Re: measuring stuff it turns out "how do you measure market power" can be the subject of a whole class which at Yale is numbered ECON 3385. Right now we are on week 3 and we are still working out how to estimate demand in multi-product markets.
Re: the broader point of the post, I agree that "corporate power" can be a vague term, but I think you could've engaged more with some of the evidence that market power has been increasing. For example here is a CEA brief from 2016 that we had to read for the first meeting of antitrust policy class: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160414_cea_competition_issue_brief.pdf. It finds that firm entry rates are down, more and larger mergers are happening, etc etc. The brief itself notes that this is not slam-dunk evidence that concentration is for sure increasing across the economy, but it is suggestive that something may be happening.
I was going to make a whole comment about how I guess I don’t need to teach my Industrial Organization class this semester if this is something we can’t measure and shouldn’t talk about so I’m glad you did instead. Market power is real and measurable, regulation is real, the growth of trusts in the Gilded Age was real and had real consequences. And the rent seeking behavior of corporations increases with market power. This isn’t very complicated stuff.
something when it comes to the most prominent spokespeople for the “corporate power” crowd…I should state up front, a crowd I’m clearly more sympathetic to than Matt (I brought up in another comment, a very good example is FanDuel, DraftKings and casinos using their lobbying power to make gambling way to accessible to average Americans).
But I think a good example of a prominent “corporate power” spokesperson is Zephyr Teachout. She was on a podcast with Ezra Klein having a debate about why housing costs are higher in California than Texas. The only answer she kept giving over and over again was “Corporate Power”. Ezra tried, really tried, to get her to unpack what she meant by this and…she basically wouldn’t do it. Honestly it came across as pathological to me almost as though she couldn’t conceive of a reason why housing costs in California are higher than Texas due to something other than “Corporate Power” (which is kind of nuts when considering the political of CA vs TX). It honestly made me tilt my head back in frustration especially because Ezra clearly has some sympathy for this explanation of various policy failures. He just could not get through to her to a) explain her reasoning more and b) at least try to conceive of the idea there may be another reason why a policy failure is happening other then “corporate power”
I think maybe two things could be said. One, the left “Corporate Power” crowd maybe just need better communicators. Two, if you want to craft good left of center public policy, assuming “Corporate Power” is some skeleton key to unlocking all policy problems is going to likely lead to some bad policy if that’s your driving belief.
Okay, but a corollary to the general observation that 90 percent of everything is crap is that 90 percent of all politics is psychobabble. There is a reason I don't actually spend very much time in my private life listening to the campaign speeches of Democratic politicians, even Democratic politicians I broadly agree with on the issues or think are really smart idea people, and it's that the vast majority of their public-facing output is psychobabble. It has always been so and likely always will be so; there is no imagined past golden age of voters weighing up complex public policy before deciding how to cast their votes. The Anti-Psychobabble Party would, if formed, be roughly as successful and long-lived as the Anti-Masonic Party.
Matt touches on many deep subjects in this piece. Colin’s focus here is helpful. As Matt notes, (“the term works fine as a shibboleth. If a writer writes about taking on corporate power, that signals something about what they believe”) shibboleths — labels for group membership — serve a function. As Colin (and Ezra) observe, Teachout and (and Warren and Jayapal and millions they represent) insist that the label has analytical power and trenchancy. Matt does a service by showing that it does not.
Wealth as we have enjoyed it since the invention of railroads, industrial fertilizer, automobiles, antibiotics, birth control, and on and on, is realized by creating organizations of enormous complexity, scale, and cross-polity span. Since Marx, the left has decried the resulting alienation of labor. Since the Luddites, the petit bourgeois / local bullies have decried the resulting disempowerment of local elites. When we train today’s elites in the reading of laws and Zora Neale Thurston novels without also training them to build organizations that build the machinery of human prosperity, we leave untouched the natural human tendency to frame the world in terms of protagonists and antagonists. The world of human flourishing — today’s world — is a world of systems and statistics and management. Most people hate those structures. It is a great failing of Matt’s audience the liberal professional-managerial elite that we continue to recreate ourselves around this pathological, willful ignorance.
Do you find that the usual anti-corporate power suspects use this data frequently when making their case? I certainly haven't noticed it, but their behaviour online is so poor that I have to admit I don't go looking for their more substantive stuff.
The issue is not that IO doesn’t have good answers about measuring corporate power, it’s that the people in charge of regulators ignore the field when given the answers.
Yes and no. My IO class will look at models of competition and measures of competition and the various policies we’ve tried to increase competition and prosecute collusion. That’s definitely a different topic. But one thing I emphasize in my classes is that the paradox of capitalism is that competition is the magic power that gives us all the good things that come from capitalism (innovation, lower prices, greater efficiency) but firms absolutely hate competition and will do whatever they can to reduce it. When that takes the form of product or process innovation, that’s great. But when it takes the form of anti-competitive practices and rent seeking, then that’s when public policy needs to step in. The industries that people complain about tend to be those with less competition and higher profits. When those profits are used in a non-productive way to increase market power (lobbying, mergers, etc.), that’s the corporate power about which people complain.
It’s always going to be a balance because we don’t want the “ruinous competition” that drives companies out of business. Firms need to make profits. But we also don’t want firms with lots of market power to be able to protect that market power through non-productive activities. We need to always have firms nipping at their heals to try to capture some of those profits for themselves.
I use the Tremblay & Tremblay textbook in my class which isn’t too technical but not for a lay audience. There was a special issue in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in Summer 2019 that looks at markups and antitrust.
Yeah, there actually is a whole body of academic work in the space. Matt is right that his enemies are annoying and wrong about a lot of things. But he hasn’t actually taken the arguments of those working through these problems at all. It’s early for me, but it’s increasingly a blind spot for Matt to write posts about the people he doesn’t like and paint with too broad of a brush. It’s getting rote and a bit lazy.
He does it on issues where he's clearly just flying on vibes himself, so he picks the weakest opponents and flays their arguments, then hangs out the Bush-style Mission Accomplished sign and goes home.
I do think Stoller is an idiot, Teachout is worse, and Kahn is only marginally better, but pretending like the US isn't shot through with regionalized monopolies and oligopolies that either stem from rent-seeking and regulatory capture or enable downstream rent-seeking and regulatory capture, is just irritatingly myopic.
I would give extra likes to this post if I could. As someone who’s done battle with these folks in professional forums, I could not agree more about how bad they are. But he’s he’s very happy to write about them rather than engage with a host of serious corporate issues that matter. It’s cheap and getting old.
More centrists and moderates need to learn that being on social media can dull their intellectual tools. It's not just a risk for leftists and the far right.
I think Matt partly likes stirring the pot and partly is using the strategy of putting out the wrong answer to get the right answer. I agree that there is a real topic to address there, but it’s interesting how approximately no one in the discourse is trying to apply real insights from research.
This is probably something I will pitch Jerusalem on sometime around end of May or early June after I've completed the two antitrust-related classes referenced in my original comment. (Now's as good a time as any to mention that starting February 2 I will be a fellow at The Argument.)
“Market power” has a specific meaning that can be measured (although it’s hard to do and the 2016 CEA brief is a *terrible* example of how to do it, even Jason Furman says so). “Market concentration” also has a specific meaning that can be measured, though the value of this measure is hotly debated (it’s a loose proxy for market power and can be useful when looking at a specific market but is totally meaningless when applied to the entire economy, where concentration in the thousands/millions of separate markets is increasing and decreasing all the time). “Corporate power,” like Matt says, has no meaning. It’s *always* a rhetorical sleight of hand. Lina Khan, Elizabeth Warren, and OMI/Revolving Door Project (funded by corporations like Oracle, Yelp, and Microsoft) know about these other more meaningful terms that can actually be measured and choose not to use them on purpose because they are deliberately trying to mislead because truth is counterproductive to their objectives.
It seemed to me MY was not really speaking to the economic and market efficiency question but the political one.
Different subjects. His examples, his focus to me is clearly the political - and the vague undefined "corporate power" that really is basically just a mask on anti-capitalism largely.
Sure, but he’s written this post 10 times. It might be valuable to actually look at the literature on corporate behavior, both the economic and political. There is a robust amount of real academic work in the space. The 100th piece about how Matt Stoller is stupid and annoying is not illuminating.
In the middle of the essay, I thought Matt was going for the distinction between, on the one hand, economic market power (both on the output side, driving up prices for consumers, and on the input side, driving down wages for workers), versus, on the other hand, political power. E.g. I've heard the critique that Lina Khan-style antitrust focuses, perhaps too much, on hostility to big corporations that are capable of wielding political power, even when the antitrust actions are unnecessary or unhelpful to consumers in a pure economic market power sense.
But for both of these definitions, "corporate power" tends to be greater in highly concentrated markets with a few giant businesses, and it seems obtuse to object that the small businesses in less-concentrated markets are also technically "corporations." They are, but being small and facing lots of competition, they don't have much power.
Strange that Matt went the "they're all corporations" route here.
It seems to me the most significant way in which big business has more power than in the past is the mobility of capital, including internationally. The threat of capital flight severely limits the ability of government at all levels—and thus people—to constrain and shape corporate actions. But I’m being mushy and non-quantitative here, so feel free to shoot me down with some numbers.
I wish we had a supply of bright future pundits who could put an effort into finding and explaining the answers to questions like this. Not that I don’t appreciate Matt telling me the question is meaningless! But that would be way more interesting.
C'mon, Matt. You've been around these people your *entire* life. Adept verbally, they use language to illuminate, advocate, describe, defend or obscure. If they are using some words that you cannot understand, that is by design.
They are anti-capitalists. Same as the communists in the 1930's, same as the campus radicals of the 1970s, now they are Democratic Socialists. They broadly believe their own morality is so superior, their ideas are so brilliant, their cause is so just that they should be in charge of making decisions about ... well, everything. And they believe making a profit is de facto proof of exploitation.
Let them be the critics. That's useful. Also, a market economy results in losers as well as winners, and these people can create systems and non-profits for making losing a bit less hurtful and catastrophic. That is a valuable and necessary role for a successful society. But we cannot let them actually run things. That would be bad.
You’re more harsh than I would be to the far left anti “corporate power” crowd (not surprisingly). But I feel like you made the exact same argument I make about hardcore libertarians and your last paragraph could be word for word a paragraph I would write about libertarians.
Sort of speaking of which. An example where libertarianism as an all encompassing philosophy falls short to me AND a place where (I think) I can give an example of the problems associated with “corporate power”; gambling. It’s really hard to tell the story of the uptick in problematic gambling habits (especially among young men) without talking about the “corporate power” of FanDuel and Draft Kings at the state and local
level, as well as the “corporate power” of the casino lobby.
As a kind of aside: Libertarianism - the ideological variety that looks to that loon Rand - to me is really just kind of a photonegative of Bolshevism (and not really classic liberalism at all).
This reflects a perennial argument I have with my more leftist friends. What they seem to dislike about corporate power the most is corporate interests wielding and directing the power of the state.
Which to my mind isn’t a problem regarding business; it is a problem of government! If government didn’t have such levels of authority, it couldn’t be abused by those kind of actors. The same problem on the libertarian side is that if you have weak enough or non-existent government that corporate interests effectively take control of power, you also have de-facto corporate control of government. And if you have government run services- those services might be run well or poorly but also face the risk of being co-opted by corruption extracting value from them, or the lack of market discipline making them more dysfunctional on average. Maybe (such as in the case of health) this tradoff is worth it and we just need to focus on oversight mechanisms and “good policy on the merits” as MY might say, but there isn’t some kind of magic way to wish away incentives.
I’m not sure it’s actually *by design* as opposed to emotional and/or mindless mood affiliation (the “superior morality”you also mention) and aesthetics. In my experience people who hold these kinds of opinions seem to take it for granted that all right-thinking people agree and persuasion isn’t required.
I feel like this entire anti-oligopoly “movement” was started by some drunken brainstorming session where they were like … look, I think Communism only has a branding problem — we need a new name.
I was speaking more broadly. Every politix episode, for example, devolves into yglesias saying "we should moderate on this issue" and beutler responding by saying "we should just change on messaging on that issue."
I'm sure neo-Brandesian stuff polls well. Populism is popular with the populi and all that. But ask any redditor why don't Americans like socialism and the answer you'll invariably get is that they've been brainwashed by effective messaging/propaganda. The idea that people can understand issues and disagree on the merits is not something you see fully grappled with in progressive spaces.
Speaking as someone who has, like, literally been in in-person book groups with Sandeep Vaheesan and shit (side note: agree or disagree with his politics, the guy is incredibly freaking smart), I can assure you that those groups were both thoroughly free from attraction to doctrinaire Communism and also not really that boozy.
Obviously this comment is libel and not actual analysis, but it's worth noting that as actual analysis it's also just factually false.
You are definitely describing a type. Your mind enjoys fulminating against this type and mine sort of does. This type exists, but there aren’t hoards of them. Many Bernie bros were more anti Hillary than anti capitalist.
Yeah this type definitely exists but I think it’s a second order example of “Twitter is not real life”. What do I mean by that? The number of far leftists who just mindlessly fulminate against “corporate power” is probably a smaller number of people than we think. But they get interviews, their ideas get thousands of “likes” on Twitter and suddenly some staffer is telling a politician “this is the voice of the people”.
I’ve brought this up before but in 2020 there was a woman who wrote a book basically arguing rioting was a good thing because attacking businesses was actually a way to address racism (or something). And she was interviewed over and over again on every freaking platform you could think of. You would think she was like the great “voice” of a generation when she was really a rando who wrote a book with a thesis at the absolute most opportune time. I feel pretty certain if you ask anyone who marched in BLM protest whether burning down a convenient store was a good thing in of itself the large majority would have said that’s pretty ridiculous.
It is pretty funny when they're ideology runs into law and their cases get tossed. But every once in a while they win and close a business, which is more harmful than general anti capitalist squawking.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced that "lol goofy ideologues get EXPOSED by real legal analysis" and somewhat closer to "US courts are generally quite pro-business and in recent decades skeptical of ~any antitrust agency's enforcement actions"
Antitrust laws are typically very vague (in the US except for a few defined “per se” violations like price-fixing, most antitrust violations are judged under a “rule of reason”—the court decides if what you did is reasonable). And neither courts nor activists tend to be professional economists so there’s a ton of wiggle room and a bit of amateur hour on all sides when it comes to this.
The real legal overreach of Khan was trying to pass rules outside the FTC’s remit like the ban on non-compete agreements (which I agree with on the merits but it’s not something an agency should just be able to do).
I was glib but I disagree, it's somewhere in the middle based on the rebukes some of these cases get for lack of bringing any evidence of either market definition or monopolistic claims over it:
In most countries it’s just called “competition policy” but we have a special name for it in the US because the first laws about this were written in response to late 19th c. trusts.
I'm sure this is true of Teachout, but is it true of Stoller, for all his flaws? I see no reason to think so.
Matt has a tendency to, on topics he doesn't like or understand well, just pull the weakest gazelle from the herd of opposition commentators, slaughter them, and call it a day without addressing any of the substance.
You and I have had this out before; if you can tell me with a straight face that ag. processing is not a cartel that has carved the US into small monopoly markets, that hospital systems in rural and small urban areas have not consolidated their way to a ton of pricing power, that car dealerships haven't completely subverted the regulatory system, that a huge fraction if not an outright majority of M&A discussions center on pricing power, that exclusive supplier contracts don't deeply distort pharmacy supplier markets... then fine, everything is A-OK.
But you know it isn't, not really.
Matt and a few commenters here like to talk about how scale improves efficiency and outcomes, but that *only* holds true if those companies operating at scale are still in highly competitive markets or are regulated in a manner to make them act as if they are.
Otherwise they simply move to capture the transaction surplus and sit on their laurels, and the degree of disruption that exists in established markets like agricultural processing has never been lower, so no one is going to enter the capital-heavy, complex market to undercut them.
"that hospital systems in rural and small urban areas have not consolidated their way to a ton of pricing power,"
But they are 80% non-profits with very low seven figure CEOs - they have pricing power to keep the doors open. It's not like they are doing it to make money and reward shareholders.
I don't think this is accurate at all. Some people who are opposed to "corporate power" like Mamdani are socialists. But the anti monopoly people talk about this a lot too, and they're very focused on small business and competition, not state ownership.
My argument is that even Mamdani and his cohort aren't socialists (in the sense of seizing the means of production), but that they are anti-capitalists. Same as the anti-monopoly people. They are supportive of small businesses (as long as they don't make much money) and competition (as long as nobody wins the competition).
I think a system where there was ownership of all businesses by individuals who kept the profits, but businesses were small, would obviously be described as "capitalism".
Re: “safer streets,” I have even heard this used in the more literal sense. That is, as a framing for an agenda around reducing auto and pedestrian fatalities. What some may hear as a tough on crime attitude is actually just a politician expressing support for anti-car measures, two very different things.
I am anti moronic unlawful drivers. We have let vehicles become more threatening to non drivers and increased the amount of horsepower relative to weight.
It doesn’t help that we have found a way for morons to finance $70k trucks with maiming plows as daily commute vehicles.
I was at the TRB* conference a couple of weeks ago and it was kind of weird to hear administration officials going on about “safe streets” in the policing/enforcement sense (“supporting our police”). Usually at a transpo confab that phrase is used to mean something closer to what you describe, and there might be discussion of ways to automate enforcement, freeing up human resources for other purposes. But (maybe in an obverse of “corporate” on the left) there seemed to be a desire to talk a lot about “police.”
There was *a lot* of the former (apparently it will even fix NEPA!) but there was somewhat less focus on equity. In general, it was pretty boring! Only a couple of sessions I attended were interesting (in a very narrow sense, NEPA assignment being one of them but weirdly there were two virtually identical panels on this topic; I only went to one).
I've seen some interesting stuff at past conferences (the impact of not providing [frieght] truck parking, "Projects that Didn't Go Well," etc). Not so much this year. And the career fair was a ghost town.
When there, I was always off in the transportation and structures stuff, which is basically its own world where this is just another AASHTO meeting, just with a bunch of fluffy fru-fru bullshit floating nearby.
We grudgingly accept that some of the planning track stuff is rigorous but basically everything else that's been bolted on is just grant grifting or graduate students who ran up a brief presentation so they could get approval to go and job-hunt.
At some point I'm hoping to get back more to see some folks than because I need to be there.
That’s how I’d interpret the phrase tbh... Most people who are injured in a street are probably injured by a car not a criminal. If you told me “X was killed in the street” I’d assume it was a bicyclist or pedestrian hit by a car.
That was where my mind went immediately, and then I chuckled when I realized what he actually meant and how clearly my misinterpretation supported the point he was making.
I’m as allergic to Warren and Khan’s lazy rhetorical approach as Matt is here but certainly there’s clear measures of “corporate power”. You can look first at the share of concentration by industry (e.g., 50% of Vet clinics are now owned by sophisticated financial owners / roll-ups) and you can look at profit margins within and across industries. The nuance here is “corporate power” just becomes leverage and that negotiating leverage is just as likely to be deployed against suppliers to lower consumer prices (e.g., Walmart) as it is to create competition barriers to raise prices and expand margin. The big trouble for this laziness is from a consumer surplus perspective a duopoly likely the most competitive and efficient structure by concentrating the market share risks as winner take all while creating the two largest absolute margin flows to invest.
