Khan told me that she started to see the world differently. Her work helped provide the basis for a piece that Lynn published in Harper’s, in February, 2012, called “ Killing the Competition.” Today, he wrote, “a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books.” The publishers saw Amazon’s power as potentially leading to a decline in the free exchange of ideas and as a crisis for democracy. When publishers tried to band together to fight Amazon, the Justice Department sued them, fearing that their action would increase the retail price of e-books. Amazon eventually controlled more than seventy per cent of the e-book market, a dominance that gave it the ability to force publishers to accept its terms, undermining the business model they had long used to subsidize the creation of a wide variety of books. Publishers had come under pressure, first from chain stores like Barnes & Noble, and then from Amazon, which sold electronic books by pricing them at a loss, in order to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle e-book readers. “There was a sense that this industry was in crisis,” she recalled. In Lynn’s view, the issues were connected. As huge companies became even bigger, much of the American middle class struggled with stagnant wages. It also became much more difficult for entrepreneurs to break into the marketplace, because competing with these giants was almost impossible. After consolidation, it became easier for furniture sellers and detergent manufacturers to raise prices, compromise the quality of their products, or treat employees poorly, because consumers and workers had few other places to go. Consumers had the impression of vast choices among brands, but this was often misleading: many of the biggest furniture stores were owned by one company a large percentage of the dozens of laundry detergents in most supermarkets were made by two corporations. In case after case, Lynn found, the number of companies in each market had been reduced to a few big entities that had bought up their competitors, giving them a disproportionate amount of power. Open Markets studied industries ranging from banking to agriculture. There will be things that you discover here that will outrage you.” Khan took the job. “She was just a fantastically smart person who was very curious.”ĭuring the interview, Lynn recalled, he asked Khan, “Do you ever get angry? Does anything make you outraged?” She replied, “No, not really.” Lynn said, “I think you’ll become angry while you’re doing this work. “When she walked in that door, she had no idea what this entailed or what she would become,” Lynn told me. She checked out Lynn’s book, “Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction,” from the library and skimmed it the night before her interview. Khan had studied the 2008 financial crisis and was interested in the effects of power disparities in the economy. Lynn was seeking a researcher without any formal economics training, who would come to the subject with fresh eyes. The study of antitrust law was far from fashionable since the nineteen-eighties, the field had been dominated by a world view that favored corporate conglomeration, which was acceptable, mainstream experts believed, as long as consumer prices didn’t rise. Unlike the practice at other think tanks, which publish research reports and white papers, Lynn, a former reporter and editor, disseminated the program’s findings directly to the public, through newspaper and magazine articles. The program had been founded the previous year by Barry Lynn, who believed that monopolies posed a threat to democracy, and that policymakers and much of the public were blind to this threat. Open Markets, which was part of the New America think tank, was dedicated to the study of monopolies and the ways in which concentration in the American economy was suppressing innovation, depressing wages, and fuelling inequality. In the spring of 2011, a recent Williams College graduate named Lina Khan interviewed for a job at the Open Markets Program, in Washington, D.C.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |