Cornered

by Barry Lynn (2010)

2/10

You know you’re in for an interesting perspective when a capitalist writes a book about the dangers of monopoly. The person can lay out the lurid history of consolidation of industry in tedious detail, and document with exhaustive specifics just how this consolidation destroys choice, and jobs, and lives, and democracy. But at the end of the day the guy is still a capitalist, so he’s therefore bound to miss key lessons.

Even before the ideological pretzeling Lynn must undergo in order to describe the problem, there are significant problems with this book. Unless you’re an economic neophyte who doesn’t really know anything about monopoly, this book will feel tiresome and over-explanatory. Most of the people who open up a book subtitled “The Economics of Destruction” are already well aware of the dangers. Either tell us something we don’t know, give us solutions, or you’re wasting our time.

As a simple history of monopoly the book is mildly useful. But certain Lynn stances – such as his brief, unconvincing tangent about neoliberalism and democratic socialism being Actually The Same Thing! – made me skeptical of later analyses. And his “solution” – there’s literally only one, and it occupies the very last page of the book – is embarrassingly, outrageously, unforgivably weak. Who could ever have imagined that all we need to do to fix monopolies is. . . break up monopolies?

Of course, his weak sauce solution and other inane statements such as, “. . . there is nothing inherently wrong with private corporate government and concentrated capital” are fundamentally due to his misguided allegiance to capitalism. It leads him to ignore such obvious questions as:

-Considering that we’ve already broken up monopolies, and they re-formed, what would stop them from doing it again even if we were able to break them up as you unrealistically prescribe? Is this just a dance we should expect to repeat every century or so? Just ignore the accompanying misery?

-Might there be something inherent in capitalism that leads to unfettered, illegal concentration?

-How many chances should we give capitalism before we try something else? One more Great Recession/Depression? Two? A hundred? Infinity?

All in all I’d skip this book unless you’re REALLY interested in monopoly. I’ve just started Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans and from the mere prologue I can tell it’s going to be significantly better, mainly because he at least acknowledges the importance of strong, timely state intervention.