Medicine is a rare area where there are laws that specifically target and try to keep out corporations--anti-corporate practice of medicine laws that make it nominally illegal for anyone not a human licensed physician to own a medical practice. Yet the majority of physicians now work for practices controlled, if not literally owned, by corporate entities, such as hospital systems, health insurers, private equity, and in the latest trend, drug wholesalers.
So what have CPOM laws accomplished? Not much it seems, except to make healthcare deals more complex and therefore more lucrative for law firm and investment banking advisors. And maybe to slightly increase the leverage of physicians selling their practices to corporate buyers.
Both Board Seats (of what publicly traded corporations? Limited liability companies - which by the way don't have Boards) and Corp Gen counsel office metrics are nonsensical and have no meaning. There's zero relation betweeen these things.
There are clear measures of it but the problem is anti trust lawyers really really hate economists and are mostly allergic to the (generally widely accepted) math.
They just don’t like or understand the accepted measures of monopoly and consumer/firm harm, or the generally accepted definitions of market failure.
I think what the smarter "anti corporate power" people really want instinctively is for businesses not to be rich or powerful enough to lobby the government effectively. In their view, that's antidemocratic. Debates over whether and how much we regular business should be conducted solely by disinterested citizens in the world of takes. If you're too small to lobby, then you're fine.
There are probably ways to measure that. But one problem is that there isn't really a clear correlation between business size and lobbying strength - as Matt has pointed out in the past, the big Wall Street banks got rolled during the Dodd-Frank debate but Elizabeth Warren herself was forced to allow a carve-out for regional banks; local car dealerships are among the most powerful trade lobbies in America; etc. So if a key part of your factual premise is wrong, then it's going to be hard to create metrics that fix the problem you've identified.
“… negotiating leverage is just as likely to be deployed against suppliers to lower consumer prices (e.g., Walmart) as it is to create competition barriers to raise prices and expand margin”
I noticed you failed to offer an example of your second idea. Maybe there are none?
Are you worried that you are being deliberately obtuse? A phenomenon we're seeing across the developed world outside the US tech sector is increasing market concentration, lower rates of firm entry and exit, declining worker mobility, and (sometimes) higher gross margins. This seems to be the main culprit in slowed or stagnant income growth outside the United States. And it also seems like a logical construct for what market power is.
I get that these people are annoying and economically illiterate, but they are not wrong that in many countries and markets local businesses have been wiped out and markets concentrated into two or three national chains.
It’s possible that population aging is the bigger driver of lower rates of firm entry/exit, since older people are probably less likely to join or found a startup.
I can’t remember it off the dome, but I think the average age of startup founders is surprisingly high. This could just be because the young ones leading the charge bring in more experienced people early on, but still worth checking
“I get that these people are annoying and economically illiterate, but they are not wrong that in many countries and markets local businesses have been wiped out and markets concentrated into two or three national chains.”
Sure, but there is not a straight line between that kind of consolidation and higher prices for consumers (the usual focus of antitrust policy), or a government that is more beholden to monied interests, or lower economic growth. A bunch of small businesses would exist if not for the rise of Amazon and Costco and Walmart over the last 30 years. Would anyone actually be better off, though? This crowd starts with the answer that big is bad and backfills the rationale or metric to support that perspective.
Matt admits that he is a very literal person, and this article is an example of it. But being very literal can be useful at times, and he provides that use here, while alongside observations like yours.
Google search, perhaps the most impenetrable corporate moat in human history, was thoroughly upended by OpenAI (by comparison an Infinitesimally small startup). I'm not convinced that the US tech sector is becoming too sclerotic due to concentration.
The necessity and scope of lobbyists is just taken as a given.
That is not actually a base state of existence.
In the 2024 cycle for example, pharma companies donated 16 million dollars to Political action committees.
This entire post entirely ignores the aspects of money talks and the size of lobbying.
We never get any reference to Citizens United.
(I edited this to change "existence" to "necessity and scope." A lot of my responses seemed to think I wanted to ban lobbying which isn't what I meant, that is both impractical and against free speech. My point, which I clarified in later responses, is that the US is structured in such a way to privilege outside lobbying, from self interested industry "corporations" in the context of the post to "the Groups." and that it doesn't have to be this way.)
I would like a group of us to band together and create a documentary critical of JD Vance. We'd have to raise some money, hire some talented creative artists, maybe even get a famous actor to do voice-overs. It will be terrific. We want to time the release of this documentary to have the most impact -- say, 2 months before the next election. We'll sell tickets in theaters and also sell the rights to Netflix.
What I just described was illegal and could have resulted in our prosecution prior to Citizens United.
I would like to propose an exception to the First Amendment that outlaws any blithe, sloppy criticism of Citizens United by anyone who hasn't tried to think though how they would design and administer a system where some corporations aren't allowed to engage in political speech, while others, such as those that make documentaries, are.
The instant I saw the headline of this article, I was all ready to post that any group of people that organize to spend on politicking is highly likely to form a corporation to do it, and a non-profit one at that--just like the group Citizens United is. It figures that someone would beat me to it, as usual. Easily one of the most misunderstood usages of the word corporation out there.
What would a world where lobbying wasn’t a thing look like? If there was some proposed legislation on some highly technical or specific matter, would the hope be that our octogenarian legislatures would just happen to know all relevant details?
There used to be a thing called the Office of Technology Assessment, its job was to research and brief congress people on specific technical issues.
It was killed in 1995 by the Republican Congress because it was really bad for American business interests for congress people to have an alternative, neutral, source of information.
And the killing was wildly successful!
30 years later, a smart, rational person such as yourself can apparently see lobbying as the only effective means of informing technical legislation.
The basic logic, touted on this blog, that says it's cheaper and better for cities to have their own civil engineers and associated professionals on staff, rather than relying on outside consultants, applies to legislators.
Congress people should have a lot more money (from the public purse) to hire staff to research these topics.
Without said moneys or government research institutions, these congress people are reliant on lobbyists.
your answer does not answer his question - there is nothing that precludes State Capacity (having internal expertise) from having lobbying. Lobbying exists in EU countries which are not lacking in that internal capacity in general.
The fact many countries in Europe have that internal capacity and the US doesn't tilts the playing field much more on our side of the Atlantic.
It is a feature that suggests much more corporate power in the US, (Similar features include the collective sectoral bargaining that some European countries have)
I should have rephrased my first post. I wrote "existence," but I feel like what I should have written was "necessity." Lobbyists exist in European countries and that is fine. I am not thinking to ban the activity.
But, to go back to my example, imagine a city, city A, that was, by law, forbidden from having in house civil engineers.
Imagine people have lived in city A for so long that when they hear that another city, City B, DOESN'T rely on outside consultants for civil engineering, that they are absolutely flabbergasted! City B bans outside consultants!
Except it doesn't, it just structures their system so that they aren't RELIANT on outside consultants.
"Europe" is a big place. Drop Americans in Zagreb, Croatia... maybe not. Drop them in Basel, Switzerland... I think they'd be quite happy about it.
The implicit argument you're making seems to be that "Outsized influence of lobbyists in the US relative to Europe ---> Better economic indicators in the US relative to Europe." That seems like a big claim.
In 2024, $9.5 billion was spent in congressional races, and the presidential race was $5.3 billion. I'm kind of amazed *only* $16 million (~0.1%) was spent by pharma.
Agreed. think anyone interested in the case really ought to read the oral arguments. The government went in and argued that the sections of McCain-Feingold at issue could have been used to suppress books. I also don't think people fully understand the facts. John alludes to them above but they go back even further. Citizens United had challenged distribution of Fahrenheit 9/11 as electioneering. Fahrenheit 9/11 ended up being permitted as bona fide commercial activity while some conservative movie they made at the time ended up being restricted. They then spent the next 7 or 8 years making movies to establish themselves as bona fide commercial film makers, like Michael Moore, and ended up restricted again on Hilary: The Movie, which is why they sued. It's very much a case about a form of prior restraint. I don't understand how anyone thinks it could have gone any other way.
There is a fair criticism on strict procedural matters that the majority answered more than they needed to to resolve the case at hand when they set it for reargument. But the broader question was going to get challenged very soon anyway.
Yea I've heard that criticism as well, and maybe so maybe so. I kind of think the facts were sufficiently before the court that it was hard not to deal with the core issue of the FEC making judgment calls about content (or really who created the content) but ymmv as to exactly where the court should have drawn the line on how much of the statute was unconstitutional.
In any case it's worth remembering that portions of McCain-Feingold survived, including on direct contributions and the 'I'm so and so and I support this ad.' People seem to think it legalized big businesses handing politicians suitcases full of cash, which it very much didn't.
Also, the disclosure requirements were upheld, with Thomas being the only justice who would have struck them down.
I really hope that I'll get to read the papers from John Paul Stevens on all the campaign finance cases of the aught, because he was always extremely critical of any argument that anything regarding this issue could be unconstitutional. I've always suspected that his stridence influenced other justices away from showing any nuance in the cases.
This goes all the way back to the originating case of Buckley v. Valeo, which he didn't officially participate in but had just arrived on the Court, and he made it clear that he would have firmly joined Byron White in holding that any regulation was constitutional. Interestingly, he was on the opposite of who he replaced in William O. Douglas.
