The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

We live in an ＂oligopoly age＂ where many industries are controlled by just a few firms -- big banks, big pharma, big tech. Bigness has become too much of a drain on the nation’s economy, and too far a deviation from the type of open capitalism that has, at times, created a broad-based wealth and promised a sense of opportunity to every generation. There is a good reason to believe that we once again face the ＂Curse of Bigness,＂ in the phrase used by Justice Louis Brandeis, to describe the challenges confronting the United States a century ago. Columbia law professor Tim Wu tells the story of what went wrong, and calls for recovering the lost tenets of trustbusters as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas in a new age of extreme economic inequality.