Tag Archives: oligopoly

A complement of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. The principal point is that competition is the driver of capitalism as companies strive in the marketplace to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in anticipating and meeting demand. When competition decreases, the engine fails to function as an evolutionary force. This is hardly a new idea. See "What Is Monopoly Capital?" by  John Bellamy Foster and "Monopoly Capitalism" by Paul M. Sweezy. But the authors of The Myth of...

We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.” Bloomberg OpinionCompetition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It Jonathan Tepper See also a short review of The Myth of Capitalism A lot of times, when you read reviews about books on the economy, you end up wondering what the reviewer’s ‘priors’ are as people like to say in economics. You read the review and wonder where the biases of the reviewer...

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is...