For me, I always thought that Buckley v. Valeo got it right all along in drawing a bright line between contributions and expenditures. And as it would be, we're coming up on the 50 year anniversary of that ruling--the Volokh Conspiracy has been doing a symposium on it this week.
I take MY point that critics of “corporate power” should be specific about what they mean and how they measure what they are talking about.
With that being said I don’t think MY steel-manned these critics of “corporate power” loosely defined. I don’t think that they are primarily concerned with aesthetic issues of “corporate-ness”, or that they necessarily are indifferent about the role of corporations in the economy.
While there may be some of that, there could also be legitimate concerns over anti competitive behavior. Or practices that harm consumers. Or undo corporate invoice on legislation. Or environmental concerns. Or labor concerns.
Regardless of if you think its a problem or if the article is missing the point. I've always found that the claims that we are in an "unprecedented" or "extraordinary" era of corporate power weird. The British East India company controlled a subcontinent, had a standing army three times the size of the British army and had so many tendrils in parliament defanging it was a major drive of the various reform acts; Standard Oil is a byword for a corporation controlling an entire critical facet of society; several banks in 2008 were deemed to big to fail and bailed out; the EPA was founded because corporations had been making the air, water and land itself toxic; and so on. Are we really to believe that corporations in the 2020s have more power than that?
"It’s just that there are basically two kinds of economies: one where businesses are growing and thriving, and one where there’s no growth and the economy is sputtering."
I think you hit on what they want - a small college town of book shops and vegan restaurants and art galleries and organic food co-ops where everyone can live an upper middle class bohemian lifestyle.
The question of what it takes to produce the natural gas to heat the homes and generate the electricity, how the cars and construction materials and water treatment infrastructure and the pharmaceuticals and medical devices and the consumer goods are designed and built ...all that can just be ignored. That's a world a lot of people really want to live in. It's totally unworkable, but for many it's esthetically pleasing.
Aside from the big, obvious thing you ignored (Citizens United and money in politics), the frustration I see among my friends of this persuasion is that large companies can flout the law.
Monetary damages for flagrant violations tend to be less than the profit from those violations. Class action suit payments come out to tens of dollars per individual impacted. It's incredibly rare for board-level individuals for large companies to go to prison for what a company does. Meanwhile mom-and-pop businesses are routinely closed entirely for code violations.
Are there plausible justifications for some of this? Sure. But it's tough to argue that it isn't an immense form of power.
There’s this idea called “efficient breach” that sometimes it’s good to violate a contract if the benefit of doing so is greater than the other side’s damages—the same ought to apply to regulations. Monetary damages should be set equal to the actual damages caused and if companies violate and pay that’s efficient breach.
Class action suit payments are that low because the plaintiffs’ lawyers take huge cuts, and most class actions are ridiculous (e.g. the claim in the Concepcion case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration agreements was that the plaintiffs had to pay sales tax on free phones they received). It would be better to hire a lot more regulators and put them in charge of requiring changes instead of having class action litigation by greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to put employees in prison for legal violations by their company, short of things like sending a hitman to kill another company’s CEO or something. The law that applies to business can be very broad and vague and sort of relies on prosecutorial discretion to decide what to punish, and there are even situations where laws are contradictory and you can’t comply with all of them.
I can easily measure corporate power in my own life: it’s how often my boss can tell me what to do, and what happens to me if I stop listening.
One can also measure how quickly a person becomes broke, cold, or homeless after parting ways with their employer. That is the relevant metric. A boss’s warts are far more tolerable if being fired doesn’t mean privation.
On this view, the best proxy for “corporate power” is its inverse: how well the state protects people when they are unemployed. Where exit is cheap, corporate power is weak. Where exit is catastrophic, corporate power is strong.
I like the sound of that at first, but surely there are alternatives to “your boss” and “government protection?” David, where do you put “go work for myself” or “go work for a competitor” in your equation? Does that just circle us right back to “make rules to protect competition and market entry” with the government a player but not the dominant force?
By that measure corporate power would decrease if people had more liquid savings? That makes sense. It's like executive compensation - if someone is 45 and has made enough money to decamp to a golf course in Naples permanently then they can demand a lot more money.
The issue with liquid savings is that it’s not scalable. You can’t have a society where everyone lives on savings and no one works (or people work only for fun).
Liquid savings doesn't mean being independently wealthy, it might mean a 6 month emergency fund. It's an amount of money such that a layoff or being fired doesn't result in immediate destitution and a desperation to take the first job available.
security is roughly a function of the natural log of one’s wealth. ergo, making petit bourgeois wealth (or its welfare state equivalent) universal maximizes security
I’m as unsympathetic to the anti-monopoly lunatics as the next guy, but I do think it’s at least *possible* to imagine what they might be talking about. (And why it would be hard to measure in the cross-section/time series.)
I think it’s something like
Bigness + (possibly) control of a salient technology => Political bargaining power.
So, e.g., Meta’s massive resources allow it to influence politics. Because Instagram is so salient in our lives, this is particularly detrimental to the People (e.g. because we watch more slop videos). If Meta were smaller, the People would be able to fight back against slop via the political system.
This is kind of conspiratorial, but does it have any particular implications for something we can measure in Oregon vs Michigan? It’s not about market shares, markups, or anything like that. It’s about a political counter factual.
To take things to the extreme: imagine an AI company raises a robot army that rivals the US military. Clearly this is power, but what would the measurable outcome be? I have no idea. AI corp would have more political bargaining power, but its power would likely be international rather than local.
But didn’t Silicon Valley lose in 2016, win in 2020, and (maybe) split in 2024, all by a sliver? It seems that Silicon Valley has less electoral power than RFK jr.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that corporate power is actually a big problem right now. (It seems like Trump has leverage over corporations rather than the opposite.)
But my point was that “is corporate power higher in Oregon or Michigan?” is not really an insightful gotcha, given what these anti-monopoly people have in mind.
US media is increasingly owned by billionaires who spend a lot of time personally with the President and often seem to tamper with coverage to align with their political views (sometimes they even sort of admit they're doing this). I'm not sure what you call that but it seems a big problem, it has got worse since 2022, and people are fighting it.
So, even if the language is bad, the most important question is still "are the advocates right about the substance" and I think it's really hard to argue they aren't at least a little bit correct.
The reason they spend a lot of time with Trump is precisely because of the specter of antitrust enforcement. If corporations weren't concerned that the government can arbitrarily decide to break them up, you'd see a helluva lot less cozying up to Trump.
In Trump's specific case there are also tariffs, and his general willingness to use the executive to punish/reward people. A weaker executive would certainly have less of this.
Power is multifaceted and not subject to a single measure like emissions. But for some clear examples of corporate power you can just look to how Musk bought Twitter and completely “vibe-shifted” the whole world by doing so. It is true that managers of publicly traded companies under a fiduciary duty to maximize investor gains may be limited in their power (which is why Twitter’s owners were basically legally required to sell to Musk when he offered so much above market value), but it seems undeniable that an ultra-rich person in charge of at least certain types of corporations could have a lot of power.
It seems like there are clear measures to me. The amount of money spent by corporations on lobbying and Super PACs. Market consolidation. Rates of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior.
Then there’s hazier but still important stuff, like Amazon’s influence on consumer markets or Meta’s influence on the media.
Re: measuring stuff it turns out "how do you measure market power" can be the subject of a whole class which at Yale is numbered ECON 3385. Right now we are on week 3 and we are still working out how to estimate demand in multi-product markets.
Re: the broader point of the post, I agree that "corporate power" can be a vague term, but I think you could've engaged more with some of the evidence that market power has been increasing. For example here is a CEA brief from 2016 that we had to read for the first meeting of antitrust policy class: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160414_cea_competition_issue_brief.pdf. It finds that firm entry rates are down, more and larger mergers are happening, etc etc. The brief itself notes that this is not slam-dunk evidence that concentration is for sure increasing across the economy, but it is suggestive that something may be happening.
I was going to make a whole comment about how I guess I don’t need to teach my Industrial Organization class this semester if this is something we can’t measure and shouldn’t talk about so I’m glad you did instead. Market power is real and measurable, regulation is real, the growth of trusts in the Gilded Age was real and had real consequences. And the rent seeking behavior of corporations increases with market power. This isn’t very complicated stuff.
I agree that it’s real, I think the problem comes when people use their corporate power goggles to look at every policy problem in America
True of so many googles out there.
I agree but I think Matt is on to
something when it comes to the most prominent spokespeople for the “corporate power” crowd…I should state up front, a crowd I’m clearly more sympathetic to than Matt (I brought up in another comment, a very good example is FanDuel, DraftKings and casinos using their lobbying power to make gambling way to accessible to average Americans).
But I think a good example of a prominent “corporate power” spokesperson is Zephyr Teachout. She was on a podcast with Ezra Klein having a debate about why housing costs are higher in California than Texas. The only answer she kept giving over and over again was “Corporate Power”. Ezra tried, really tried, to get her to unpack what she meant by this and…she basically wouldn’t do it. Honestly it came across as pathological to me almost as though she couldn’t conceive of a reason why housing costs in California are higher than Texas due to something other than “Corporate Power” (which is kind of nuts when considering the political of CA vs TX). It honestly made me tilt my head back in frustration especially because Ezra clearly has some sympathy for this explanation of various policy failures. He just could not get through to her to a) explain her reasoning more and b) at least try to conceive of the idea there may be another reason why a policy failure is happening other then “corporate power”
I think maybe two things could be said. One, the left “Corporate Power” crowd maybe just need better communicators. Two, if you want to craft good left of center public policy, assuming “Corporate Power” is some skeleton key to unlocking all policy problems is going to likely lead to some bad policy if that’s your driving belief.
