goal. They are not the kinds of people who might go into the "helping" professions. And they are not people who simply love the core work. Not teaching or the actual practice of law. Not the pleasure of physically building a house in front of your own eyes or creating a piece of pottery. Not the satisfaction of solving that electrical or plumbing problem and seeing it just work the way it is supposed to.
It is a view that lacks empathy of people with different goals and sources of satisfaction. So many people want to *leave* *work* *at* *work*. But the proponents of smallness cannot accept that there are people with different motivations than themselves, different contributor to what would make A Good Life. The insist that their higher form of humanity is people like them, and the world should be recreated to serve the goals of people like them.
I cannot communicate how hard it is convince these people that their view does not serve everyone, and likely only serves a small faction of people
Sorry not to be crass but this has to be a deliberate misreading of core tenants of Neo Brandeisian antitrust policies. First, whatever Lynn's book is talking about the point of modern antitrust law is that consolidation creates increased prices and direct harm to competititon. Warby Parker is great but Ticketmaster ballooning their ticket prices and colluding with scalpers makes tickets unaffordable for middle class americans. Rollups of medical practices arguably put pressures on doctors to increase the price of their services. Big tech monopolies undermine our democracy and give us lackluster products vulnerable to hacking.
The notion that Lina Khan only cares about small businesses because she cited one line of her paper which was about the hollowing out of small businesses by Amazon and statutorily ILLEGAL CONSOLIDATIONS is also dubious. Nobody is saying Amazon has not contributed massively to society, but there is no need for them to control large parts of the national economy and there being broken up would ensure they cannot do highly problematic practices like, to name a few: making it extremely hard to opt out of prime, price fixing for favorable products and their own branded products, and having horrible workplace safety regulations.
In dozens of cases these pro consumer, socially good antitrust policies were favored by the Biden administration: stamping out credit card fees, making it easier to cancel online subscriptions, banning noncompetes so millions of low wage workers were not functionally indentured servants in middle america, challenging mega grocery store mergers that would invariably increase prices.
Again, if the author understood the point of antitrust law this would all make sense.
'''If the United States were to redistribute its GDP across a vast number of new small firms, that would mechanically increase the number of small business owners.'''
That is a mighty big assumption. It would not increase small businesses owners as much as you think since it would shrink GDP due to less effeciency and less R&D. Small firms typically don't make billion dollar bets on the future.
Was Bruenig responsible for the headline? Otherwise someone is doing him dirty given how he has had vague accusations of sexism thrown at him for being mean to Neera Tanden lol
Explain how the Government did not allow the JetBlue Spirit merger as now one is gone and how the supermarkets were not allowed to merge although competition with Amazon and Walmart changing everything was also denied?
I think skipping ahead to dismantling the large monopolies without overcoming the national debt first is how we ensure the Republican platform of collapsing the federal government succeeds.
The Democrat position is currently that debt doesn’t mean anything because we can just print off the money and now gold is replacing USD as a global reserve. We’re really floundering here, paying too much attention to GDP while China implements a robust modern infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.
I’m not familiar with Cornered, but the way you describe them here makes it appears that they would have common cause with members at a DSA meeting, by encouraging a breakdown of barriers between workers and their labor with the proliferation of small businesses.
Also, I’m sure you may be talking about extreme cases, but it isn’t clear to me that it would necessarily be the case that the abundance folks and the anti-trust folks would be in conflict. Some anti-trust cases could perhaps promote innovation for example, one of their core tenants.
Strictly speaking smaller businesses are not less likely to exploit the labor of those they employ. They are also harder to regulate, as inspecting 10,000 little workshops is always going to require more paperwork and more people than inspecting 10 large factories.
Framing the Neo-Brandeis argument as a matter of #BossBabe leftism strikes me as an unnecessarily gendered potshot. There's plenty to criticize about girl boss feminism, but it's ancillary at best to the Lynn/Khan antitrust framework.
And Lina Khan campaigned for Zohran (and praised him in the very NYT op-ed that the author selectively quotes from!), so it's just incorrect to claim that they are on different sides of an intraparty battle.
Im glad I wasn’t the only person confused by the this headline. Khan was actually recently on Pablo Torres podcast with Zohran.
I also don’t see the connection between Feminism and the economic rhetoric review that was wound into this essay. Is the whole connection supposed to be about Lina?
The entire antitrust movement as exemplified by Lina Khan is fundamentally wrong. It has nothing to say about lower prices but thinks big is per se bad just because. As we’ve seen and are still seeing people care a lot about prices. Making prices lower should be the goal. Big or small doesn’t inherently matter. I do find it telling that people like Khan have no real world experience and are just ivy league educated scholars. Everything they think of is purely theoretical and devoid of anything concrete.
I also can’t help but notice that many of the new antitrust people hate Obama. Maybe 5% of Democrats feel that way but they all managed to get hired by Biden. Of all the things the next Democratic president should do differently not hiring anyone from that crowd should be high up there. Policymakers should be laser focused on the cost of living and anyone not interested in that should be ignored.