In the end it is generally clear that people like Teachout are essentially anti-free enterprise, but are dressing up that in a vaguer langauge
Okay, but a corollary to the general observation that 90 percent of everything is crap is that 90 percent of all politics is psychobabble. There is a reason I don't actually spend very much time in my private life listening to the campaign speeches of Democratic politicians, even Democratic politicians I broadly agree with on the issues or think are really smart idea people, and it's that the vast majority of their public-facing output is psychobabble. It has always been so and likely always will be so; there is no imagined past golden age of voters weighing up complex public policy before deciding how to cast their votes. The Anti-Psychobabble Party would, if formed, be roughly as successful and long-lived as the Anti-Masonic Party.
I don't know, I think those guys must've done something right: I can't think of a single politician in my lifetime who was in a masonic cabal!
Apparently the UK metro police are a hotbed of Masonry...
Matt touches on many deep subjects in this piece. Colin’s focus here is helpful. As Matt notes, (“the term works fine as a shibboleth. If a writer writes about taking on corporate power, that signals something about what they believe”) shibboleths — labels for group membership — serve a function. As Colin (and Ezra) observe, Teachout and (and Warren and Jayapal and millions they represent) insist that the label has analytical power and trenchancy. Matt does a service by showing that it does not.
Wealth as we have enjoyed it since the invention of railroads, industrial fertilizer, automobiles, antibiotics, birth control, and on and on, is realized by creating organizations of enormous complexity, scale, and cross-polity span. Since Marx, the left has decried the resulting alienation of labor. Since the Luddites, the petit bourgeois / local bullies have decried the resulting disempowerment of local elites. When we train today’s elites in the reading of laws and Zora Neale Thurston novels without also training them to build organizations that build the machinery of human prosperity, we leave untouched the natural human tendency to frame the world in terms of protagonists and antagonists. The world of human flourishing — today’s world — is a world of systems and statistics and management. Most people hate those structures. It is a great failing of Matt’s audience the liberal professional-managerial elite that we continue to recreate ourselves around this pathological, willful ignorance.
Do you find that the usual anti-corporate power suspects use this data frequently when making their case? I certainly haven't noticed it, but their behaviour online is so poor that I have to admit I don't go looking for their more substantive stuff.
They are too lazy to bother knowing even basic facts before opining.
The issue is not that IO doesn’t have good answers about measuring corporate power, it’s that the people in charge of regulators ignore the field when given the answers.
It’s a political economy issue.
Something something HHI’s.
I was with you up until the last sentence. No, it's very complicated stuff!
Different subject than MY in end, although adjacent
Yes and no. My IO class will look at models of competition and measures of competition and the various policies we’ve tried to increase competition and prosecute collusion. That’s definitely a different topic. But one thing I emphasize in my classes is that the paradox of capitalism is that competition is the magic power that gives us all the good things that come from capitalism (innovation, lower prices, greater efficiency) but firms absolutely hate competition and will do whatever they can to reduce it. When that takes the form of product or process innovation, that’s great. But when it takes the form of anti-competitive practices and rent seeking, then that’s when public policy needs to step in. The industries that people complain about tend to be those with less competition and higher profits. When those profits are used in a non-productive way to increase market power (lobbying, mergers, etc.), that’s the corporate power about which people complain.
It’s always going to be a balance because we don’t want the “ruinous competition” that drives companies out of business. Firms need to make profits. But we also don’t want firms with lots of market power to be able to protect that market power through non-productive activities. We need to always have firms nipping at their heals to try to capture some of those profits for themselves.
Good points. Any greatest hits books or articles from your class to get us up to speed on the topic?
I use the Tremblay & Tremblay textbook in my class which isn’t too technical but not for a lay audience. There was a special issue in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in Summer 2019 that looks at markups and antitrust.
Related, Works in Progress had a good piece a few months back outlining a new metric to measure market competition: https://open.substack.com/pub/worksinprogress/p/how-to-measure-competition?r=1cj74&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Yeah, there actually is a whole body of academic work in the space. Matt is right that his enemies are annoying and wrong about a lot of things. But he hasn’t actually taken the arguments of those working through these problems at all. It’s early for me, but it’s increasingly a blind spot for Matt to write posts about the people he doesn’t like and paint with too broad of a brush. It’s getting rote and a bit lazy.
He does it on issues where he's clearly just flying on vibes himself, so he picks the weakest opponents and flays their arguments, then hangs out the Bush-style Mission Accomplished sign and goes home.
I do think Stoller is an idiot, Teachout is worse, and Kahn is only marginally better, but pretending like the US isn't shot through with regionalized monopolies and oligopolies that either stem from rent-seeking and regulatory capture or enable downstream rent-seeking and regulatory capture, is just irritatingly myopic.
I would give extra likes to this post if I could. As someone who’s done battle with these folks in professional forums, I could not agree more about how bad they are. But he’s he’s very happy to write about them rather than engage with a host of serious corporate issues that matter. It’s cheap and getting old.
Mission accomplished, indeed.
More centrists and moderates need to learn that being on social media can dull their intellectual tools. It's not just a risk for leftists and the far right.
I think Matt partly likes stirring the pot and partly is using the strategy of putting out the wrong answer to get the right answer. I agree that there is a real topic to address there, but it’s interesting how approximately no one in the discourse is trying to apply real insights from research.
I’d like to read a follow-up guest post on this
This is probably something I will pitch Jerusalem on sometime around end of May or early June after I've completed the two antitrust-related classes referenced in my original comment. (Now's as good a time as any to mention that starting February 2 I will be a fellow at The Argument.)
Congrats!
Congratulations! Looking forward to reading your work there.
Don’t know if you’re gonna get a post but if you’re interested … there’s a chapter in this book on Corporate Power and it’s considered the standard.
https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Finance-4th-Pearson-Standalone/dp/013408327X
Thanks I'll give it a look post-grad
“Market power” has a specific meaning that can be measured (although it’s hard to do and the 2016 CEA brief is a *terrible* example of how to do it, even Jason Furman says so). “Market concentration” also has a specific meaning that can be measured, though the value of this measure is hotly debated (it’s a loose proxy for market power and can be useful when looking at a specific market but is totally meaningless when applied to the entire economy, where concentration in the thousands/millions of separate markets is increasing and decreasing all the time). “Corporate power,” like Matt says, has no meaning. It’s *always* a rhetorical sleight of hand. Lina Khan, Elizabeth Warren, and OMI/Revolving Door Project (funded by corporations like Oracle, Yelp, and Microsoft) know about these other more meaningful terms that can actually be measured and choose not to use them on purpose because they are deliberately trying to mislead because truth is counterproductive to their objectives.
is market power the same as corporate power, though?
No, and I think the switch in verbiage achieves several goals for the people who advance the term:
-Permits them to lump in political/corruption type considerations with usual antitrust considerations
-Switches from "market," a neutral to positive word, to corporate, a word with a generally negative connotation
-Avoids technical arguments about whether the conditions in a given market are such that the formal academic concept of market power is applicable
-Is more consistent with their actual goal of anti-bigness rather than the promotion of consumer or worker welfare
It seemed to me MY was not really speaking to the economic and market efficiency question but the political one.
Different subjects. His examples, his focus to me is clearly the political - and the vague undefined "corporate power" that really is basically just a mask on anti-capitalism largely.
Sure, but he’s written this post 10 times. It might be valuable to actually look at the literature on corporate behavior, both the economic and political. There is a robust amount of real academic work in the space. The 100th piece about how Matt Stoller is stupid and annoying is not illuminating.
Interestingly enough Yale’s Econ department is incredibly strong in empirical IO, where this is most of what they’re trying to do.
Oh I know. Inshallah Steve Berry Nobel soon.
In the middle of the essay, I thought Matt was going for the distinction between, on the one hand, economic market power (both on the output side, driving up prices for consumers, and on the input side, driving down wages for workers), versus, on the other hand, political power. E.g. I've heard the critique that Lina Khan-style antitrust focuses, perhaps too much, on hostility to big corporations that are capable of wielding political power, even when the antitrust actions are unnecessary or unhelpful to consumers in a pure economic market power sense.
But for both of these definitions, "corporate power" tends to be greater in highly concentrated markets with a few giant businesses, and it seems obtuse to object that the small businesses in less-concentrated markets are also technically "corporations." They are, but being small and facing lots of competition, they don't have much power.
Strange that Matt went the "they're all corporations" route here.
It seems to me the most significant way in which big business has more power than in the past is the mobility of capital, including internationally. The threat of capital flight severely limits the ability of government at all levels—and thus people—to constrain and shape corporate actions. But I’m being mushy and non-quantitative here, so feel free to shoot me down with some numbers.
Are corporate power and market concentration synonyms?
I wish we had a supply of bright future pundits who could put an effort into finding and explaining the answers to questions like this. Not that I don’t appreciate Matt telling me the question is meaningless! But that would be way more interesting.
C'mon, Matt. You've been around these people your *entire* life. Adept verbally, they use language to illuminate, advocate, describe, defend or obscure. If they are using some words that you cannot understand, that is by design.
They are anti-capitalists. Same as the communists in the 1930's, same as the campus radicals of the 1970s, now they are Democratic Socialists. They broadly believe their own morality is so superior, their ideas are so brilliant, their cause is so just that they should be in charge of making decisions about ... well, everything. And they believe making a profit is de facto proof of exploitation.
Let them be the critics. That's useful. Also, a market economy results in losers as well as winners, and these people can create systems and non-profits for making losing a bit less hurtful and catastrophic. That is a valuable and necessary role for a successful society. But we cannot let them actually run things. That would be bad.
You’re more harsh than I would be to the far left anti “corporate power” crowd (not surprisingly). But I feel like you made the exact same argument I make about hardcore libertarians and your last paragraph could be word for word a paragraph I would write about libertarians.
Sort of speaking of which. An example where libertarianism as an all encompassing philosophy falls short to me AND a place where (I think) I can give an example of the problems associated with “corporate power”; gambling. It’s really hard to tell the story of the uptick in problematic gambling habits (especially among young men) without talking about the “corporate power” of FanDuel and Draft Kings at the state and local
level, as well as the “corporate power” of the casino lobby.
I'm with you on being anti-libertarianism.
As a kind of aside: Libertarianism - the ideological variety that looks to that loon Rand - to me is really just kind of a photonegative of Bolshevism (and not really classic liberalism at all).
This reflects a perennial argument I have with my more leftist friends. What they seem to dislike about corporate power the most is corporate interests wielding and directing the power of the state.
Which to my mind isn’t a problem regarding business; it is a problem of government! If government didn’t have such levels of authority, it couldn’t be abused by those kind of actors. The same problem on the libertarian side is that if you have weak enough or non-existent government that corporate interests effectively take control of power, you also have de-facto corporate control of government. And if you have government run services- those services might be run well or poorly but also face the risk of being co-opted by corruption extracting value from them, or the lack of market discipline making them more dysfunctional on average. Maybe (such as in the case of health) this tradoff is worth it and we just need to focus on oversight mechanisms and “good policy on the merits” as MY might say, but there isn’t some kind of magic way to wish away incentives.
I’m not sure it’s actually *by design* as opposed to emotional and/or mindless mood affiliation (the “superior morality”you also mention) and aesthetics. In my experience people who hold these kinds of opinions seem to take it for granted that all right-thinking people agree and persuasion isn’t required.
I feel like this entire anti-oligopoly “movement” was started by some drunken brainstorming session where they were like … look, I think Communism only has a branding problem — we need a new name.
Everywhere in progressive politics is the belief that better messaging is the only thing needed to make any idea popular.
But the Neo-Brandeisian messaging *is* popular. We found that at Blueprint and Future Forward found the same thing in their ad testing.
I was speaking more broadly. Every politix episode, for example, devolves into yglesias saying "we should moderate on this issue" and beutler responding by saying "we should just change on messaging on that issue."
I'm sure neo-Brandesian stuff polls well. Populism is popular with the populi and all that. But ask any redditor why don't Americans like socialism and the answer you'll invariably get is that they've been brainwashed by effective messaging/propaganda. The idea that people can understand issues and disagree on the merits is not something you see fully grappled with in progressive spaces.
I don’t listen to podcasts
You must not drive anywhere.
Speaking as someone who has, like, literally been in in-person book groups with Sandeep Vaheesan and shit (side note: agree or disagree with his politics, the guy is incredibly freaking smart), I can assure you that those groups were both thoroughly free from attraction to doctrinaire Communism and also not really that boozy.
Obviously this comment is libel and not actual analysis, but it's worth noting that as actual analysis it's also just factually false.
You are definitely describing a type. Your mind enjoys fulminating against this type and mine sort of does. This type exists, but there aren’t hoards of them. Many Bernie bros were more anti Hillary than anti capitalist.
Yeah this type definitely exists but I think it’s a second order example of “Twitter is not real life”. What do I mean by that? The number of far leftists who just mindlessly fulminate against “corporate power” is probably a smaller number of people than we think. But they get interviews, their ideas get thousands of “likes” on Twitter and suddenly some staffer is telling a politician “this is the voice of the people”.
I’ve brought this up before but in 2020 there was a woman who wrote a book basically arguing rioting was a good thing because attacking businesses was actually a way to address racism (or something). And she was interviewed over and over again on every freaking platform you could think of. You would think she was like the great “voice” of a generation when she was really a rando who wrote a book with a thesis at the absolute most opportune time. I feel pretty certain if you ask anyone who marched in BLM protest whether burning down a convenient store was a good thing in of itself the large majority would have said that’s pretty ridiculous.
It is pretty funny when they're ideology runs into law and their cases get tossed. But every once in a while they win and close a business, which is more harmful than general anti capitalist squawking.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced that "lol goofy ideologues get EXPOSED by real legal analysis" and somewhat closer to "US courts are generally quite pro-business and in recent decades skeptical of ~any antitrust agency's enforcement actions"
Antitrust laws are typically very vague (in the US except for a few defined “per se” violations like price-fixing, most antitrust violations are judged under a “rule of reason”—the court decides if what you did is reasonable). And neither courts nor activists tend to be professional economists so there’s a ton of wiggle room and a bit of amateur hour on all sides when it comes to this.
The real legal overreach of Khan was trying to pass rules outside the FTC’s remit like the ban on non-compete agreements (which I agree with on the merits but it’s not something an agency should just be able to do).
I do agree with you on the last paragraph, am no fan of non-competes, from a market PoV other than in very very narrow circumstances.
I was glib but I disagree, it's somewhere in the middle based on the rebukes some of these cases get for lack of bringing any evidence of either market definition or monopolistic claims over it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/socialdawn/p/anti-anti-big-tech?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=9xf6a
Feel like antitrust could use a new term.
In most countries it’s just called “competition policy” but we have a special name for it in the US because the first laws about this were written in response to late 19th c. trusts.
I think it’s sad that this movement is mostly law professors and not based in anything quantitative like economics
that's because american antitrust policy is traditionally (for the past few decades) based on economics, and some law professors dislike that
I'm sure this is true of Teachout, but is it true of Stoller, for all his flaws? I see no reason to think so.
Matt has a tendency to, on topics he doesn't like or understand well, just pull the weakest gazelle from the herd of opposition commentators, slaughter them, and call it a day without addressing any of the substance.
You and I have had this out before; if you can tell me with a straight face that ag. processing is not a cartel that has carved the US into small monopoly markets, that hospital systems in rural and small urban areas have not consolidated their way to a ton of pricing power, that car dealerships haven't completely subverted the regulatory system, that a huge fraction if not an outright majority of M&A discussions center on pricing power, that exclusive supplier contracts don't deeply distort pharmacy supplier markets... then fine, everything is A-OK.
But you know it isn't, not really.
Matt and a few commenters here like to talk about how scale improves efficiency and outcomes, but that *only* holds true if those companies operating at scale are still in highly competitive markets or are regulated in a manner to make them act as if they are.
Otherwise they simply move to capture the transaction surplus and sit on their laurels, and the degree of disruption that exists in established markets like agricultural processing has never been lower, so no one is going to enter the capital-heavy, complex market to undercut them.
"that hospital systems in rural and small urban areas have not consolidated their way to a ton of pricing power,"
But they are 80% non-profits with very low seven figure CEOs - they have pricing power to keep the doors open. It's not like they are doing it to make money and reward shareholders.
I don't think this is accurate at all. Some people who are opposed to "corporate power" like Mamdani are socialists. But the anti monopoly people talk about this a lot too, and they're very focused on small business and competition, not state ownership.
My argument is that even Mamdani and his cohort aren't socialists (in the sense of seizing the means of production), but that they are anti-capitalists. Same as the anti-monopoly people. They are supportive of small businesses (as long as they don't make much money) and competition (as long as nobody wins the competition).
I think a system where there was ownership of all businesses by individuals who kept the profits, but businesses were small, would obviously be described as "capitalism".
Re: “safer streets,” I have even heard this used in the more literal sense. That is, as a framing for an agenda around reducing auto and pedestrian fatalities. What some may hear as a tough on crime attitude is actually just a politician expressing support for anti-car measures, two very different things.
I am anti moronic unlawful drivers. We have let vehicles become more threatening to non drivers and increased the amount of horsepower relative to weight.
It doesn’t help that we have found a way for morons to finance $70k trucks with maiming plows as daily commute vehicles.
I was at the TRB* conference a couple of weeks ago and it was kind of weird to hear administration officials going on about “safe streets” in the policing/enforcement sense (“supporting our police”). Usually at a transpo confab that phrase is used to mean something closer to what you describe, and there might be discussion of ways to automate enforcement, freeing up human resources for other purposes. But (maybe in an obverse of “corporate” on the left) there seemed to be a desire to talk a lot about “police.”
*Transportation Research Board, part of the NAS
TRB: The Omniconference for the Omnicause.
What fraction of presenters had a variant on "AI is going to fix all our problems!" this year?
Has it displaced the recently dominant "Look at this data analysis that proves everything is inequitable?" line of discussion yet?
There was *a lot* of the former (apparently it will even fix NEPA!) but there was somewhat less focus on equity. In general, it was pretty boring! Only a couple of sessions I attended were interesting (in a very narrow sense, NEPA assignment being one of them but weirdly there were two virtually identical panels on this topic; I only went to one).
I've seen some interesting stuff at past conferences (the impact of not providing [frieght] truck parking, "Projects that Didn't Go Well," etc). Not so much this year. And the career fair was a ghost town.
When there, I was always off in the transportation and structures stuff, which is basically its own world where this is just another AASHTO meeting, just with a bunch of fluffy fru-fru bullshit floating nearby.
We grudgingly accept that some of the planning track stuff is rigorous but basically everything else that's been bolted on is just grant grifting or graduate students who ran up a brief presentation so they could get approval to go and job-hunt.
At some point I'm hoping to get back more to see some folks than because I need to be there.
This is true, but it's also somewhat of a newer usage than the one Matt uses in this article.
That’s how I’d interpret the phrase tbh... Most people who are injured in a street are probably injured by a car not a criminal. If you told me “X was killed in the street” I’d assume it was a bicyclist or pedestrian hit by a car.