I don’t really disagree with the first three paragraphs. Antitrust has its place. If a merger will make prices higher it should probably be stopped, but that’s not the Khan approach. There’s not really a case to be made that Amazon and Google are ripping us off.
I think viewing everything as being caused by monopolies is not just factually wrong but leads people to do shoddy work. See Derek Thompson’s takedown of that kind of argument in the case of Dallas’ housing market if you haven’t already.
On Obama, nobody’s perfect or above criticism but that’s not what people like Matt Stoller are saying.They think he was the worst president ever. Many from that crowd are also just plain nuts. Just look at anything Stoller puts out or look at the X account of Khan’s chief of staff.
I think you are oversimplifying. There are cases where things being too big is bad and raise prices, and there are cases where things being to small is bad and raise prices. Anti-trust is a tool to be applied where it is needed, there are cases where its not needed, and cases where it is. Saying that it is pointless is saying that a specific type of screw driver head is pointless.
Some things are natural monopolies, these tend to be industries that require extremely large capital investment in physical assets that utilize limited land/resources. Railroads for example, always trend towards a single owner because railroad competition tends to be destruction competition that lowers the quality and reliability of service rather than raising it. Same with providing drinkable water, electricity, etc. That's why the solution to those is not breaking them up, it's bringing them under public ownership.
Other things are not natural monopolies, and more competition isn't destructive in the same way, thus applying anti-trust makes sense and provides benefits.
wrt "hating" obama, I don't think its fair to say that he doesn't deserve critique, even in some places harsh critique, because he's a human and no president ever has a perfect 4-8 years in office. A lot of people in the obama admin had strong critiques of bill clintons presidency (who was also very popular!), it's just one of the generational aspects of politics.
The FTC going after Microsoft for buying Activision and Amazon for looking into buying Roomba left me considering that these aren’t really grounded people.
Was Microsoft going to corner the video games market? Was Amazon going to run over the other makers of autonomous vacuums? Why was this different from Amazon slapping a Basics tag on a Chinese OEM product and calling it their own? Have they cornered the market on AA batteries? Smart home speakers?
“Microsoft makes game consoles and platforms. So they could force Activison to make only games for its platforms. “
Was the FTC going to break up Nintendo and Sony as well - exclusives are standard operating procedure - I’m not sure why organically having an in house studio that provides exclusives, like Nintendo, is somehow better for the consumer than being able to buy a studio?
These selective enforcement when there are other companies sitting around doing the same thing is very odd. I suppose the FTC was going to go after Sears as well because there was a danger of cornering the appliance market with Kenmore? They’re a store, after all, with their own brand of washer dryers! And Wal Mart might corner the cornflakes market with their store brand cereals, they’re the biggest retailer in the world, after all.
The argument is that a practice that’s fine for two major competitors is somehow a problem for the third competitor. It seems more like hamstringing or selective enforcement because you’ve got an axe to grind, rather than anti-trust principles.
"https://gizmodo.com/not-only-is-the-new-playstation-5-more-expensive-its-also-worse-2000668063"
In response to this, you'll find many posts bemoaning how poorly Microsoft is doing in its console fight with Sony. So legislating against Microsoft is handicapping the company currently in last place in a market, not something you generally want to do if you're looking to preserve the competitive health of the market.
May have been temporarily bad for consumers but good for competition. Spirit not merging with Jet Blue was supposedly good for consumers until Spirit went bankrupt exited being a low cost carrier.
Is 3 competitors in the console games market better for consumers than 2?
I do find it funny that both abundance and antitrust are fundamentally about evading the difficult question of redistribution (where you need to take stuff from rich people and give it to poors!). That would require raising taxes on rich and upper middle class. It’s easier to instead just to do *growth* or *critique concentration of power* than raising rich people’s taxes lol
I mean what else is there to be said that hasn't before. Society needs to raise taxes on basically everyone and yet it is difficult to do so because it is very politically costly!
Sure but this same matter of fact thing can be said about nimby diagnosis: people don’t like change in their neighborhoods, really what else is there to say? Well, you can make same old moral arguments to convince people it’s good to have a greater good in mind and be a YIMBY, similarly we can make same old moral arguments people should pay taxes for greater good! It’s about agenda space. there’s nothing novel about any of these arguments
You need to establish confidence that the taxes would be used well, and Democrats have been losing that fight since the 1960s.
I think you’ll find Europe taxes people we’d consider solidly middle class quite heavily.
The issue is that looking at the way US cities govern themselves, cities with big money revenue streams, doesn’t give much confidence in the Democrats ability to do redistribution well.
What effective state capacity needs to be demonstrated to provide free school lunches for example or do simple cash transfers? Common at least part of it is just political will.
It’s more why are the billions and billions of dollars of education spending not already able to fund free school lunch? Why does it cost multiple times the price in Europe to build trains in blue states? Stuff like that.