That was where my mind went immediately, and then I chuckled when I realized what he actually meant and how clearly my misinterpretation supported the point he was making.
I’m as allergic to Warren and Khan’s lazy rhetorical approach as Matt is here but certainly there’s clear measures of “corporate power”. You can look first at the share of concentration by industry (e.g., 50% of Vet clinics are now owned by sophisticated financial owners / roll-ups) and you can look at profit margins within and across industries. The nuance here is “corporate power” just becomes leverage and that negotiating leverage is just as likely to be deployed against suppliers to lower consumer prices (e.g., Walmart) as it is to create competition barriers to raise prices and expand margin. The big trouble for this laziness is from a consumer surplus perspective a duopoly likely the most competitive and efficient structure by concentrating the market share risks as winner take all while creating the two largest absolute margin flows to invest.
Medicine is a rare area where there are laws that specifically target and try to keep out corporations--anti-corporate practice of medicine laws that make it nominally illegal for anyone not a human licensed physician to own a medical practice. Yet the majority of physicians now work for practices controlled, if not literally owned, by corporate entities, such as hospital systems, health insurers, private equity, and in the latest trend, drug wholesalers.
So what have CPOM laws accomplished? Not much it seems, except to make healthcare deals more complex and therefore more lucrative for law firm and investment banking advisors. And maybe to slightly increase the leverage of physicians selling their practices to corporate buyers.
Some other measurable items:
- states where non-compete clauses are enforceable
- fraction of employees covered by forced arbitration
- fraction of board seats of major bodies (both for-profit and nonprofit) occupied by C-suite executives
- the average budget for a corporate general counsels office compared to the budget of the state's attorney General's office
- fraction of political donations in a given cycle from corporations with >$1B market cap
Both Board Seats (of what publicly traded corporations? Limited liability companies - which by the way don't have Boards) and Corp Gen counsel office metrics are nonsensical and have no meaning. There's zero relation betweeen these things.
There are clear measures of it but the problem is anti trust lawyers really really hate economists and are mostly allergic to the (generally widely accepted) math.
They just don’t like or understand the accepted measures of monopoly and consumer/firm harm, or the generally accepted definitions of market failure.
I think what the smarter "anti corporate power" people really want instinctively is for businesses not to be rich or powerful enough to lobby the government effectively. In their view, that's antidemocratic. Debates over whether and how much we regular business should be conducted solely by disinterested citizens in the world of takes. If you're too small to lobby, then you're fine.
There are probably ways to measure that. But one problem is that there isn't really a clear correlation between business size and lobbying strength - as Matt has pointed out in the past, the big Wall Street banks got rolled during the Dodd-Frank debate but Elizabeth Warren herself was forced to allow a carve-out for regional banks; local car dealerships are among the most powerful trade lobbies in America; etc. So if a key part of your factual premise is wrong, then it's going to be hard to create metrics that fix the problem you've identified.
“… negotiating leverage is just as likely to be deployed against suppliers to lower consumer prices (e.g., Walmart) as it is to create competition barriers to raise prices and expand margin”
I noticed you failed to offer an example of your second idea. Maybe there are none?
Are you worried that you are being deliberately obtuse? A phenomenon we're seeing across the developed world outside the US tech sector is increasing market concentration, lower rates of firm entry and exit, declining worker mobility, and (sometimes) higher gross margins. This seems to be the main culprit in slowed or stagnant income growth outside the United States. And it also seems like a logical construct for what market power is.
I get that these people are annoying and economically illiterate, but they are not wrong that in many countries and markets local businesses have been wiped out and markets concentrated into two or three national chains.
It’s possible that population aging is the bigger driver of lower rates of firm entry/exit, since older people are probably less likely to join or found a startup.
I can’t remember it off the dome, but I think the average age of startup founders is surprisingly high. This could just be because the young ones leading the charge bring in more experienced people early on, but still worth checking
“I get that these people are annoying and economically illiterate, but they are not wrong that in many countries and markets local businesses have been wiped out and markets concentrated into two or three national chains.”
Sure, but there is not a straight line between that kind of consolidation and higher prices for consumers (the usual focus of antitrust policy), or a government that is more beholden to monied interests, or lower economic growth. A bunch of small businesses would exist if not for the rise of Amazon and Costco and Walmart over the last 30 years. Would anyone actually be better off, though? This crowd starts with the answer that big is bad and backfills the rationale or metric to support that perspective.
Matt admits that he is a very literal person, and this article is an example of it. But being very literal can be useful at times, and he provides that use here, while alongside observations like yours.
Google search, perhaps the most impenetrable corporate moat in human history, was thoroughly upended by OpenAI (by comparison an Infinitesimally small startup). I'm not convinced that the US tech sector is becoming too sclerotic due to concentration.
This is very sloppy.
The necessity and scope of lobbyists is just taken as a given.
That is not actually a base state of existence.
In the 2024 cycle for example, pharma companies donated 16 million dollars to Political action committees.
This entire post entirely ignores the aspects of money talks and the size of lobbying.
We never get any reference to Citizens United.
(I edited this to change "existence" to "necessity and scope." A lot of my responses seemed to think I wanted to ban lobbying which isn't what I meant, that is both impractical and against free speech. My point, which I clarified in later responses, is that the US is structured in such a way to privilege outside lobbying, from self interested industry "corporations" in the context of the post to "the Groups." and that it doesn't have to be this way.)
I would like a group of us to band together and create a documentary critical of JD Vance. We'd have to raise some money, hire some talented creative artists, maybe even get a famous actor to do voice-overs. It will be terrific. We want to time the release of this documentary to have the most impact -- say, 2 months before the next election. We'll sell tickets in theaters and also sell the rights to Netflix.
What I just described was illegal and could have resulted in our prosecution prior to Citizens United.
I would like to propose an exception to the First Amendment that outlaws any blithe, sloppy criticism of Citizens United by anyone who hasn't tried to think though how they would design and administer a system where some corporations aren't allowed to engage in political speech, while others, such as those that make documentaries, are.
Buttigieg jumping on the dumb populist anti-Citizens United was especially disappointing. Surely he knows better.
Popularism supporters when the popular position is something they disagree with on the merits: 🤯
The instant I saw the headline of this article, I was all ready to post that any group of people that organize to spend on politicking is highly likely to form a corporation to do it, and a non-profit one at that--just like the group Citizens United is. It figures that someone would beat me to it, as usual. Easily one of the most misunderstood usages of the word corporation out there.
Ha, this was sincerely clarifying for me, thank you.
A lot of people who criticize this case don't understand just how radical and suppressing the narrow question at hand was.
In a country with free speech, on what pretext do you think "lobbyists" can be banned?
this is on the order of the naive fulminations against political parties.
Lobbyists are more attached to another, less discussed First Amendment clause: The right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
What would a world where lobbying wasn’t a thing look like? If there was some proposed legislation on some highly technical or specific matter, would the hope be that our octogenarian legislatures would just happen to know all relevant details?
There used to be a thing called the Office of Technology Assessment, its job was to research and brief congress people on specific technical issues.
It was killed in 1995 by the Republican Congress because it was really bad for American business interests for congress people to have an alternative, neutral, source of information.
And the killing was wildly successful!
30 years later, a smart, rational person such as yourself can apparently see lobbying as the only effective means of informing technical legislation.
The basic logic, touted on this blog, that says it's cheaper and better for cities to have their own civil engineers and associated professionals on staff, rather than relying on outside consultants, applies to legislators.
Congress people should have a lot more money (from the public purse) to hire staff to research these topics.
Without said moneys or government research institutions, these congress people are reliant on lobbyists.
your answer does not answer his question - there is nothing that precludes State Capacity (having internal expertise) from having lobbying. Lobbying exists in EU countries which are not lacking in that internal capacity in general.
If one has free speech one will have lobbyists.
The fact many countries in Europe have that internal capacity and the US doesn't tilts the playing field much more on our side of the Atlantic.
It is a feature that suggests much more corporate power in the US, (Similar features include the collective sectoral bargaining that some European countries have)
I should have rephrased my first post. I wrote "existence," but I feel like what I should have written was "necessity." Lobbyists exist in European countries and that is fine. I am not thinking to ban the activity.
But, to go back to my example, imagine a city, city A, that was, by law, forbidden from having in house civil engineers.
Imagine people have lived in city A for so long that when they hear that another city, City B, DOESN'T rely on outside consultants for civil engineering, that they are absolutely flabbergasted! City B bans outside consultants!
Except it doesn't, it just structures their system so that they aren't RELIANT on outside consultants.
“The fact many countries in Europe have that internal capacity and the US doesn't tilts the playing field much more on our side of the Atlantic”
The vast majority of Americans would not be happy living in Europe’s economy.
"Europe" is a big place. Drop Americans in Zagreb, Croatia... maybe not. Drop them in Basel, Switzerland... I think they'd be quite happy about it.
The implicit argument you're making seems to be that "Outsized influence of lobbyists in the US relative to Europe ---> Better economic indicators in the US relative to Europe." That seems like a big claim.
In 2024, $9.5 billion was spent in congressional races, and the presidential race was $5.3 billion. I'm kind of amazed *only* $16 million (~0.1%) was spent by pharma.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/cost-of-election
Yeah I'm not sure how you write this many words on this topic and don't mention citizens united.
Probably because Citizens United was correctly ruled and will not be overturned in any foreseeable future.
Agreed. think anyone interested in the case really ought to read the oral arguments. The government went in and argued that the sections of McCain-Feingold at issue could have been used to suppress books. I also don't think people fully understand the facts. John alludes to them above but they go back even further. Citizens United had challenged distribution of Fahrenheit 9/11 as electioneering. Fahrenheit 9/11 ended up being permitted as bona fide commercial activity while some conservative movie they made at the time ended up being restricted. They then spent the next 7 or 8 years making movies to establish themselves as bona fide commercial film makers, like Michael Moore, and ended up restricted again on Hilary: The Movie, which is why they sued. It's very much a case about a form of prior restraint. I don't understand how anyone thinks it could have gone any other way.
There is a fair criticism on strict procedural matters that the majority answered more than they needed to to resolve the case at hand when they set it for reargument. But the broader question was going to get challenged very soon anyway.
Yea I've heard that criticism as well, and maybe so maybe so. I kind of think the facts were sufficiently before the court that it was hard not to deal with the core issue of the FEC making judgment calls about content (or really who created the content) but ymmv as to exactly where the court should have drawn the line on how much of the statute was unconstitutional.
In any case it's worth remembering that portions of McCain-Feingold survived, including on direct contributions and the 'I'm so and so and I support this ad.' People seem to think it legalized big businesses handing politicians suitcases full of cash, which it very much didn't.
Also, the disclosure requirements were upheld, with Thomas being the only justice who would have struck them down.
I really hope that I'll get to read the papers from John Paul Stevens on all the campaign finance cases of the aught, because he was always extremely critical of any argument that anything regarding this issue could be unconstitutional. I've always suspected that his stridence influenced other justices away from showing any nuance in the cases.
This goes all the way back to the originating case of Buckley v. Valeo, which he didn't officially participate in but had just arrived on the Court, and he made it clear that he would have firmly joined Byron White in holding that any regulation was constitutional. Interestingly, he was on the opposite of who he replaced in William O. Douglas.
For me, I always thought that Buckley v. Valeo got it right all along in drawing a bright line between contributions and expenditures. And as it would be, we're coming up on the 50 year anniversary of that ruling--the Volokh Conspiracy has been doing a symposium on it this week.
I take MY point that critics of “corporate power” should be specific about what they mean and how they measure what they are talking about.
With that being said I don’t think MY steel-manned these critics of “corporate power” loosely defined. I don’t think that they are primarily concerned with aesthetic issues of “corporate-ness”, or that they necessarily are indifferent about the role of corporations in the economy.
While there may be some of that, there could also be legitimate concerns over anti competitive behavior. Or practices that harm consumers. Or undo corporate invoice on legislation. Or environmental concerns. Or labor concerns.
Regardless of if you think its a problem or if the article is missing the point. I've always found that the claims that we are in an "unprecedented" or "extraordinary" era of corporate power weird. The British East India company controlled a subcontinent, had a standing army three times the size of the British army and had so many tendrils in parliament defanging it was a major drive of the various reform acts; Standard Oil is a byword for a corporation controlling an entire critical facet of society; several banks in 2008 were deemed to big to fail and bailed out; the EPA was founded because corporations had been making the air, water and land itself toxic; and so on. Are we really to believe that corporations in the 2020s have more power than that?
"It’s just that there are basically two kinds of economies: one where businesses are growing and thriving, and one where there’s no growth and the economy is sputtering."
I think you hit on what they want - a small college town of book shops and vegan restaurants and art galleries and organic food co-ops where everyone can live an upper middle class bohemian lifestyle.
The question of what it takes to produce the natural gas to heat the homes and generate the electricity, how the cars and construction materials and water treatment infrastructure and the pharmaceuticals and medical devices and the consumer goods are designed and built ...all that can just be ignored. That's a world a lot of people really want to live in. It's totally unworkable, but for many it's esthetically pleasing.
Aside from the big, obvious thing you ignored (Citizens United and money in politics), the frustration I see among my friends of this persuasion is that large companies can flout the law.
Monetary damages for flagrant violations tend to be less than the profit from those violations. Class action suit payments come out to tens of dollars per individual impacted. It's incredibly rare for board-level individuals for large companies to go to prison for what a company does. Meanwhile mom-and-pop businesses are routinely closed entirely for code violations.
Are there plausible justifications for some of this? Sure. But it's tough to argue that it isn't an immense form of power.
There’s this idea called “efficient breach” that sometimes it’s good to violate a contract if the benefit of doing so is greater than the other side’s damages—the same ought to apply to regulations. Monetary damages should be set equal to the actual damages caused and if companies violate and pay that’s efficient breach.
Class action suit payments are that low because the plaintiffs’ lawyers take huge cuts, and most class actions are ridiculous (e.g. the claim in the Concepcion case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration agreements was that the plaintiffs had to pay sales tax on free phones they received). It would be better to hire a lot more regulators and put them in charge of requiring changes instead of having class action litigation by greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to put employees in prison for legal violations by their company, short of things like sending a hitman to kill another company’s CEO or something. The law that applies to business can be very broad and vague and sort of relies on prosecutorial discretion to decide what to punish, and there are even situations where laws are contradictory and you can’t comply with all of them.
Worth noticing that's it's the "oligarchs" who have bent the knee to Trump, not the other way around.
Isn't this how oligarchy always works? Bend the knee in public, pull strings in secret.
Neobrandisians don't want to make emperical claims that effect positive, useful change. They want to be mad.
I can easily measure corporate power in my own life: it’s how often my boss can tell me what to do, and what happens to me if I stop listening.
One can also measure how quickly a person becomes broke, cold, or homeless after parting ways with their employer. That is the relevant metric. A boss’s warts are far more tolerable if being fired doesn’t mean privation.
On this view, the best proxy for “corporate power” is its inverse: how well the state protects people when they are unemployed. Where exit is cheap, corporate power is weak. Where exit is catastrophic, corporate power is strong.
I like the sound of that at first, but surely there are alternatives to “your boss” and “government protection?” David, where do you put “go work for myself” or “go work for a competitor” in your equation? Does that just circle us right back to “make rules to protect competition and market entry” with the government a player but not the dominant force?
By that measure corporate power would decrease if people had more liquid savings? That makes sense. It's like executive compensation - if someone is 45 and has made enough money to decamp to a golf course in Naples permanently then they can demand a lot more money.
Liquid savings absolutely decrease corporate power, as do food stamps or unemployment that protects fired (as opposed to laid off) employees
The issue with liquid savings is that it’s not scalable. You can’t have a society where everyone lives on savings and no one works (or people work only for fun).
Liquid savings doesn't mean being independently wealthy, it might mean a 6 month emergency fund. It's an amount of money such that a layoff or being fired doesn't result in immediate destitution and a desperation to take the first job available.
security is roughly a function of the natural log of one’s wealth. ergo, making petit bourgeois wealth (or its welfare state equivalent) universal maximizes security
I’m as unsympathetic to the anti-monopoly lunatics as the next guy, but I do think it’s at least *possible* to imagine what they might be talking about. (And why it would be hard to measure in the cross-section/time series.)
I think it’s something like
Bigness + (possibly) control of a salient technology => Political bargaining power.
So, e.g., Meta’s massive resources allow it to influence politics. Because Instagram is so salient in our lives, this is particularly detrimental to the People (e.g. because we watch more slop videos). If Meta were smaller, the People would be able to fight back against slop via the political system.
This is kind of conspiratorial, but does it have any particular implications for something we can measure in Oregon vs Michigan? It’s not about market shares, markups, or anything like that. It’s about a political counter factual.
To take things to the extreme: imagine an AI company raises a robot army that rivals the US military. Clearly this is power, but what would the measurable outcome be? I have no idea. AI corp would have more political bargaining power, but its power would likely be international rather than local.
But didn’t Silicon Valley lose in 2016, win in 2020, and (maybe) split in 2024, all by a sliver? It seems that Silicon Valley has less electoral power than RFK jr.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that corporate power is actually a big problem right now. (It seems like Trump has leverage over corporations rather than the opposite.)
But my point was that “is corporate power higher in Oregon or Michigan?” is not really an insightful gotcha, given what these anti-monopoly people have in mind.
We have historical examples of corporations with armies that became de facto states like the VOC, British East India Company, etc…
The problem is that you have to imagine it. And the danger is that a lot of other imagined items come along for the ride. Yay populism.
US media is increasingly owned by billionaires who spend a lot of time personally with the President and often seem to tamper with coverage to align with their political views (sometimes they even sort of admit they're doing this). I'm not sure what you call that but it seems a big problem, it has got worse since 2022, and people are fighting it.
So, even if the language is bad, the most important question is still "are the advocates right about the substance" and I think it's really hard to argue they aren't at least a little bit correct.
The reason they spend a lot of time with Trump is precisely because of the specter of antitrust enforcement. If corporations weren't concerned that the government can arbitrarily decide to break them up, you'd see a helluva lot less cozying up to Trump.
Tying them up in litigation for years is probably enough of a problem they want to avoid, never mind an actual breakup.
In Trump's specific case there are also tariffs, and his general willingness to use the executive to punish/reward people. A weaker executive would certainly have less of this.
Also losing broadcast licenses.
Power is multifaceted and not subject to a single measure like emissions. But for some clear examples of corporate power you can just look to how Musk bought Twitter and completely “vibe-shifted” the whole world by doing so. It is true that managers of publicly traded companies under a fiduciary duty to maximize investor gains may be limited in their power (which is why Twitter’s owners were basically legally required to sell to Musk when he offered so much above market value), but it seems undeniable that an ultra-rich person in charge of at least certain types of corporations could have a lot of power.
How is this any different from a newspaper? It’s been done for hundreds of years.
It seems like there are clear measures to me. The amount of money spent by corporations on lobbying and Super PACs. Market consolidation. Rates of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior.
Then there’s hazier but still important stuff, like Amazon’s influence on consumer markets or Meta’s influence on the media.