I’m conceding there is an element to what you are saying (mostly related to production) but the much greater roadblock is literally not wanting to redistribute. That is why Red states don’t expand Medicaid. And there are gaps in the welfare state that can literally be solved through simple cash transfer redistribution to young parents etc. I’m not saying it’s popular among Americans but YIMBY (shaming white moderate suburban types who don’t want their neighborhood to change) is also not popular! But abundists like to make the argument to affect discourse in their direction! Intellectuals can similarly convince Dems that we should do more simple welfare state expansion through redistribution. It doesn’t seem as exciting as antitrust or abundance though
It is interesting how this dream of...perhaps of certain kinds people(?)...being the boss pops up in different places.
I know it best from debates about charter schools in which some policy elites—especially in the first 15 years of this century, when charter schools really took hold—identified with school principals. They demonized central offices and spoke of the importance of principals being able to make their own decisions and of principals knowing the kids and their parents. As though a principal's relationship with a student has anything more to than the smallest fraction of importance, influence and power as the the student's relationship with their teachers(s).
But these policy elites never imagined themselves as the workers who did the core work of these small organizations—no, only as the bosses. And radically inflated the importance of those bosses. (I write this is as someone who believes deeply in the value of leadership and the importance of school principals. But no actual school principals would ever tell you that they are more important to students than the teachers are.) And they never think of the impact of size on teachers. Of course, they certainly never think about the additional burdens on small organization owners vs. branch managers.
As I've seen it, policy proponents of this smallness stuff are (wannabe?) theorists and strategists who can't imagine wanting to give up those roles to others. They are people who might be motivated by working with *people* as their real goal. They are not the kinds of people who might go into the "helping" professions. And they are not people who simply love the core work. Not teaching or the actual practice of law. Not the pleasure of physically building a house in front of your own eyes or creating a piece of pottery. Not the satisfaction of solving that electrical or plumbing problem and seeing it just work the way it is supposed to.
It is a view that lacks empathy of people with different goals and sources of satisfaction. So many people want to *leave* *work* *at* *work*. But the proponents of smallness cannot accept that there are people with different motivations than themselves, different contributor to what would make A Good Life. The insist that their higher form of humanity is people like them, and the world should be recreated to serve the goals of people like them.
I cannot communicate how hard it is convince these people that their view does not serve everyone, and likely only serves a small faction of people
Sorry not to be crass but this has to be a deliberate misreading of core tenants of Neo Brandeisian antitrust policies. First, whatever Lynn's book is talking about the point of modern antitrust law is that consolidation creates increased prices and direct harm to competititon. Warby Parker is great but Ticketmaster ballooning their ticket prices and colluding with scalpers makes tickets unaffordable for middle class americans. Rollups of medical practices arguably put pressures on doctors to increase the price of their services. Big tech monopolies undermine our democracy and give us lackluster products vulnerable to hacking.
The notion that Lina Khan only cares about small businesses because she cited one line of her paper which was about the hollowing out of small businesses by Amazon and statutorily ILLEGAL CONSOLIDATIONS is also dubious. Nobody is saying Amazon has not contributed massively to society, but there is no need for them to control large parts of the national economy and there being broken up would ensure they cannot do highly problematic practices like, to name a few: making it extremely hard to opt out of prime, price fixing for favorable products and their own branded products, and having horrible workplace safety regulations.
In dozens of cases these pro consumer, socially good antitrust policies were favored by the Biden administration: stamping out credit card fees, making it easier to cancel online subscriptions, banning noncompetes so millions of low wage workers were not functionally indentured servants in middle america, challenging mega grocery store mergers that would invariably increase prices.
Again, if the author understood the point of antitrust law this would all make sense.
'''If the United States were to redistribute its GDP across a vast number of new small firms, that would mechanically increase the number of small business owners.'''
That is a mighty big assumption. It would not increase small businesses owners as much as you think since it would shrink GDP due to less effeciency and less R&D. Small firms typically don't make billion dollar bets on the future.
Was Bruenig responsible for the headline? Otherwise someone is doing him dirty given how he has had vague accusations of sexism thrown at him for being mean to Neera Tanden lol
Explain how the Government did not allow the JetBlue Spirit merger as now one is gone and how the supermarkets were not allowed to merge although competition with Amazon and Walmart changing everything was also denied?
I think skipping ahead to dismantling the large monopolies without overcoming the national debt first is how we ensure the Republican platform of collapsing the federal government succeeds.
The Democrat position is currently that debt doesn’t mean anything because we can just print off the money and now gold is replacing USD as a global reserve. We’re really floundering here, paying too much attention to GDP while China implements a robust modern infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.
I’m not familiar with Cornered, but the way you describe them here makes it appears that they would have common cause with members at a DSA meeting, by encouraging a breakdown of barriers between workers and their labor with the proliferation of small businesses.
Also, I’m sure you may be talking about extreme cases, but it isn’t clear to me that it would necessarily be the case that the abundance folks and the anti-trust folks would be in conflict. Some anti-trust cases could perhaps promote innovation for example, one of their core tenants.
Strictly speaking smaller businesses are not less likely to exploit the labor of those they employ. They are also harder to regulate, as inspecting 10,000 little workshops is always going to require more paperwork and more people than inspecting 10 large factories.